The Three Verboten "M"s

Mojitos, Men and Minibus Taxis. Up until now, I have refrained from talking about the verboten triple in my blog - for obvious reasons. Two of the three Ms will remain verboten - men and mojitos - but minibus taxis will be the subject of this post. I'll also be talking about driving in Johannesburg and flying on Kulula airlines.

Quick Disclaimer: Please fasten your seatbelt and hold on tight. At times you may find that your body weight exceeds the value of "g" (remember that from physics?!?). Or maybe you'll find yourself going so fast in a circle that you are going faster than time itself (that does actually happen!). You may also skip your daily workout, you'll get a far more vigorous cardiovascular exercise routine from taking a minibus taxi. Your reference points for poor driving will change drastically - from spatially-challenged ex-boyfriends (or girlfriends) to truly insane individuals who get their daily thrill from nearly killing people in head-on collisions. Imagine extreme road rage...and then try imagining road rage worse than that. Think of lanes on the side of the highway merging without notice, and then think of lanes in the middle of the highway merging without notice. Imagine the biggest intersection you've ever encountered with no working traffic lights, and cars driving every which way - into, around and practically over each other. Then think about the last time you flew on an airplane and didn't pay attention to the safety instructions, even if you were seated in an exit row. If you had been flying Kulula airlines in South Africa, you certainly would have paid attention.

Welcome to transportation in South Africa.

Since I arrived in Cape Town about four weeks ago, I've been taking minibus taxis to and from the ICTJ office (the NGO I work with here) and to interviews. At nights and on the weekends, I get rides with friends who have cars when I go out. Once in a while, I've taken private taxis, but never alone, always with friends. People have been incredibly generous with rides, as well as everything else. However, I have never actually discussed minibus taxis in detail, for fear of precipitating early heart attacks among my family. I keep on receiving questions, but I ward them off with "Oh, my little sister's listening" or "I'll tell you later, I'm running low on minutes" or "My Internet connection is poor, we may go out at any time" or "Even though skype is cheap, I'm running out of skype credit and need to go pay my credit card bill" or "I have more interesting things to share." In other words, I don't talk about minibus taxis. But it's probably about time that I divulge some tidbits about this interesting and complex aspect of my daily life. It's really quite something, honestly. I learn a lot - mainly about how reckless people can be, the degree to which people are hard-working, and how we all want the same things in life - strong relationships with family, friends and romantic partners (the order depending on the moment), satisfying work, good food and drinks, and leisure time.

Let me briefly describe the minibus taxi situation in Cape Town. So a minibus taxi is basically like an overgrown Suburban (remember the gas guzzlers that used almost as much gas as a hummer and were popular in some families?) with about 5-6 rows of 3 seats. But there are never any seatbelts, except in the few minibus taxis that traverse the 14-hour drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg. And in the rows that have three seats, four people MUST sit there. Sometimes five or more if the people sitting in the row are skinny and don't need too much foot-room. Minibus taxis drive along the Main Road here (street names aren't too creative - either basic, or in Afrikaans and named after terribly racist Afrikaner leaders) and they coagulate in the City Centre at the minibus taxi station. South Africans don't say "downtown", they say "City Centre". The minibus taxi station is on the third floor of a shopping mall of sorts and across the street from the actual bus station. The station, however, isn't exactly a station in the Western sense. It's more a conglomeration of minibus taxis lined up under signs that presumably say where they are going. But half the time, the taxis aren't actually going there, and other taxis are going to the place you're trying to go to, despite the fact that the sign on the taxi specifies someplace in the opposite direction. So I am slightly exaggerating, but not by much. :) In fact in some ways, it's probably an understatement more than an exaggeration. Secondly, there is loads of noxious food for sale and various other sundry items that might be pertinent to the weather or the daily mood. After it rains, which is very frequent right now in Cape Town as we approach winter, huge puddles collect in the station. By huge I mean HUGE, oftentimes inches and inches deep. So I have to find creative ways to traverse the station without getting my high-heeled boots wet, which usually means climbing through structures that used to exist and now only have wires sticking out at odd places, or climbing over randomly-placed stairs, or practicing track hurdles by literally jumping over the puddles and hoping that I don't land on uneven pavement. It also means ignoring hooting, looks, crooning, and other burlesque gestures and sayings. Honestly, why would men think that women come to minibus taxi stations to pick up men? At 8 in the morning, dressed in a business suit?

