Hell
on Wheels
To earn a living, South Africa's minibus
taxi drivers must dodge traffic -- and bullets. Jabu Themba struggles
to earn a living on the frontlines on South Africa's taxi wars.
By Chris Gaither
"A man's life — what is that worth? Another man exists only to the degree
that he stands in your way." — The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuscinski
In Zulu, Jabu Themba's first name means "happiness." He might laugh at the irony if he weren't so miserable.
His day begins at 5 a.m., before daylight filters through the iron burglar bars on his home in Soweto, the vast township outside Johannesburg where the apartheid government sequestered 4 million of South Africa's black residents. After a breakfast of warm water, he climbs into his rickety white-and-yellow Toyota van and begins the daily hunt for passengers. "In the taxi industry, it's first come, first served," he says.
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Cops Step Into Taxi Wars Under apartheid, the police ignored the taxi wars. Now they're fighting back. By Chris Gaither On a December afternoon, two members of a taxi association in Soshanguve, a suburb of Pretoria known for its brutal taxi wars, were gunned down in their van. The Scorpions, an elite South African crime-fighting unit modeled after the FBI, were sent after the assassins. Six years ago, the apartheid government would not have thought the crime worthy of investigation. But this effort paid off: tracked down through shoe-leather investigating and tips from key witnesses, eight members of a rival association were quickly arrested, charged with murder and put in prison without bail. Although the black majority has taken control of South Africa's government, many of its high-level justice officials are white Afrikaners — holdovers from the old regime. But they take now orders from a different government with a much different agenda. Two such men were responsible for arresting and prosecuting the accused in this Soshanguve shooting. Seated at a mammoth oak conference table in their gated Pretoria office compound, Gerhard Nel and Andrew Leask look like an Afrikaner Laurel and Hardy. Nel, a government lawyer in charge of prosecuting taxi violence, is short and wiry, with cold gray eyes set into a shrew-like face. Leask, the regional Scorpions director, is brawny as a rugby player and mustachioed, with a sloping brow. Each has been working for the government for nearly 20 years, which means they came up through the ranks during the most oppressive days of apartheid. Nel says local taxi violence has slowed greatly since the Scorpions moved in last year. "You just know if you resort to violence, government will stop it and you'll be without income." But why did justice officials wait so long to confront violence in the industry? Why was there little action when drivers were killing each other before 1994? "That's a political question, something I wouldn't venture an opinion on," Nel says. "The government has just got the will now to do that. It's a transformation process." Is it because it's a black industry, and the former government didn't care? "That's a political issue that I'm not willing to give an answer to," Nel says. "My job is to hit them and do the job."
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Themba, who has sported a checkerboard smile since a police interrogator knocked out his teeth for carrying liberation-movement political pamphlets in 1975, covers the 17-mile route between downtown Johannesburg and Soweto. He drives until his vision is blurry, 16 hours a day, six days a week (Sundays are reserved for Jesus), shuttling black commuters to work and school. His weekly salary is about $40; the rest of what he collects from passengers goes to his bosses, who own the taxi he drives. "This job is a hand-to-mouth sort of thing," he says.
It's also a club-to-head, bullet-to-heart, knife-to-guts sort of thing. Themba discovered that last year when rival taxi drivers, eager to scare him off his route, chased him down a Soweto street with stout wooden Zulu clubs called knobkerries. He ducked into a friend's store and escaped with deep bruises.
Themba is one of the lucky ones. During the last two decades, thousands of South African taxi drivers have been shot, knifed, burned or beaten to death — not by robbers, but by each other. More than 1,500 have died in the last four years alone. To put that in perspective, in New York City, the killing of the eighteenth livery cab driver in as many months drew major press attention and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's promises for improved security. In Soshanguve, a township of about 1 million people just north of South Africa's capital city of Pretoria, 18 slain taxi drivers would be average for a four-month period.
South African taxi owners take market competition to deadly levels. In carving out trade routes for their vans, they have adopted the bloody-handed approach of the apartheid regime, which didn't seem to care if blacks killed one another. This is a capitalism bred in mob rule. "The manner in which the industry deals with the opposition is to eliminate the opposition," says Lawrence Venkile, project manager of taxi operations for the national Ministry of Transport.
