Writing the train, not riding it

I am spending my Saturday night becoming proficient in "Transit-Oriented Development". It's a fairly intuitive concept really; transport acts as a catalyst for social and economic development. More vroom-vroom, more ching-ching. More specifically, more feet on the ground in "corridors", more bums on seats on trains, and more wheels on the bus going round and round, translates to more ching-ching.

While wading through city policy is always a treat, I've quite appreciated the fact that some of the writers of the strategies and plans that get the CoCT stamp are mostly coherent and don't split too many infinitives. So it hasn't been wholly unpleasant. However, I am left with a troubling question as I gaze on the articles and budgets and maps lying next to me on my bed: do any of these writers actually put their own feet on the ground, their own bum on a train, their own packet of NikNaks on the bus seat next to them? Now, I'm not talking about doing fieldwork, because pretty much any old person can take a clipboard to Khayelitsha, talk to a bunch of people, count a few activities, and retreat to their office satisfied that they have a good picture of what's happening on the ground because hells they were just there. So no, I'm not talking about fieldwork. I'm talking about life.

See, there are things you notice as you go about your day to day, that you don't notice when you have a fieldwork mandate. You can go to the rank in town and ask commuters ten questions about their journey, and you'll probably get some juicy information. But what you might not hear is the resigned sigh of the woman in front of you walking up the stairs that take you from the bus terminus at the Grand Parade, over Strand Street and to the taxis on top of the station. You might not see as she lifts her ankle every few steps and shakes her foot gently, maybe even pulling her sandal away from her swollen ankle for a second or two.

You could set up camp with the Metro police block outside the Goodhope Centre and ask the taxi drivers questions as they come to a stop. But if you're not on the van you won't see how the drivers signal to one another as they drive, how they call and sms, how they send messages through the gaaitjies. You won't see how they know about that roadblock, how they swap drivers outside Dart Motors in Woodstock or even the BP after the bridge. You won't hear how the commuters complain when the taxi is redirected past Cape Tech and round past District Six to avoid the flashing lights.

You can ask someone about how hot the trains get, but if you don't sit there sweating and stuck to the seat you may not realise just how unpleasant it is. And you may not know that when people complain about getting wet it's because the road outside Retreat Station floods when it rains and there's a man standing near the taxis who talks about getting a license to sell Old Brown Sherry because he'll make his millions here, he promises you. If you've never felt the pang of panic when you're at Salt River Station running over the bridge to connect to the Ottery train, never felt the push and pull of the sometimes desperate bodies around you, you may not realise that the sequencing of the trains is just not right, and it means that the woman in front of me who sighs at all the stairs must now stop her sighing and run and push and do what she can to get to her train before it goes. The Metrorail trains never run on time, you may hear. But unless you're there, you may not understand the depth of what it might mean to be late. You might not get just how important it might be to bold that bit in your policy document.

Maybe anthropology rubbed off on me more than I wanted it to, but I just don't think that people who don't use public transport should be legislating about it. It's not that they don't come up with usable ideas, They do. They write lovely policies and strategies to help things go vroom. But I think they miss something. I read a stagnancy and staleness in these policies that show just how un-public the writers are. I guess you have to be well-educated to work for government. I guess that means you have a good job. I guess that means you have a nice car. But does your education give you the right to mandate policy for infrastructure that you will never use? That you will never experience? To be honest, I don't know. I have no education when it comes to Transit-Oriented Development and I respect the writers who do; they have some good ideas. It's just that those good ideas are not necessary complete ideas. Yeah, I think that's what I'm saying.

The City's Seasons

Like any ecosystem, urban or otherwise, cities have seasons. They have pressure systems that mimic rising and pushing warm and cold fronts, and trends that shift direction like the wind. Unlike the weather, however, Cape Town’s city seasons can’t be neatly summarized on colorful charts and maps. The city’s seasons are born into existence through the action and inaction of people, and that behavior is far harder to predict than falling rain or sunny skies. But there might be a backdrop to that behavior; here are a few ideas.

Migration

I live in Obs. Around this time of the year, the shuttles and busses moving students in and out of Observatory cut their schedules. The Pick ‘n Pay at St Peter’s Square empties. The McDonalds and KFC on Norfolk Road shudder with relief. The undergraduates are gone. They aren’t the only ones.

“I’m going to the Eastern Cape,” my domestic worker tells me, “my son is becoming a man.”

“Ah, congrats!” I smile in reply.

“He’s going with his daddy at the end of the month, I’m going on the 14th.”

Over December, people go home. The women’s club I sew with in Khayelitsha closes as soon as the schools do; the grandmothers have saved all year to spend six weeks back in Pedi and Ngcobo. They go home.

But as people leave, others arrive. GP number plates idle along Victoria Road from Bantry Bay to Llandudno. From the start of school holidays till the end. It’s a transient time this, our seasonal migration.

Regeneration

On the 1^st of January this year, a massive fire burnt through BM Section in Khayelitsha. Thousands of people lost their homes and the political year shortened its summer holiday and started in earnest to answer the questions of the watching public: whose fault was it that the fire could spread through the shakey infrastructure in the way that it did, and whose fault was the arguably slow response to the fire? What upgrading was and wasn’t happening in BM Section, and where were the city’s political leaders? Fire destructs, it also provides reason to rebuild. If there are resources, capacity and political will, crisis can be a catalyst for positive change. It’s a big if, but a possible if.

