I have a car and am almost entirely reliant on it. While only around 30% of South Africans have this luxury, the public transport system is often unreliable, unsafe and slow, so a lot of people use the somewhat informal minibus taxi industry. My city, Johannesburg, mushroomed from a gold mining settlement around 140 years ago, and sprawled without any plan. You don’t want to walk. I could give you a lift.
We’d start our journey by heading out of my building complex with its high electric fences that might seem threatening to a western eye. They are such a mainstay of South African middle-class life, I hardly notice them. The same goes for the community-installed cameras, the roaming security company cars and the constant vigilance that seeps into your bones when you live in a high-crime country. Some might call it fear. I try not to look at it that way.
On the lighter side of the security conversation, we would wave and greet my local car guard in his standard orange vest. I’ll call him John, although that’s not his real name. His job of watching cars to ensure they remain where they’re left is taken very seriously, although if someone did actually try to steal your car, it’s not clear what John might actually do.
John’s friendly greeting with a Congolese accent hints at another constant in South Africa – the presence of foreign nationals, many of whom have had to leave dangerous or desperate situations to try to make a living here. While regular waves of xenophobia, especially Afrophobia, make the headlines, many find a home here, even if it is sustained by meagre tips and shelter from the harsh sun.
Within a few blocks, you’ll notice a few things about Joburg’s roads. If South Africa were to have a national symbol, it would be the pothole. Storm drains overflow, broken streetlights are fixed only occasionally, according to some unknowable system. Our city has some serious trouble with maintenance. A sense of disrepair hangs over it all.
At our first robot, which you might call a traffic light, you will see a few interesting characters. There may be someone holding a sign telling a grim tale of unemployment and hardship, and if you could spare a few coins…
The other day, I saw a guy who had tried humour. His board said: “My wife was captured by ninjas, please give ransom money”. At other times, you might get dancers or windscreen cleaners. Next to the cars themselves, you will see a line-up of salesmen offering cold drinks, or cellphone cables.
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If the traffic lights (again, robots, in our slang) are broken or out, as they regularly are in our ongoing electricity crisis, then the fun really starts. In other countries, the intersection would essentially become a four-way stop, but South Africans are good at turning bad situations into rather comical opportunities.
Out of nowhere, a group of self-appointed, homeless people-turned-traffic-controllers will appear. They will start wildly conducting the flow of cars, pointing, shouting, and communicating with each other in a series of mysterious whistles. No one will ask how they had the guts to stand in the middle of all this chaos and decide they could do this, but everyone will unanimously trust them, and order will be restored.
South Africa is very comfortable with chaos, especially on the roads. A place where everyone has apparently learned the same rules of the road, and yet a friendly nod and wave from one driver to another trumps all. It’s where the full minibuses that shuttle commuters from A to B have their own set of rules and honks that everyone grudgingly respects. It’s where a traffic cop asking for a cool drink means a bribe, not a refreshment… and all is understood.
It’s a place where people constantly face challenges. And yet it doesn’t show. There is always a conversation to be had about soccer or a conspiratorial laugh about how the electricity is out again. And so we all bump along the potholed roads together.
Elna Schütz is a Johannesburg-based freelance journalist working in audio and writing