Six years after apartheid's end, the black-led government is finally doing more than make feeble promises to fix the taxi business. Officials recognize its symbolic value to economic development — the industry was the first under apartheid to be run completely by Africans for Africans. But for this government, which needs money to erase centuries of gross neglect for South Africa's blacks, more than pride is at stake — taxis, which sprung up unchecked during apartheid, earn an estimated $2.5 billion in annual revenue yet remain off the income tax rolls.
The government has cracked down sharply on taxi violence and stepped up licensing regulations. And to lower the death rate from taxi-related road accidents, which ranks among the world's highest, the government has rolled out a $500 million plan to replace the entire fleet of 126,000 "mobile coffins," as President Thabo Mbeki called them in his State of the Union address in February.
But imposing law on an industry born into lawlessness is no easy task. Fearful of losing their grip on the business, taxi owners and drivers are protesting the changes with road blockades and more violence. Apartheid's legacy is tough to break.
. . .
Themba's van, an early-1980s Toyota with a cracked windshield and countless dings in the paint, is barreling along the Soweto Highway toward downtown Johannesburg. Steep yellow hills rise high on either side. Such perfect barriers are rarely found in nature — the hills are tailings from Johannesburg's gold mines, used by apartheid's architects to keep the festering townships out of sight. This highway is one of the few roads in or out of Soweto, which made the township easier to seal off during riots.
The 15 passengers sit silently on cracked, gray vinyl seats, and Themba does nothing to spur conversation. "With 15 passengers, I can't say anything or I won't be able to speak at the end of the day." The only sounds are the engine's whine, the rushing of sooty air through the opened window and the murmur of African-rhythm jazz playing on the radio, whose cracked faceplate falls off with every jostle. Themba's is a typical van taxi, called "combis" or "Zola Budds," after the notorious South African runner who tripped Mary Decker Slaney. Sedan taxis are available for hire around the city, but with prices 10 times higher than vans (usually $5.50 for a 15-mile trip), they are generally reserved for the wealthy.
Along the route, Themba passes billboards for Internet sites and credit cards that someone else has the money to use. He passes the soccer stadium where his beloved Kaizer Chiefs play on Saturdays. The team's patch dangles from his rear-view mirror, but he follows them in The Sowetan newspaper only, for he cannot afford to take Saturdays off. At least he is working. Unemployment rates hover around 25 percent nationwide — about the same as the United States during the Great Depression — and have reached as high as 60 percent in Soweto. "You know what unemployment has done to us? When people go into town, it is only to pay bills," Themba says. "They don't go just for fun."
Themba stands six feet two inches, yet his sunken cheeks and slight neck give him a fragile appearance at age 49. His wardrobe looks hardly changed since the 1970s: a blue floral-print butterfly collar protrudes from under a red sweater of cotton and polyester. Though Zulu is his primary language, his English is excellent. This is a product not of his schooling, which he swapped for a job at age 9 after his father died, but of his years as an organizer for a textile workers' union. English, one of South Africa's 11 official languages, serves as a common tongue among tribal dialects and carries none of the stigma of Afrikaans, the language of apartheid.
Taxi driver Jabu Themba, 49, shuttles passengers between Soweto and downtown Johannesburg 16 hours a day. He brings home $40 a week. Rival taxi drivers took market competition to brutal extremes last year, when they beat him with Zulu clubs. Photo by Mimi Chakarova. |
He generally speaks softly, with a slight lisp. But when demanding fares from passengers, his brow drops, his chest puffs and his whisper becomes a bark. Charging each customer only 50 cents a trip to compete with buses, which receive government subsidies, he can hardly afford to get stiffed. Like half of taxi drivers nationwide, he does not own this van. The owners demand that he pull in $40 a day, equal to his week's salary, which means he works six days a week for one day's take. There are no meters — coins and bills are sent forward, passing from hand to hand. Taking his eyes from the road, Themba collects the money and deposits it into the Toyota's metal ashtray, which bounces and jingles in his lap.