Once I get on the minibus taxi and we start off, I fervently hope that I'm sitting next to someone who a) doesn't way over 200 pounds and b) took a shower in the recent past. Preferably women, because they never bother me, as opposed to men. Next I have to hope that the driver actually has a driver's license and doesn't get his daily thrill from side-swiping full-length buses. As long as the minibus taxi isn't full (meaning that people are literally crammed into each other on every row), the driver or the driver's helper constantly yells out the minibus taxi's final destination to people walking along the street and the driver continuously honks the horn. It's like a cacophony of honking horns. When someone needs to get off, he/she says "driver, thank you" and the driver suddenly stops in the road. Cars behind the taxi are forced to either wait or go around. Once the driver lets the person(s) off, he quickly guns the aged, sputtering motor and drives forward immediately. Nearly all minibus taxi drivers are male. One time I had a female minibus taxi driver, but she looked very masculine. Nonetheless, she got numerous weird looks from passersby and passengers. Minibus taxis are very cheap - the equivalent of about $0.75 for getting from City Centre to the Claremont suburb where my NGO is located, or $1.50 for getting from my apartment in Sea Point to Claremont, which is about a 45-50 minute trip. I must add that I am nearly always the only White person aboard the taxis, despite the fact that I know at least several other UNC alums who take minibus taxis on a daily basis and happen to be white. White liberal twenty-somethings who can't or don't want to afford to rent a car do take minibus taxis in Cape Town; however, in Johannesburg, this is an entirely different story.

When I arrived in Johannesburg last Saturday, I fully expected to take public transit throughout my week-long stay. I knew it would be different in Jo'burg versus Cape Town, but I thought I could manage. However, my colleague Olivier had warned me, and he got so worried that he told me to phone him as many times as I needed to during my time in Jo'burg. He later called me and expressed grave concerns about my safety. Anyhow, I arrived in Jo'burg on a Saturday night and spent the first two nights in Soweto. I'll write about this in another post; it certainly warrants a separate story or two. On Monday, I switched to a different hostel, the Brown Sugar Backpackers in Observatory, and then had to travel to Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, which is an hour away from Johannesburg. I took a minibus taxi from my hostel to the central station for minibus taxis in Johannesburg, then I took another minibus taxi to Pretoria. Somehow, I managed to get out of the minibus taxi early and then find my way to the office building for my interview without ever consulting my map or asking for directions. I arrived 30 minutes early, so I sat in the lobby and reviewed my notes for the interview. I'll write about my interviews later as well.

However, on the way back from Pretoria, things did not fare so well. The central station in Johannesburg is an absolute wreck, and many of the minibus taxis can only be caught on unidentified streets, often blocks from the actual station. There are no signs, so the only way to tell where to go is by already knowing. I was trying to get from the central station to my hostel in Observatory, but no one had told me that in Johannesburg, they say "Observa-try" whereas in Cape Town, they say "Observatory", as in "laboratory", or just "Obz". So every time I asked someone how to get to Observatory, they had no idea what I was talking about. I asked at least ten people before I finally found a woman who walked with me through the entire station and down several streets to get me to the right minibus taxi. The taxi station was terribly crowded, and I did not feel safe simply because I didn't know my way around Jo'burg. I became quite disillusioned with public transit in Jo'burg, and I didn't know how I would make it through a week of public transit without having adequate time to learn my way around the city. Nor did I know how I could possibly make it to interviews even close to being on time if I had to navigate such a madhouse every day.

So that night, I decided to rent a car in Jo'burg, despite the fact that my American car insurance didn't cover me for driving overseas. Clearly I just would not be able to have any wrecks. I called up the rental car company the next morning at 7:30am, and had a car delivered by 9am for my 10am interview. Several years ago, when my father was driving a car with a manual transmission, he had started to teach me how to drive it, but I was never home, so lessons were intermittent and I didn't make any progress. Since in South Africa, people drive on the left side of the road, I wasn't about to learn how to drive a stick shift car and on the left side of the road at the same time. So I begrudgingly hired an automatic car, which meant that my smallest option was a Toyota Corolla. I ended up getting a blue Nissan that was the same size and shape as a Toyota Corolla.

