‘Town girl? Town? Kyape Town? Mowbray-Kaap! Mowbray-Kaap toe Kaap toe Kyaaaaap!’ The insistent, distended syllables of the taxi conductors are the signature tune of Main Road, a permanent soundtrack to the streets of Cape Town. The crier now has his arm stretched out the window, not so much a request as an instruction to the surrounding traffic. We tack across three lanes and brake violently to pick up more custom. As any South African motorist will tell you, the taxis are a large and colourful presence on the roads. In the last twenty tears they have also been of the fastest growing sectors of the South African economy, now comprising an industry of privately owned fleets and powerful mafia-like controlling bodies with a turnover estimated at over 16 billion Rand. In the early 1980’s, this emerging market was championed as a showcase for black-owned business; some optimistic corporate scenario planners even predicted ‘a silent revolution’ transforming South Africa into one of the most integrated economies.
But in fact the origin of the taxi industry and its troubled history lies less in the miracle of the free market than in the spatial distortions and illogic of the apartheid city, which insisted on racial separateness but relied on cross-racial labour. To service this most glaring contradiction in its vision of a segregated society, from 1948 the National Party government created a public transport system of inflexible and inadequate bus and rail networks that became some of the most hated symbols of the regime. Inevitably, ‘pirate’ taxis began to fill the transport vacuum: first small-scale operators who delivered workers to their jobs in old American saloon cars, then Toyota minibus drivers in the 1970’s, whose wide roaming, stop-and-go taxi routes cut average travelling times for commuters from three to two hours. During the bus boycotts of the 1980’s these became a symbol of transport for the people by the people, and in a rapid about turn, the apartheid government decided to wash its hands of this enormous and unstable emergent industry. In 1987 it was deregulated almost overnight, with catastrophic results.
Below the lush gardens and gables of Groote Schuur (once the residence of Cecil Rhodes, now President Mbeki’s Cape Town hideaway) the conductors fight over customers emerging from the Shoprite supermarket, each seizing an old woman by the elbow in a tug of war.
‘This way auntie, this way please, just give me the bags.’
Someone leaves a half-empty taxi that has been waiting too long and comes to sit in ours.
‘Hey’ Hey!’ the jilted taxi man runs towards us, in a rage, ‘What you doing? Kom terug!’
Somebody else opens the driver’s door to throw a punch.
‘Let a man sit where he wants!’
These pavement skirmishes are only the aftershocks of a long history of conflict within the taxi industry. Before 1987, 90% of applications for non-white taxi ownership had been rejected; now they were handed out ‘like confetti,’ according to one driver, ‘like Valentine’s Day cards in February,’ in special buy-one-get-one-free deals. Without the necessary infrastructure in place to manage it, the taxi market soon became flooded, prone to intense and often violent competition over access to routes and ranks, and in the 1990’s the Cape Peninsula was one of the most volatile areas in the country. Social commentators explain that with space on the Cape Flats so limited and economic opportunities so few, territory tends to be serially reappropriated, like the walls layered with graffiti around us as we pass the run-down textile houses of Salt River and Woodstock.
Yet analysts of the first Cape ‘taxi war,’ which lasted from 1990 to 1992 and claimed hundreds of lives, suggest that there was something more to this conflict than mere commercial competition. As in other major theatres of conflict in the violence prior to the 1994 elections, subsequent human rights enquiries suggested that a covert, state-sponsored ‘third force’ operated to destabilise ANC strongholds, and in a province where the regime’s usual collaborator, the Inkatha Freedom Party, was largely absent, the security forces exploited the taxi conflict. Hostilities were finally brought to an end when rivals were collapsed into a single organisation in 1992, the Congress for Democratic Taxi Associations (grandly echoing CODESA, the name of the lengthy negotiations process which enabled the first democratic elections of 1994) but this uneasy truce of former rivals was not to last.