On the seat beside him, the headline in The Sowetan screams, "Taxis Taken Off Roads." The provincial government, afraid that a growing feud is about to break into violence, has suspended operations for the 975 members of the Faraday Taxi Association, which runs from downtown to Alexandra, Bedfordview and other suburbs. "We won't have some Rambos shooting people...and turning South Africa into a banana republic," a local official told the newspaper.
Associations are legal cooperatives of taxi owners, who often use illegal methods to close their routes to competition. With Faraday, trouble started last year, when owners reneged on a pledge to sign over vehicle deeds to drivers with many years of service. The enraged drivers planned a strike. On August 31, 13 drivers were headed to downtown Johannesburg to plan their next action. They never arrived; their taxi was surrounded and pummeled with bullets, killing three men inside. Police arrested five Faraday owners, who allegedly were trying to stop the drivers from striking, and charged them with murder. "Taxis are a bad industry," Themba says. "There's too much violence, too much conflict."
For decades, blacks lucky enough to find work would wake before dawn and trek to remote stations. There they would board hopelessly crowded and perpetually delayed trains or buses for the morning commute. Enterprising blacks saw a market and filled it with private vans, bought through high-interest loans from private banks, which didn't mind working with blacks when profits could be made.
The white government watched taxis quickly eat into its bus and train profits. Strict licensing failed to stop the spread. With the taxi business booming by the mid 1980s, officials turned their backs on the industry, hoping it would run itself into the ground and collapse. "They had no interest, because the lives that were at stake were black people's lives," says Venkile, the transportation official, who is black. "It meant very little to that government."
But left on their own, what business model were these entrepreneurs to follow? For those growing up in the townships under apartheid, the streets were the only real schooling. These men were used to fighting for food, for politics, for jobs; Themba's youngest brother was killed for crossing picket lines, stabbed 17 times. Another taxi taking your customers? Automatic weapons should show him how you feel about that.
Sowetans cram into an aging taxi for the evening commute. Few black South Africans can afford cars, and these taxis offer rides for as cheap as 30 cents. The government is trying to replace these vans with larger, safer new vehicles. Photo by Mimi Chakarova. |
Speaking on January 29 in a Pretoria suburb, where taxi drivers gathered to celebrate the Taxi Driver of the Year, national transport minister Dullah Omar said, "Apartheid left us a terrible legacy. It destroyed mutual respect and self-respect. It dehumanized people, and like a cancer spread a culture of violence in our suffering land. Many of us became involved in crime, and found old and new ways to oppress, humiliate, injure and exploit each other. You and I know very well that we are still living — and dying — in the whirlpool of these problems in our new South Africa."
Nowhere is this better shown than in the taxi industry. As Venkile explains it, Mafia-like trade organizations flourished in the absence of any democratic culture. To drive a route, a taxi owner must pay dues to the organization that controls it. The dues also buy protection; associations hire hit men — often mercenaries from such countries as Mozambique, who are difficult to trace, police say.
One such assassin, a former South African Special Forces operative hired by a taxi association, told his story to Drum, a South African news magazine. He described hunting down the chairman of a rival association: "We found his car parked in the driveway, threw petrol all over it and set it alight. There was a loud bang, and a huge ball of flame shot into the sky. He ran out of the house cursing, with a gun in his hand. We opened fire and he was stopped by a hail of bullets."
"If you are powerful and feared, rival taxi organizations will not hesitate to pay hit men 50,000 rand (about $8,000) to get you out of the way," he said.
Living in a township during the 1980s, Derrick Luthayi noticed some taxi owners striking it rich and thought he'd get in on the action. He bought a 16-seat van and hired a driver recommended by the local taxi association. But Luthayi soon found that his van rarely moved from the taxi stand. His driver would park there in the morning and disappear for most of the day, returning in the evening with little money.
Luthayi's driver was not lazy. In fact, he was working hard. The trouble was that he was working harder at shooting rival drivers than piloting Luthayi's taxi. The association had placed one of its assassins as his driver. "One day he came to me and said, ÔThe association said I should ask you who is going to die for you today.'"
Luthayi tried driving his own taxi, but the association and rivals thought he was the assassin. His van was marked. He knew he had three options: Stay in business with other drivers' blood on his hands; drive himself with his own blood on his hands; or cut his losses. "I sold it and got out," says Luthayi, who today edits a newspaper in Johannesburg. "And I'm still alive."