In January and February the wind continues to blow. It’s hot, so hot, and Cape Town burns. The fires that run up and down and along the mountain parade in the new year and require our attention and action. The southeaster blows and freshens the city, the schools open, the students return. For better or worse, the city regenerates.

Consolidation

And then the city finds its groove and builds its routine. The gaaitjies shout their Mowbray-Kaap’s and squeeze themselves into tighter than tight taxi corners. “Don’t worry, I’m a chicken,” one tells me one day as he huddles over my legs in the front row, “I only need one leg to stand.” The Village Three bus winds its way through every road in Khayelitsha before reaching its destination. Everyone knows to be patient.

I love Cape Town’s routines. At noon everyday the city blinks as the Signal Hill cannon announces: “it’s lunchtime!” At full moon we walk up Lion’s Head. The call to prayer calls us to witness the ways in which we live together, syncretically sometimes, other times in tension. But always together. The first Thursday every month turns the city into an artwork that you can walk through and talk to. And on Fridays the traffic starts early, why shouldn’t it? It’s Cape Town.

We spend April and May consolidating (and ruing the passing of the March public holidays). It’s a time for the city to function.

Protest

To speak of a season of protest is not to undermine the grievances and the pain of people whose homes flood in July. Not their shacks, their homes. Protest in Cape Town is not just about poo and closed highways, and the politics that attempt to divide us. It’s when the inequalities in our city turn toxic.

But Cape Town doesn’t just protest service delivery. The angry upside-down umbrellas that are shoved broken into the bright green bins dotted all over the city articulate our collective rage against the weather. We’re not a patient people, Cape Tonians, when it comes to the weather and dark early mornings. The general air of discontent that settles over the city in the winter dissipates fairly rapidly though, as we move into spring.

And spring pulls us back to migration and movement, and closer to the long December holidays… 

His and Hers

I drive with my windows open. Even when I stop at the traffic lights. The middle-class among you will know what this means. This means that when someone comes to ask for money, for food, for anything, that I look at them and that I see them. If I'm going to say no, I need to say no, not just shake my head and stare forward. Poverty doesn't go away when you ignore it, it just goes ignored. So, I keep my windows open. These are people on the streets around me, people with parents, people with dreams. People who I try not to undermine by ignoring their personhood.

But what is my point? Yesterday, as I was making my way to a friend's house, I stopped at the lights at Stanhope and Main and a man came to my window.
"Two for five rand," he said, and rattled a pair of wooden maracas through the window.
"No thanks," I told him.
"It's for my daughter," he replied.
"I'm sorry," I answered, "but no." The man's breath smelt bitter and alcoholic. So I made a judgment call. And yes, on the seat next to me was a bottle of birthday bubbly for my friend. But while the rich are allowed their frivolous purchases, the poor must be responsible (and the rich must be paternalistic). It's not as though their impoverished lives limit their freedom in so many other ways, no-no, no-no. No drink for you.
So that's what I told him, "No."
He kept shaking the maracas, kept asking, kept begging. I sat there on my throne and alternated between "no" and "I'm sorry." Sorry for so many things, but that's for another time. And then, then he tries a different line: "If you don't give me money, then give me sex."
I looked at him for a moment. At the brown cheeks, at the narrow patch of lighter brown scar tissue under his right eye, at the blue plastic bag out of which he waved his maracas. I looked.

A few days ago, walking back from the little shop where I buy my pipe tobacco on Lower Main, a man came up to me and asked for some spare change. With tobacco in pocket (Oh, but I have private medical aid so the state won't have to pay for my ill health, yadda yadda yadda, I can afford my bad decisions), yes, with tobacco in pocket, I told him, "no."
He replied: "I want the money for sex."
He continued: "I want to buy condoms to cover my penis."
I knew where this conversation was going, so I walked on without replying.
"Don't you want to cover my penis?" He asked.
I stepped between the bins outside Cha Chi, under the unruly branches poking out of the hedge on the corner of Norfolk, and willed myself not to hit a homeless man.

So when this man yesterday in the traffic asked me for sex, I just looked at him. With all my wealth, my whiteness, my education, my able-bodied life, you would think the balance of power would be in my favour when interacting with a poor, black, (presumably) undereducated, limping, drunk person. You would expect that I could dictate the terms of our engagement. You might say, "Jen, look at your middle-class comfort, look at the history of your experiences, look at the everything that you have and the nothing that he has. Don't be a fool, you are the privileged one."
But then you would be forgetting one small detail. Something as accidental as our skin colour really, perhaps as random as our birth: he is a man, and I am a woman. And so I sit with my double x chromosomes as he reduces every other pocket of power ascribed to my body to a paper castle he can knock over with his hisness.

But not quite see. Because I can drive away. I can take those other pieces of privilege and escape. Not so the imagined woman who limps and looks like him. No, not her...

