Sounds of Freedom: Music, Taxis, and Racial Imagination in Urban South Africa
At first sight, the major cities in South Africa do not appear to have changed much over the last decade. Their physical layouts still reflect the apartheid planners’ obsession with fixity — of identities, of space — and with control of movement. Yet cities like Johannesburg and Durban have experienced profound changes. The diverse spaces of the city are today used in radically different ways and are imbued with a new set of meanings more related to the senses than to economic functions. A city like Johannesburg, as pointed out forcefully by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004), has become the site of a radical heterogeneity and proliferating desires. Its new dynamism both reinvents the city’s founding moment of creativity and moral transgression during the gold boom of the late nineteenth century and indicates its emergence as a new, immensely creative African metropolis. The distinction between the erstwhile white centers of South Africa’s cities (clean, modern, and universal in aspiration) and the racially defined townships (designed as enclosed, stable, and quasi-domestic community spaces) have given way to what Mbembe and Nuttall call a new and radical “social velocity” (2004: 349). This essay focuses on how the kombi-taxi — the eight- to twelve-seat van — has emerged as one of the most effective and literal manifestations of such social velocity and a new form of movement and inhabitation of South Africa’s urban spaces.
The ethnographic focus of this essay is a formerly Indian township south of Durban. One of the general effects of the new urban dynamism is that the township has been transformed from a site of quasi-domestic stability and what Michael Herzfeld (1997) calls “cultural intimacy” to a properly urban space, marked by unpredictability, difference, and the incessant movement of anonymous bodies and signs.
This transformation of the township from an order of fixity and familiarity to one of eros and unknowability has produced major upheavals and anxieties. The formerly Indian townships are today pervaded by a profound sense of melancholia produced by the loss of an object that cannot be recognized and must remain repressed: the stability and intimacy of community life during apartheid. The melancholic “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him,” argues Freud (1989: 586). This nonrecognizability of the lost object leads, Freud argues, to self-reproaches and self-revilings. Freud (1989: 587) continues: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” As we shall see, the condition of melancholia and loss pervades even the enjoyment of the new possibilities of the postapartheid city.
Taxis and the Dying Days of Apartheid
The final stages of apartheid saw a flurry of initiatives aimed at fostering a black middle class and trying to remove the worst excesses of the “petty apartheid” that had caused so much anger (pass-books, the Immorality Act, etc.). One of these measures was to liberalize the inadequate transport sector and to open the market for Black, Indian, and Coloured entrepreneurs venturing into the taxi business. Starting in the late 1980s, an ever-growing fleet of kombi-taxis began to service the townships, taking the workforce to and from the city centers and plying between the major cities, urban centers, and densely populated bantustans (designated homelands) such as Transkei, Boputatswana, and KwaZulu.
The taxi trade proved a relatively easy and inexpensive way to start a business, and competition was stiff and often violent from the outset. The trade was relatively unregulated and soon a number of rival taxi associations emerged, often based on existing networks of ethnic bonds or political affiliation. For this reason the turf wars of the townships soon extended to the taxi ranks. Rival associations clashed and the resulting shoot-outs, which killed and wounded innocent bystanders and passengers, became recurrent phenomena. In the province of KwaZulu- Natal, the virtual civil war between the ANC (African National Congress) and the Inkatha movement suffused and structured the turf wars between taxi associations, which usually became aligned with one of these political formations. The overall scarcity of jobs increased the pressure on the taxi trade, which also proved an easy money-laundering device and attracted powerful crime syndicates.
After 1994, the new government imposed a string of regulations designed to define routes, areas, fares, and the number of taxis.1 Many taxis remained unauthorized and broke the rules by hunting for passengers outside their own territory, overcharging, overloading, not paying attention to maintenance standards, and so forth. The organization and regulation of the industry made having political connections essential for the major operators. Influential members of the taxi associations soon began to enjoy political clout as patrons of local political figures. The so-called taxi wars were now fueled by rivalry in business, politics, and underworld activities. The violence peaked in 1996 when official police statistics reported over three hundred deaths and six hundred wounded in taxi-related violence in South Africa. Most of this violence was perpetrated by professional hit men who were employed by taxi associations to shoot rival owners and drivers and to terrorize passengers of rival taxi associations (see Dugard 2001).
In South Africa’s urban landscapes and highways, the taxi industry defines its own rules. Taxis have become a metonym of the underworld as well as a powerful symbol of postapartheid freedom. The promise of earning a fast buck in a job that does not require formal training, the cool style of the drivers, and the sheer promise of a world flush with quick cash and potential have made the industry a highly attractive place for many young men. The taxi business has been an important arena for black economic empowerment, emerging alongside but independent from more formalized transport sectors like the bus services that had been a source of quasi-monopolistic self-enrichment by black elites during apartheid. Taxis have been central to the gradual reconfiguration of the former sociospatial order of the apartheid city. In the kombi-taxi, black people have explored the formerly white world: its beaches, its parks, its exclusive neighborhoods, its shopping malls. For drivers and attendants, this enjoyment of a now formally democratized space was crucial in their experience of “freedom” — a term that came up in virtually every conversation I had with informants in the taxi business. The experience of freedom, however illusory it may be considering the economic imperatives that govern the lives of drivers, emerges from the everyday phenomenology of taxi driving: the open road, the unpredictability of the wishes or directions of your next customer, the inchoate promise in flirting with nameless women, and, not least, the experience of being a hunter, with its associated possibilities of “luck” on the road (making lots of money) or of “making a mess” (fatal accidents). This precarious experience of freedom and autonomy via incessant movement and unpredictable fortune undoubtedly characterizes taxi driving across the world, but in South Africa it acquired a particularly powerful symbolic force in the postapartheid generation.
This sense of freedom, autonomy, and enjoyment was often compounded by claims of being legally untouchable. Many drivers claimed that they never paid speeding tickets thanks to the legal protection of their politically well-connected bosses. While such claims are impossible to verify, there is little doubt that the taxi industry enjoys a very substantial de facto autonomy in terms of regulation and police intervention. The sheer size and quasi-legality of the taxi industry have made it an important source of corruption. Police stations, government officials, and all the affiliated sectors — spare parts, sound systems, and garages — are now involved in a vast network of deals and financial flows that remains almost impenetrable to law enforcers and anticorruption squads.
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Notes
This essay is part of my ongoing work in one ethnographic site, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Much of this material will be included in my forthcoming book, Melancholia of Freedom: Nostalgia and Anxieties of Belonging in Postapartheid South Africa. Earlier versions of this essay have been presented at the Departments of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, University College London, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. Critique and questions at these seminars helped me to improve and sharpen my arguments. A special thanks to Saba Mahmood, Achille Mbembe, Jean and John Comaroff, and the editorial committee of Public Culture for suggestions, encouragement, and constructive criticism.
- A recent report on the taxi industry in the province of KwaZulu-Natal reports almost twenty thousand taxis organized in 287 registered associations. The report estimates that there are at least thirteen thousand illegal taxis in operation in the province ( Profile KwaZulu-Natal 2001).