. . .
Soweto's streets were designed with two requirements — They must be straight enough to allow cops clean shots at rioters, and wide enough for armored cars to make U-turns. During the 1970s, when Themba did political work for the outlawed African National Congress and students demonstrated in the streets, the straight, wide streets made the riot police's job easier. But today, with the ANC in power, the layout makes Themba's job easier. With a quick glance, he knows whether potential customers are waiting on side roads.
After dropping a load of passengers in downtown Johannesburg, he is back in Soweto, parked on a dirty street corner in Jabavu Central West. Parts of Soweto, like Orlando, where Winnie Mandela lives surrounded by barbed-wire and security cameras, feel almost middle class. But JCW is Soweto at its most destitute: To Themba's left, a donkey scuffs through mounds of trash in one of the township's many impromptu dumps. Sowetans, too, are picking through the garbage, looking for scraps to bring home. It's mid-morning; they have no jobs to go to.
Themba has 14 passengers, but he wants at least one more before he heads into town. So he rolls away from the dump, beeping his horn and waving an index finger — the local sign for a downtown trip. "It's not easy to fill up your taxi," he says. "There is too much competition." A woman dressed in an apron and blue uniform hails him and jumps in. She wants him to drive her to the Highland Mall in another part of Soweto, where she works at the Pick Ôn Pay grocery store. "No, Mama, I can only drop you off halfway," he says, addressing her with the respectful title. After she steps out without arguing, he explains that a local trip only costs 35 cents. "No one else was going there," he says. "It wasn't worth my time."
More than 5 million South Africans, and 65 percent of the country's city dwellers, use these taxis every day. One of them is Hendrick Modiba, a chunky 38-year-old Sowetan in a thin sweater who is on the first leg of his daily commute. He works at a food packing plant in another suburb, but Themba can't go there. His taxi association, Nanduwe, struck a deal to drive the Soweto to Johannesburg route, and the van might get shot up if he dares sneak onto another association's turf. Modiba transfers taxis downtown. "I used to take the train, but it was too slow," he says.
While most trips are uneventful, some passengers find themselves caught between warring taxi gangs. On a March evening in 1997, Johannesburg's rush-hour commute was disrupted when a member of a taxi association lobbed a hand grenade into a crowded taxi stand. Eight commuters were seriously injured. "I do worry, but there's nothing I can do," Modiba says. "I just live with it."
Those who do catch a ride are sometimes sorry they did. Last year 900 passengers and 1,385 drivers were killed in 70,000 taxi-related accidents. Part of the blame lies in driver fatigue. Like Themba, they work on quota systems. To break even, some drivers work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And driving those taxis is tough enough for well-rested drivers; the average South African taxi is 10 years old, driven day in and day out. Consider that New York City pulls its fleet cabs off the roads after three years and independently owned cabs after five years. What would a New York City taxi look like after 10 years? "Like the taxis did before we instituted the mandatory retirement age — held together with spit and chewing gum from inspection to inspection," says a New York Limousine and Taxi Commission spokesman.
South African drivers have to pay for their own gas, brake pads, oil changes, spark plugs and speeding tickets. With earnings that rarely exceed $65 a week, it's no wonder that 80 percent of taxis fail to meet governmental safety standards.
Here's a sampling of taxis impounded in recent months: One, lacking a steering wheel, was piloted by pliers clamped to the steering column. A few taxis abandoned traditional fuel-dispensing methods, instead siphoning gasoline directly to the engine from canisters tottering on the front seat. And dozens, through gaping holes in the floorboards, offered passengers an exhilarating view of the ground rushing below, a la Fred Flintstone.
Under the government's new plans, the roads will be filled with an entirely new fleet of taxis by 2006. Transportation officials have a short list of international bidders to make new 18- and 35-seat taxis, loaded with the latest technology — microchips to track stolen vehicles; smart-card sensors so passengers can pay with swipe cards, which makes skimming off the top tougher for drivers; engines with cleaner emissions.
The winning manufacturers will land a guaranteed market of some $2.5 billion. In exchange, they must build local factories and hire South Africans to build, sell and maintain the vans.