Windows and Doors

"Don't you want to open the window?" I asked.
The woman sitting next to me pushed out her arm from between her body and the side of the taxi and gave the cracked plastic handle a little tug. Nothing moved. She shrugged. "It's broken."
My neighbour to my left was a man giving life advice to, presumably, a friend. "You will know when it's right," he was saying, "you will know when you are ready." He mmm'd, he aaah'd and had I not been sitting bent forwards in the only open space between me and the heads in front of me, I probably would have heard the otherside of the conversation too. We were packed in see, and packed in a little tighter than usual. Our gaaitjie was clearly well-versed in the science of overloading.

A few minutes earlier he had antagonized some fellow passengers by scrutinizing their body shapes and playing Tetris in the crowded van.
"Get up brother," he'd ordered the guy in the football jersey, "you are too fat to sit there."
We were in this predicament because the man who had come to sit on the laptop (fabric-covered piece of plank) between me and the football jersey was himself quite a hefty guy and together the two of them were crowding both the rest of our row and the seat in front of them. There were complaints. The gaaitjie assessed my fellow passengers and tried to persuade the slim woman sitting behind me to move onto the laptop but she refused. After some furious negotiating and further "you are too big"-ing the gaaitjie managed to rearrange us into what he felt was the best position and we were off.

As we left our row in the deck, the woman he had expelled from the taxi because of her incompatibility with his Tetris game screamed and smacked the window and the gaaitjie's face with her handbag. I looked at him disapprovingly from my perch.
"No look," he defended himself, "she diddin wanto sit there!" He pointed to some vague and occupied area.
I continued to raise my eyebrow.
"No she's crazy, who hits a person?!"
So we sat, the taxiload of us, stewing in our neighbour's sweat and cursing the feeble window latches that wouldn't open.

The driver, unaware or uncaring of the existing levels of passenger discontent, stopped off at Rochester to put in petrol. He seemed to know the pump attendant and they chatted until the man in the football jersey, already thoroughly upset, started a chorus of "huh-aaaah's". The woman sitting next to me still had her arm pinned against the window from her unsuccessful attempt to open it: when she had raised it we had all--unintentionally--shifted a minuscule amount to the right and filled up the space between her and the taxi wall and now she was stuck. I smiled apologetically, but I knew from the stink-eye she gave me that despite the disproportionately small slice of the seat I was taking up, she blamed me for her salute.

As I sat with someone's knees pressing into the back of my chair, with someone's backpack at my feet, with someone's elbow on my thigh, I thought, YOH, I will be glad when I can drive again and at least have the option of an airconditioned 'one bum to one seat' trip. Although, I remember now, one of the very first conversations I had at the Wellness Centre, which lead to one of the very first moments of ok we are going to be friends, was about the general unpleasantness of sitting in a crowded taxi on a hot day. It was an emphatic conversation. There were gestures, there were reenactments. There were laments and there were speculations. Yes, we all decided, shaking our heads: mmm, it was bad.

Never-mind closing windows and opening doors: when it comes to making friends with people you don't know, I'd argue that when you open a window, sometimes you close a door. Flipping the adage script, yo.

Too close to the Main Road

A couple of weeks back, I got a little too intimate with the Main Road. It was home-time, bus-time, taxi-time, walking to the PicknPay after work time, and I waited at the traffic lights for the little green man to invite me over. He glowed and smiled and the wheels moving suburbward came to a stop. I stepped off the pavement and into the street, across one lane, across two lanes and THUNK; across no lanes. A man who saw me said that I flew, I've always wanted to fly. But I don't remember the flying, don't remember my knee expanding and swelling and moving apart, don't remember the sound or feel of my bones breaking. I do remember losing a shoe.

As I lay on my beloved Main Road and looked at the clouds, I heard voices beating out over the intersection in rapid bursts. I breathed deeply. Sometime later, I realised my shoulder couldn't move.

There were paramedics--they wore green--there were boards and straps and my head was forced still. There was the ceiling of the ambulance and my brother sitting, maybe crouching next to me. I don't know, couldn't see him, just felt his hand in mine.

At Groote Schuur, Mister Christians in the bed next to me was swearing and grunting and giving the nurses a hard time. I could smell him through the curtain separating us.
"Why are there only men here?" I asked the sister in my morphine-filled stillness. It was me in the trauma unit, with five others, all men.
"Oh, they get in fights and they drink." She left her explanation at that.
And they do stupid things, I thought to myself.

Standing next to my hospital bed, my mom phoned my mas from the Wellness Centre and Seniors' Club.
"We shook," Ma'Monica messaged me, when the news reached her family.
"Listen here girl," Tabs said in an email, "you must know this if you're not feeling well we don't feel well so you better get better fast. Inam sends his love"
Their visceral responses echoed my pain. Their families cared, like my family cared. It made me think about the calls for outrage bouncing off every corner of the South African media over the last little while; outrage at rape, outrage at murder, outrage at violence, outrage at the breaking bones of our sometimes shared social fabric.

