Public transit, Johannesburg-style

During last winter's Snowpocalypse in Philadelphia, I never left my house without checking the SEPTA website to see which bus routes were down. For a week I walked a mile over icy sidewalks to work. I asked a SEPTA employee in the customer service center if he thought my bus route would be running again soon.

"Yeah, I'm sure you'd like that, wouldn't you?" he said.

So this winter, I escaped the Philadelphia chill with a trip to my South African in-laws' hometown. Diepkloof is a neighborhood in Johannesburg's sprawling, historically black Soweto suburbs, where the violence of apartheid's last decade rocked my husband's school days. My black in-laws don't own a car, but with my husband, Edwin, at my side, I was ready for an outing anyway. In Jo'burg, you can always get where you're going"“ if you're really up for the ride.

Enter South Africa's primary mode of public transportation: the taxi. Most black South African shoppers and commuters rely on a system that's a cross between an urban taxi service and a bus route.

Neighborhoods, mall parking lots and highways teem with 15-seat vans, operating on general loops. A ride costs between five and seven rands (a little less than a dollar), and, especially in the back seat "“ which is smaller than the width of a love seat but is required to hold no less than four riders regardless of size"“ you will learn the meaning of squished.

Which taxi to take?

But first you have to find the right taxi. To me, the challenge of this quickly eclipses the strangeness of my being the only white person around. Even at most taxis' originations, there are no signs. There are no marked stops. There are no official routes, no schedules. In a whole month, I saw only one taxi that posted its fares.

A trip to Eastgate, a local mall, begins with a stroll in the right general direction, my husband Edwin holding his index finger up like a pontificating professor. After about ten minutes a taxi pulls over.

"Town?" Edwin asks as we roll the sliding door open. The riders inside nod.

"I thought we were going to the mall," I whisper, digging in my pocket for the fare.

"We are," he says. "And we're not paying yet."

Making change

The taxi wends through the neighborhood until the last seat is filled. We head for the highway, and coins begin to clink.

"How much?" my husband asks the woman beside him.

"Six fifty," she says. Edwin hands a bill to our neighbor. "Three," she says to the people in the next row up, adding her own fare and passing the money forward.

Harrowingly, the driver counts change from a tray while he merges onto the highway. With a leisurely hand-to-hand relay, every passenger from front to back receives correct change, though the driver never once looks at us.

Soon I will learn that without designated stops, the correct hand gesture is the key to getting your taxi. Thumbs-up means you want to go to the closest mall. Point backward for a ride to another suburb. And point to the sky if you want a ride to Town.

Waiting in line

"Town" is the city of Johannesburg, whose streets are full of as many vendors and pedestrians as cars. We pull into the Park Station taxi rank in the heart of Jo'burg, and I realize that this is only the first leg of the day.

Park Station is larger than a football field. A low roof on pillars squats over it. There are about 50 lines of at least six taxis each, a queue of riders at each station. Everything in between is packed with milling travelers, many of them mothers wearing babies in ingeniously wrapped blankets.

My husband and I gush out of our taxi with the others as it takes its place in one of the lines. The only signs I can see are large advertisements for a laxative, and two kinds of typed paper notices: one for same-day abortions, and one listing the phone number of a "Prophet."

"Where do we get a taxi to Eastgate?" I ask.

"I don't know," Edwin says, not in the least perturbed. "I'm looking for the right person to ask."

"Ngi wa tholaphi amataxi aya Eastgate?" he asks a man in the crowd. The man points to the far bottom corner of the rank. "Dankie," Edwin replies as we wind through the crowd, ignoring the vendors' proffered phone cards, sunglasses and candy.

Translating from Zulu

We stop another man just outside the rank. He waves us down the street, where we try our luck with a man selling knit hats. "What did he say?" I pant as we hurtle down the sidewalk again.

"Around the corner, cross the street and down another block," Edwin translates from the Zulu. "We'll find it."

"Sorry?" Edwin asks a man down the street. "Eastgate taxis?"

"After robot!" the man cries, meaning after the next intersection (traffic lights are called "robots" in South Africa). And then we see them past the nearest traffic light: three or four taxis and a queue of people squeezed between the curb and some produce vendors.

"Eastgate?" Edwin asks a woman whose toddler is demolishing a juicy pear. She nods.

Iron fist

The line moves quickly, due to a man who is loading the taxis with an iron fist, flying into a rage with malingerers who try to avoid sitting in the packed back seat. The woman and child in front of us climb in, but the loader notices the child's pear and almost flings them from the vehicle in an irate flood of Zulu. Apparently there is a rule against eating onboard.

The pear splats to the gutter and in no time we're tightly packed. The taxi czar slams the door and turns his wrath on the next 15, and we join the stream of traffic. The inside of the taxi is plastered with bumper sticker slogans, including "I'm Jesus' Fool, Who's Fool Are You?" and "Brother from another mother, because of my naughty father."