Fortunately, I had bought a giant road map of Johannesburg in the Cape Town airport. Almost as soon as I received the car, I headed toward my interview. But because my interviewee had spelled his street address incorrectly when he gave it to me, I ended up going in the opposite direction and driving around for 2 1/2 hours before finally arriving an hour and a half late. The only reason why I found it was because I used deductive reasoning to rule out all of the places that it couldn't be and all of the street names that his spelling was close to. Needless to say, I was mortified and apologized profusely for the next five minutes straight when I arrived. For the next four days, I drove around Johannesburg and its many suburbs. I used the road map and continuously got lost because of the impossibility of reversing routes, due to Jo'burg's numerous one-way streets.

Driving in Jo'burg was quite an experience. I could have constantly freaked out, as people nearly side-swiped me, took out their road rage on me and were generally reckless and impetuous drivers. But freaking out accomplishes nothing, so I just sat back and grew eyes in the back of my head. I had more than a few breathless moments, but I decided it was good for my heart, since I wasn't running for exercise due to safety issues. Briefly, several obnoxious elements of driving in Jo'burg: 1) Traffic rules don't matter. Red lights mean that you look both ways and then if no one is coming, you continue driving. While I did adopt several South African driving characteristics, I never felt comfortable with running red lights. 2) Intersections sometimes don't have functioning traffic lights (or as they are called here - robots). When this occurs, you are supposed to drive forward, even when cars are coming from all sides. The hope is that the drivers will somehow communicate via telepathy and thereby avoid collision. If you don't drive forward, and you wisely wait until cars aren't coming, be prepared to experience serious road rage and have the driver behind you attempt to run you off the road and nearly succeed. That happened to me; I'm positive I didn't breathe for several milliseconds. 3) Lanes merge on the highway without any prior notice. When you see cars coming toward you, realize that they have no other place to go.

From an anthropological standpoint, driving in Johannesburg and living in a gated house or apartment to be safe means moving from cage to cage. Imagine gated communities in the states which have been criticized for their exclusivity and homogeneity. In Jo'burg, it's as if middle-class and wealthy people live their lives perpetually behind bars. They move from their locked cars, to their locked and gated offices, to gated shops, to their triple-gated homes with high-tech alarm systems and several imposing bulldogs or Rotweilers. It's no wonder that the crime rate is one of the highest in the world, when a majority of the population lives in Soweto or the city centre and the minority of the population lives behind bars in luxury. When the disparity between haves and have-nots is so vast, crime feeds and reproduces rapidly. I absolutely hated fitting into these stereotypes, but I truly felt that it was the only smart way to stay safe in Johannesburg. So I decided it was more important to be safe and rent a car than to be mugged or raped while sitting on some artificially constructed moral highhorse.

As I said before, I flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg on a South African discount airline called Kulula. The noteworthy aspect to flying on Kulula is that the stewards and stewardesses actually put on a show for you throughout the entire flight. On my return flight to Cape Town from Jo'burg, the pilot introduced the first steward as "an expert at quantum physics, so if you have any relevant questions, feel free to ask" and the stewardess as "a young beautiful lady looking for a rich single man, so if you know of any eligible bachelors, please pass on their names." I was busy doing some anthropological analysis of Kulula airlines' magazine, but then I started to pay attention. Flotation devices were important so that passengers would be "ready to jump in the water and start swimming the backstroke." Reading lights were for those wimpy passengers "afraid of the dark." Those individuals seated in the exit row would have to help both children and adults acting like children. I was sitting in the exit row at the window next to the exit, and just before take-off and landing, the steward asked me to put on my shoes. No barefoot people allowed? I turned to my seatmates, an elderly Capetonian couple coming back from a vacation to Madagascar, and suggested that putting on shoes would really help me to swim the backstroke once I jumped into the water wearing my gratuitous flotation device. At the end of the flight, the stewardess asked all the passengers to clap for the pilot, so the pilot received a round of applause. And if you count the fact that everyone stood up to leave afterward, a standing ovation.

I was so happy to be back in Cape Town that I couldn't stop breathing in the fresh sea-sweet air. It was dark, unfortunately, so I couldn't see Cape Town as we flew in. But I know how beautiful it is, so I could use my imagination. The song "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last" came into my head, but I changed the words to "Home at last, home at last, thank humanity Almighty, I'm home at last."