But what do we mean by outrage? If we were to shake everytime someone got hurt, we would spend our days shaking, not feeling well. I'm not saying be silent, I'm not saying do nothing. I'm not encouraging a culture of ambivalent "at least's" where oh you were mugged but at least you weren't stabbed, and oh he was shot but at least he's not dead, and oh she was raped but at least it wasn't the dad. What I'm saying is that we need to find a balance. We cannot shake all day, that is no kind of life, but nor can we ignore the everyday pains that, unwatched, mutate into a violent pandemic. Between self-preservation and dislocation we need to find a way to care. And caring is something you can do all day, while drinking several cups of rooibos tea with your left hand. Ag, who knows, maybe we should all take to the streets.

And as for the man who sped down my Main Road, who jumped a red light, who smacked me to the tarmac, and who drove away, uncaring: may the soul of my favourite pair of skinny jeans haunt you till the end of your days.

The State of the Nation and an empty taxi

I gave the gaaitjie a raised eyebrow as the van came to a stop and he opened the door. "Mowbray?" he asked and pointed down the road.
I looked into the van; empty.
"Ja," I say finally, after I see a tariff sheet stuck to a window by vaguely transparent layers of sellotape, "you just look a bit suspicious with an empty van, makes me nervous you know."
The driver laughs and tells me " ja no you mus' be careful." He pulls on his cigarette and the smoke bounces lazily over his arm and out of the window.
"I know," I reply, and settle into the sweating pleather seats.

We sit in a silence broken only by the gaaitjie's shouts, his head breathing in and out of the open window, his neon safety vest folded over the chair in front of him.
"It didn' use to be this empty," the driver starts to say.
"Uh?" I offer an interested grunt in reply.
"Ja no, it is only now the las' few years that it's so." He is wearing a cream T-shirt with a thin orange stripe running the width of his back. There is a small hole in the fabric over his left shoulder, it looks like a mosquito or a fly but after staring at it--almost transfixed--I realize it moves as he does.
"So why?" I ask him, shifting my attention from the minute piece of skin, "what happened now for the van to be empty?"
"People, they lost their jobs. I used to work in sales, for thirteen years I worked in sales and then even I got retrenched."
I "mmm" in response, "that's bad luck."
He nods in agreement. "Ja, so people lost their jobs. They got packages you know, packages and they've got a bit of money so they think they gonna buy a taxi and make money." He laughs, shakes his head like we all do. "But you don' make money so." I can see his sunglassed face in the rearview mirror, he shifts his attention between my reflection and the road.
"You see, say you put in a fifty rand petrol in Wynberg, then you drive to town and you pick up maybe one maybe two maybe a couple of people and that's so thirty-forty rand, maybe you make your fifty rand. But no more."
"Is that what it costs? To get the taxi from the one side to the other?"
"Yis," he nods emphatically, "a fifty rand."
The lights are red at the at the pedestrian crossing at the Nando's. The gaaitjie whistles and calls to the people sitting, standing, paused on the pavement. No response. The lights turn green and the driver shifts the horizontal gearstick forward and up.

"So why do people do it then, why do they buy the taxi?"
"They don' know. They jus' think they gonna make money." He slows to let a car on the left come into his lane, but the car hoots and its driver waves to him to move on.
"Hy gat omdraai," the gaaitjie says.
"Ja," I agree, "he wants to turn around."
Our van starts forward again.
"You see, it wasn't always so. The guys who started here, who were the first ones on this route those years ago: HEY!" He exclaims and starts laughing again. "They made money those guys. They live in the nicest houses, they drive in the nicest cars. So people see that and they think I'm gonna be in a house so and drive such and such a car, but that was then, you know?"
"Ja," I say, "I know."
I get out at the McDonalds and maze around the huddles of school children sitting waiting on the pavement for their bus.

Zuma described the State of the Nation last night. Mixed reviews really, on both Zuma and the state. Me; I like to see the taxi half full, even when it's empty. So aluta continua, I suppose.

Christmas on the Main Road

I hand in my dissertation draft to my supervisor tomorrow, so right now Christmas involves only listening to carols on my laptop as I go through the painstaking process of editing, moving ideas in and out of my footnotes, and calculating exactly how many hours of productive awake time I have left before I have to hand-in. As a Christmas Elf adopted at birth, this upsets me immensely.

Oh, Christmas! Where have you gone old friend?

My in-again, out-again roommate complains that Christmas is horrendously Eurocentric: all the snow, midwinter feasting food and reindeer antlers is in no way representative of South Africa's sun, midsummer Chardonnays and giant foam fingers for the cricket that abound at this time of year.

But oh, Christmas! CHRISTMAS!

In the spirit of relativism--it's appropriate because I'm registered for a masters in anthropology and anthropologists love not only relativism but big words that are so meaninglessly vague their primary value is the aesthetics of their typography--here's how Christmas came to me on Tuesday.

'Twas just before 7am and the sun was already wilting my flowers as I left the house. I stood on the pavement at Main Road, waiting for a taxi to take me to gym. I got on the first Wynberg one, blurry-eyed and with one running shoe tied annoyingly tighter than the other. I sat miserably, cursing the early morning and the dissertation that caused it. I saw no 'keep yo 'fro off my window' sticker so I leant my head against the glass and stared out as no one drove passed us at this ungodly hour, on this ungodly day.