With vehicle costs soaring (a 15-seater costs $21,000 today), owners cannot afford to replace their vans without help. So the government is pitching in as much as 30 percent of the cost when an owner trades in an old taxi.
But there are catches. To trade in, the van must be registered to the owner, licensed as a taxi, registered for tax, and completely paid off. Owners cannot trade in stolen vans, which represent a huge percentage of the industry's fleet. And arguing that you stole the van during apartheid because you were oppressed simply won't cut it, Venkile says. "There's a panic setting in on the industry, because you're going to go through a rigorous screening exercise to verify this is your vehicle. Stealing is stealing, no matter what the regime."
But apartheid taught black South Africans two things: Don't trust authority; and protest if you're unhappy. Possibly as a stall tactic, taxi associations have drummed up fears about job losses. The project calls for 85,000 larger vans to replace the 126,000 on the road today. Doing the math, drivers fear that 41,000 of them will find themselves out of work. In January, that was enough to send hundreds of drivers into the streets of Johannesburg and Pretoria, waving machetes, guns and sticks, and beating some drivers who refused to join the anti-government demonstrations.
Venkile says that some jobs will be lost, but that others will be created by the vehicles' manufacturers. He adds that the overhaul will weed out an estimated 25,000 unlicensed drivers. In his State of the Union address, President Mbeki warned, "While we are ready to engage in genuine consultations, it is a mistake to think that the government can be intimidated into taking wrong decisions."
But with jobs so scarce, drivers want more than words. "No one can find fault with restoring order and safety to the industry, but I don't think the impact of these changes has been really thought out," says Meshack Khosa, research director of the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, who has studied the taxi industry since 1986.
Indeed, Khosa's words prove prophetic. The Sataco taxi union, the overhaul project's biggest proponent, withdrew its support less than a week later, citing a lack of involvement in the process. Though Sataco resumed negotiations two weeks later, the withdrawal highlights the government's shaky support in the industry it is trying to change.
"Under apartheid, we struggled hard to survive," says one driver in Themba's association. "But now that our own people are in charge, the government is making things very difficult for us."
. . .
Themba has taken a rare midday break to go home and see his three daughters, who share the two-bedroom house with his girlfriend and his mother. He parks his van in the driveway, creaks open a rusty white gate and walks into 11401 Mtipa Street. Though cockroaches trickle across the kitchen floor, the family members have taken great care to make their two-bedroom home comfortable — a haven from the harsh realities of the outside world. The house is carefully appointed with knickknacks, thin white curtains, a plastic-covered sofa, artificial plants and a color television, playing South Africa's version of MTV.
His daughters, each beautiful and dressed in the Capri pants so popular in America, rush forward to greet their father's guest. They pull out chairs at the dining room table and bring out the family's photo albums. This is Jabu. This is the girls' mother, whom Jabu divorced years ago. This is a family friend. He died too young. This is a cousin. He died, too.
Eventually conversation turns to their father's profession. The middle daughter, 17-year-old Zanele ("Enough" in Zulu), says she worries that her father might not come home one night. "What if something happens to him? They're always fighting."
But 19-year-old Gabisile ("Pride"), a little older and more used to life in Soweto, is not as afraid of death. Instead, she fears life without enough money to pay for school, so she can be the accountant that her father boasts she will become.
"He goes to work for the whole week, but when he comes home, he brings too little," she says. "It's better than nothing, but it's not enough for a father."
Seated at the far end of the table, Themba says nothing, just twirls a cigarette between his fingers and stares at his watch. He says he must resume work. At least seven hours of work remain, and he must meet his quota or be branded as lazy. He creaks open the rusted white gate and climbs into his Toyota, as his daughters walk out to wave goodbye.
Pulling onto Mtipa Street, he sits quietly for a few moments, then asks whether he has been a good tour guide to Soweto. He has. "Maybe I can be a driver in the tourism industry," he says. "I was worried that my English is not good enough, but after driving you around today, I am more confident that I can do it."
He gazes through the cracked windshield wistfully, then turns and smiles. For this moment, the future gives Jabu Themba something the present rarely affords. Happiness.