Coins clink and I realize that payment from each row is handed up along with the count of passengers in that row. The driver receives each set of fares and counts change for each batch according to how many people are in the row it came from. He hands the change back, the money going from hand to hand until everyone is square. No one ever pockets anyone else's change.

The taxi unloads in the no-man's land behind the parking garages, far from any entrance. But we have arrived.

Bumper stickers

Our return trip begins with a typical journey through the Eastgate taxi rank, smaller than Park Station but still offering at least ten different taxi queues. We ask others in line whether this is the taxi to Town. On our third try, the last woman to climb into a loaded taxi nods yes, and then withers us with a glare while she rolls the door shut, as if she couldn't imagine why we would ask something so inane.

We catch the next taxi (bumper slogan: "Women used to cook like their mothers, but now they drink like their fathers") back to Park Station. It's rush hour, and, if possible, the crowd is even thicker.

As we spill into the mob, I consider another sticker from our latest ride: "If you are a passenger in the taxi, don't be a problem." It's a common topic among local commuters: A Jo'burg taxi driver often seems to view his passengers as little more than 15 problems"“ worth maybe 100 rands per trip, but problems nonetheless.

Which line for Diepkloof?

As we disembark in Park Station and begin the hunt for the right taxi home, Edwin is wary of approaching the wrong driver, even though drivers are the only ones who know for sure where a taxi is going. Adrift in the swarming rank, I feel hopeless. Not only is Diepkloof just one section of the suburbs, Diepkloof itself has more than seven zones. Without a single map or sign, how could we ever find the right taxi?

But finally at least two people in one queue confirm that this is indeed the line for our zone. Once we're in line, others immediately begin to question us. But as we get closer to the head of the line, I notice Edwin hanging back.

"Don't look at the line or the driver," he murmurs, staring at a laxative ad. He moseys back a few feet and lets the family behind us jump the line as if he doesn't notice. I try to move my eyes from our queue and taxi while also avoiding the gaze of any vendors who might think I wanted to buy guava pops. "Why?" I ask.

Fighting for a newer cab

"I don't want that taxi," he says, gesturing vaguely to the front of our line while feigning interest in a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken. Indeed, the next taxi is a small, ramshackle, rusty affair, but the one after that is a new breed of South African taxi that debuted for the crowds of the 2010 Soccer World Cup: large, fresh-painted vans with seat belts, headrests and clean upholstery. The harried drivers of the old taxis keep a weather eye out for riders who might try to choose the better vans, haranguing any riders who appear to be shirking their place at the head of the line in the face of an older taxi.

Edwin's cousin summed up the temper of the taxi driver to me when she explained what happened to her when she tried to pay her fare with a 50-rand note on the way to school, before the driver had enough change. "Why are you so stupid?" he raged. "Why didn't you get some change before you got on my taxi?" He ripped her money in half and left her on the side of the road.

But with a critical mix of feet-shuffling and elaborately aimless looks, we gained a World Cup taxi within 15 minutes. Each driver might take a slightly different route out of the city, and as I was to learn over the next month, this meant an early moment in nearly every taxi ride when Edwin would frown out the window and mutter, "This might not be the right taxi after all." But after an hour of gridlock to get out of Town, we take the road to Diepkloof.

The only time women listen

"The only time women listen is when money talks", a sticker informs us, along with "Phakisma izwi, ukhulume ku sese yisikhathi ladho uzokwehla khona." That's an instruction, Edwin explains later: "Raise your voice when it's time to get off."

You see, the taxi is not a bus, and there are no predetermined stops. A block before you need to get off, you yell, "Short right!" or "Short left!" to indicate you'd like a stop at the next street, or "After robot!" The driver never indicates whether he hears you over his pounding stereo, but he usually makes the stop.

"Short left," Edwin announces, and we disembark to walk home in the dusty dusk.

Through all our perils in getting a taxi, there was a practical sort of bonhomie as everyone asked everyone else which taxi is which, and how much is the fare. And for all the apparent chaos, we were never, ever stranded, which is more than I can say for SEPTA.

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia...

Back in Philadelphia, as we're riding a SEPTA train into town, a tall, muscular conductor leans over the young man sitting in front of us. "Sir," says he conductor, "we've changed our policy, and that ticket is no longer valid on this train."

"But why?" he passenger replies. "I don't understand why it's not valid."

The conductor grasps the seat back to lean into the rider's face. "Sir, let me explain this to you. That ticket is no longer valid on this train."

That taxi-van loader in Jo'burg is looking better all the time. He may have lacked manners, but at least you could understand his logic. And he wasn't interested in power trips— only the kind of trip that gets you from one place to another.♦


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