And then, oh just then as we drove by where the Sunrise Chip and Ranch used to be, the gaaitjie whipped out a recycled coffee tin. He'd stuck on bits of Christmas wrapping to give it a bit of festive flair. He shook the tin at us, demanding our attention. Our confused looks prompted him to cry out defensively: "It's for my Christmas bonus!"

The woman next to me snorted, the woman next to her howled. I don't know if it was the early hour, the earnest eyebrows of the gaaitjie, the driver's resigned sigh or just the state of my nerves, but I joined the woman two seats down from me in the laugh that reverberated off the taxi walls. "But have you ever?" the woman asked between gulps of breath. I shook my head.
"Sorry man," I said to him, "I only have enough for the ride there and back. But Merry Christmas!"
He didn't appreciate our derision and muttered out the window as he put his coffee tine away.

Oh, Christmas; it's a magical time.

In the wind

The south-easter has picked up these last few weeks, and today it flew and bounced and shook the roll-down doors of the factories and warehouses in Salt River with an impatient kinesis that only mirrors the unrest on the otherside of Sir Lowry's Pass. Two workers on their break struggled to light a cigarette: they huddled together, heads bent down, foreheads almost touching, their hands completing the walls around their faces. Creating a vacuum of calm in the bluster of the wind. Oh, the wind. The wind.

I walked in the wind, hunching my shoulders, scrunching my eyes. The broad streets of that part of Salt River were no doubt designed for trucks that weren't running over lunch. It was just me and the few bundles of factory workers wanting a smoke outside. I find the place I'm looking for eventually--the workshop that covered my couches last week--and collect the left-over roll of fabric and a refuse bag of off-cuts. As I stood in the empty loading bay, the roll balanced on my shoulder as I squeezed the refuse bag under my arm, the wind whipped the flaps of my pale green cardigan into my face. I heaved up the roll, shook my head free of its veil and started trekking up Manrose Street to the Main Road.

I had no hands to wave at the gaaitjie who called out to me, but he understood my nod and the van stood waiting a few metres to the left of the intersection when I reached the top of the road. I paused and looked at him, the wind between us, the fabric under and on top of me and he ran towards me, arms outstretched. "Sorry sorry," he said, "I didn't see you properly from down there."
"No worries," I handed him the refuse bag, "as long as it fits."
He waited for me to get in the van and then passed me the roll of fabric over the heads of my fellow commuters. The refuse bag sat on my lap.
"Allright?" he asked me before he tapped the van in a signal to the driver to move off.
"Allright." I nodded in reply.

On Tuesday, on another taxi, the man next to me looked up sharply as the gaaitjie started talking to the front-seat passenger in a language I didn't recognize. He must have though, and he called out a greeting. They met with the familiarity of strangers who share their foreignness. They chatted, the three of them, and at the crescendo of the gaaitjie's story my neighbour leant forward to shake his hand and laugh. I started laughing too, it was just that kind of contagious, serendipitous happiness that pulls at you.
"What language are you speaking?" I asked him.
"Swahili." He answered.
"Cool!"
"Mambo?" He asked me.
"What's that?"
"It means how are you doing."
I smiled, "I'm good, thanks."
The taxi stopped and he moved to the door, turning back to me, to the gaaitjie, giving a bit of a wave.

As I sat today, surrounded by fabric in the stationary taxi, I felt the van shudder as another taxi stormed by. Taxi's, it seems, like people, respond to others moving past them; caught for the briefest moment in the same frame. And people, like the wind, move past those moments so fleetingly; somewhere else to be.

A brief pause

I took a taxi earlier through to Rondies, things to do, people to see etc. I was sitting there reading my news app, when the taxi slowed down to pick up a passenger outside Thandokhulu High. At least that's what we thought. There was a lone woman standing there, with a plastic bag wrapped around her one hand, and a handbag clasped in the other. The driver timed his stop perfectly and the gaaitjie opened the door right in front of her. The few of us in the van looked to the door, the woman looked back. "Auntie?" the gaaitjie said.
No response. She stood there deadpan. No yes, no no, just standing there. So we hovered, all of us suspended in our glances door-wards, waiting. Waiting for her to get on, waiting for her to shake her head. We waited. Again, and somewhat more insistently, "Auntie?"
Still nothing.
I started to giggle. There was the gaaitjie, with his gold-rimmed sunglasses, his honey coloured skinny jeans and his small canvas bank bag filled with coins hanging from his wrist; swinging calmly. And then there was this stoney faced woman, either so disengaged from the world she couldn't reply, or so deploring of taxi etiquette that she wouldn't. The woman sitting in front of me picked up my giggle. So did the gaaitjie, so did the driver. As he drove off again we were in hysterics.
"She's a statue that one," squealed the gaatjie, "a statue!"
"Ya," I agreed, "a statue."

Community

As happens in life, I found myself sitting on the pavement outside the closed garage door of a fabric distributor in Salt River last Thursday morning. The manager arrived shortly before 9am, in a flurry of apologies for her lateness. "It was the taxi," she told me, "it went straight through on the freeway to town and I had to get another one back out!"
I nodded sympathetically, "no, no, I know, don't worry. The drivers sometimes do their own thing, it's fine I wasn't waiting long."

She waved me in behind her and walked me around the small shop, lifting and pulling rolls of fabric off the shelves, helping me find one that didn't have watermarks or creases. We each grabbed an end of the cardboard-centred roll and maneuvered it onto a measuring table and then into a plastic covering. I realized the logistical error of my plan when I saw just how much fabric 22 metres translates to. "Uhmmm," I started, "I don't know how I can get that home." We stood the two of us, assessing the totem pole of fabric. "Can I get the couch guy to come here to pick it up?"
"What's his name?" she asked me.
"Riza."
"Oh ja no, he pops in here almost everyday, I'll leave a note that it's for you. It's Jane ne?"
"Jen." I answer, "I'll tell him it's here."

I phoned him on my way out of the shop and he promised to send his cousin to my house later with his bakkie to pick up my furniture. I ran home over lunch and opened the gate to a man shouting "Hiiiiii!"
As he stood in my lounge, nodding and looking perplexed, just him with no friend to help carry, I thought it might be a good idea to ask, "Oh, are you here for the couches?"
Fortunately he answered in the affirmative. "I'm just wondering how to get them out." Clearly not everyone has Mr Isaacs' level of dexterity when it comes to furniture removal. He did have a friend though, and the two of them squeezed my couches out and onto the pavement. I had to head back to work, so I left them there, Riza's cousin, his friend, my two couches, and a hope that it would all work out.

Friday was my community partner workshop, an all day affair at the District Six Museum. We spent the day talking about all kinds of things: volunteers, development, partnerships, research, volunteers again and then at some point in the afternoon we settled on community and just how foreign some of Cape Town's communities are to my students. "We try to explain to them," one of my partners said, "that it's different here. But it takes for them to be out there to really see."
"Mmmm," added another woman, "how do you explain that everybody's your auntie, nobody's your uncle and who is your daddy?" The room erupted in nods and laughs. Wide agreement then.

I thought of the auntie at the fabric shop, of Riza and his cousin, of my volunteer placement partners and of the taxi drivers that move us all around from place to place. I know, I really do, that "community" doesn't actually exist. But sometimes, in some spaces, it kind of does.

A better day

I had to sprint through traffic to catch the Wynberg-bound taxi. I just stuck my hand out in an apologetic gesture and hoped that the driver of the white car that stalled to an uneasy stop uncomfortably close to me understood my haste. I was already running late and didn't want to risk waiting on the pavement watching the Golden Arrows puff by in their smokey crawl. I stepped inside the taxi and looked around, no empty seats. "Where must I go?" I asked the gaaitjie. He pulled the door closed behind me as I stood hunched over him and pointed to a spot next to the driver's seat, there on the otherside of two pairs of legs. I leant over and held onto someone's shoulder, an unseen hand reached out, pulling my elbow, and I swung onto the small cushioned platform, one foot underneath me, the other dangling somewhere behind the front passenger seat.
"Sit forward!" the driver suggested to me. I held onto his head rest and demanded:
"Do I look like an acrobat my friend?"
He laughed and said fine, "as long as you're comfortable, sister."
I assured him I was. 

While having a sit-down and chat with a friend at a cafe overlooking the Main Road in Rondies, I started to hear some music that seemed a little too vibrant for a taxi sound-system. As the music got louder, I realized it was moving. Over the road, on the corner of the Woolworths where the homeless couple sit, a bunch of four men in orange robes danced along. Two had big drums, one had an accordion, one handed out flyers. One of the beggars at the intersection joined in the jam, so did two or three students walking past. There's a Hare Krishna temple nearby, I assume that's where they came from. The music moved up the Main Road, mixed with the hoots and grumbles of the traffic. The four men in their orange robes, joined sporadically by pedestrians: I found them almost hypnotic.

About half an hour later, they returned, now on my side of the road. They paused at the petrol station behind me, the attendants left their pumps to dance with them. I waved as they walked by, smiled and got up for a quick wiggle. The man with the accordion returned my smile and sang louder. His friend passed me a flyer inviting me to join them for yoga and a "sumptuous vegetarian feast." I continued to wiggle, maybe I even jived a little there on the pavement. My companion laughed, "making friends again, Jen?"
"Yip!" I was happy to answer.

Came home, perused Facebook. First couple of posts in my newsfeed are all links to the Equal Education 'Build the Future' youtube, friends sharing with friends sharing with friends. I also saw some updates that showed how the non-profit that a couple of my friends started a few years ago is so beyond thriving it's basically recalibrating the youth development scene in Cape Town. For lunch today, I read Bottles' paper on transitional justice, I was all: YOH, not only can she drink her body weight in alcoholic beverages, but here is a woman who knows what is what.

So yeah, South Africa may not be doing all that well right now. But as long as we're working for change, as long as we'll offer each other shoulders and arms to steady ourselves in a moving taxi, and as long as we can dance in the street with strangers, I think we're going to be fine. We'll be fine.

The words of the prophets

It might not be taxi poetry, but stuck and scribbled to taxi walls are smatterings of advice,  admonishments, requests and cliches. Some are banal appeals: "I like your lovely perm... But not on my windows", and some are a little more sagely: "Don't rush me, it's better to be late at work than early in hospital". Some have got me musing.

Written on the taxi door: "Keep the door open: ventilation stops the spread of TB." It's a sticker with the USAID logo. I can almost smell their good intentions. I know they didn't put it there, there next to the door handle. But it's just so damn metaphoric isn't it?

"Everyone is a foreigner somewhere..." Post 2008 maybe? Post the xenophobic hunting of foreigners? Some days, squeezed in between bodies and baggage, I hear conversations in French, Xhosa, Afrikaans, even the Dutch or German of blonde-haired tourists. Not some days as in never days, some days as in most days. One hundred percent guaranteed, unless you're a lonely commuter, you'll never be on a lonely-lingual taxi.

"Respect a fool to avoid noise." I've heard a version of this one before. My mom always tells me, as I gear up to start sniping with whichever fool has me red-faced and on the edge of violence: "never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."

The two that really got me into some potentially existential territory were stuck on opposite sides of the same taxi:

"A black man is always a suspect" / "Thank God I'm a black man"

Thank God I'm a suspect? No, I know, it's not an exercise in logic. And that isn't what spurned my entry in the world of what if's. See, I started to wonder then, when I read those twin signs, what it means to be a black man. I wonder how it feels. A different skin, a different body. But it's not just an internal state of being, is it? It's how the rest of the world engages with your skin, with your body. I remember a couple of years back reading the French phenomenologists and getting lost in their complicated ideas and I don't want to mozey into that terrain here, but it's something to think about: what if I were a black man, how would I be different?

The mental gymnastics get a bit much--particularly because I can't lean my unpermed 'fro on the taxi windows to rest my busily heavy head--so I zone out to the conversation on MetroFM and watch out the window as the buildings move by.

Stepping out

It's not often that I call an area "dodgy". In fact, I almost never do. But yesterday, hey, yesterday, I found myself thinking: "But for reals Jen, you have good ideas and then you have this." I was buying wooden planks see, from a place in Lower Woodstock. But I didn't have the strength to drive in the afternoon traffic, so I figured I'd just take a taxi down Main Road, hop off somewhere close to where I needed to be and walk through a side-street down to Lower Main where the wood shop has been for the last 82 years--as the man who walked me round their expansive yard told me.

I explained to a friend last night (over several glasses of piwi*) that what made me nervous was that there were too many people loitering. Loiterers always give me the twitchies, I kind of what to say, "but hi, what are you waiting for friends?!" Anyway, there was a group sitting in a small circle on the pavement, another group bundled on the stumpy wall in front of one of those Victorian terrace houses. There were two guys walking behind me, the one called out:
"Hey sister, you've got a good step!"
His buddy laughed. So did I to be fair.
A workman who heard the exchange lumbered over from his parked bakkie to join me in the middle of the road (I figure if I walk in the middle there's a greater chance of someone seeing me and intervening if paw-paws start flying). He nodded his head in agreement and added:
"Yes, it's a good compliment."
I look at him and smile, "yeah, yeah."
"Yes," he continues, "not everyone can walk so, with such attitude."
Oh the irony; here I march with confidence with my 'fro and skinny jeans, all the while embracing my inner meerkat and surreptitiously mapping in my mind all the people, the streets, the subtle and not so subtle movements around me, tensed and ready to run the hell out of there if needs be. But my step, oh my step gives none of that away.

I choose a different side-street to walk back up, and it's marginally better but it's only when I'm sitting squished in the front row of the taxi that I take a deep breath and shake my head at me. The gaaitjie is singing along to the radio, between sucking on a purple bompie* that he holds between his teeth when he manages the door. The woman sitting next to me has a little boy sitting on her lap, he's got that vacant look that kids sometimes get, when the world just gets too much for them and they're tired and their eyes just glaze over in happy oblivion. The taxi stops to let her off and the gaatijie stretches out his arms to hold the little boy as she squeezes herself through the seats. With her feet firmly on the ground and her handbag safely on her shoulder, the gaaitjie swings around and deposits her son in her arms.

The whole exchange was oddly beautiful. The mother in her bright blue ensemble, the little boy with fuzzy hair and soft eyes, the almost awkwardly skinny gaaitjie with the bompie swnging from his teeth and his arms held out; patient despite the busyness of the afternoon commute. I dunno, maybe you had to be there.

* pipe and wine
* plastic sachet of frozen flavoured ice

A wing and a prayer

"Maak gou, maak gou, kawuleza!"* It was a deer in headlights sort of thing, I looked up from texting and into the gaaitjie's very insistent and impatient face. The woman standing next to me was similarly startled. "Ok, ya, sure." I mumbled as I squeezed into the taxi. The gaaitjie was finding space for the ma, but she was big and wasn't going to fit into any old dark hoekie*. So the gaaitjie, like directing some orchestral masterpiece, or playing one of those puzzle games where there's one tile free and you have to move all the little pieces around to create a picture, waved the guy in the jeans up, moved the guy in the bright blue tracksuit to the right, pulled the other ma's cooler bag forward, and then my view was obscured by the girl he pushed in next to me and I was stuck, facing forward, unable to move. But clearly he reached some kind of crescendo, all the while shouting at our commuting community to "come move quicker, it's no time for sleeping, sister come wake up", and there was room for the ma to nestle in. He had hardly shouted "Forward!" before we were on our way.

My arms were pinned against me, T-Rex style, so I just dropped my coins in the hand of the woman sitting next to me and smiled hopefully. She paid the gaaitjie and asked me, "do you know what time it is?" I could feel my phone in my jeans pocket, but there was no way I had leverage space to get it out. "Uhmm, I think it's around 6pm." She was wearing a headscarf so I gave it a bit more thought. "Yes, I was on the pavement at 3 minutes to," I told her. I remember because I was temporarily late and was checking the time on my phone continuously. She nodded in thanks, clasped her hands together, and went silent. Half a minute later she broke her fast.

The gaaitjie tapped loudly on the side of the van, called "Forest Hill!" and flung the door open. We came to a sudden stop. If I wasn't held in place by my neighbours' bodies, I would've whip-lashed forward. "Come, come, come!" he shouted, "skywe jou lywe!"* I giggled a little. As we sped away again I shouted "MacDonalds!" and twisted my head as much as I could to see that the gaaitjie heard me. "MacDonalds!" he shouted forward to the driver. As I was leaving the van I bumped my head on the door-frame, and the gaaitjie took a second to say, "careful sister" before swinging back into the now moving van and slamming the door.


* Hurry up!
* Small corner
* "Move your bodies", but funny, because in Afrikaans it rhymes.

Office politics

"Hou vas ek se!"* The gaaitjie's shout emphasized his irritation. We were hovering in that area outside the Mowbray police-station and the driver had started to drive, disobeying the gaaitjie's previous"hou vas!" The two of them had been beefing from Woodstock, which was odd. Sometimes gaaitjies and drivers make jokes, keeping up a constant chatter, and the gaaitjie will jump out and buy cigarettes and glass bottles of Coke or packets of fruit from the pavement outside the Shoprite in Salt River, with crumpled sweaty notes passed back from the driver's seat. Sometimes they just sit in silence, the gaaitjie shouting only "forward" or "hou vas" as the situation demands. But I've never seen an acrimonious working relationship.

So there we sat, a handful of commuters, all looking down or out of the windows, as the gaaitjie shouted his aggressive "hou vas, ek se!" from his precarious position in the open doorway. The driver lifted his left fist off the steering wheel and waved it in the general direction of the gaaitjie. He somehow managed to shout a mutter. Fist-wave, mutter-mutter. The gaaitjie responded with a "you must listen to me!" The driver responded with another incomprehensible shout. I took my phone out and stared at the screen with intense purpose. If I'd stumbled into a similar situation on immobile land, I would have extricated myself as soon as possible.

The gaaitjie swung back into the taxi and slammed the door. We stood stationary. He tapped twice on the door--the universal signal for both stop and go--and glowered at the driver. The driver revved the engine before taking-off. I guess when your office is public transport, there's nowhere to hide the politics between middle management and minions.

* Literally: "Hold fast/hold on, I say", Contextually: "Stop driving now!"

Midnight train

I landed up in Claremont yesterday evening and found what I thought was a happy coincidence: a taxi hovering on the curb when I arrived at Main Road on foot. But, nay-nay. It was clearly their last trip for the evening and the driver and gaaitjie wanted that taxi packed so we sat. And we sat. One girl got impatient, demanded her money back from the gaaitjie and got off. The rest of us; too tired, too cold and too squished in between others' arms and legs didn't move, initially. But then, shoh, it was citizen mobilization like I've never seen before.

The driver turned left off the Main Road to double-back around the block in the hope of picking up a few stragglers. "Haaaaah!" exclaimed the woman behind me, "where are you going?" The gaaitjie waved her off and she started cursing him in Xhosa. "Yuiy!" I gave a nudge on his shoulder, "answer the lady because we all want to know!"
"No it's fine we're just going around the corner."
He received a multilingual choral response from frustrated commuters just wanting to go home. 
The uncle behind me stank of alcohol and damp, and threatened to "moer"* both driver and gaaitjie if we didn't get back on track. Then things got tense. The driver demanded that the uncle get off, the uncle refused.

So again we sat hovering on the side of Main Road's curb. The gaaitjie asked for my money, I told him that "I'm only going to pay when we've gone past the Engen." He muttered under his breath and asked a neighbouring passenger who shook her head and said, "not until we move." He received similar responses from the rest of the group. We were resolved. The driver was pissed off, but he drove. As we got to Newlands, the uncle behind me still hadn't paid. The gaaitjie opened the door, the driver hardly slowed down. Pulling on his shopping bag, the gaaitjie guided the vocal stowaway to the moving pavement and slammed the door.

* beat-up

Going somewhere?

I was in a rush to get to the gym after work yesterday; the two and a half treadmills that my basement-gym has fill-up fast. So I was grateful when the gaaitjie I waved to from the opposite side of the road left his post at the taxi-door, ran across three lanes, collected me from the middle of the road, threw-out his hands in a dramatic 'stop' sign to halt the oncoming streams of traffic and helped me hop onto the still moving vehicle. As always, he sat with his head hanging out of the window to shout to potential customers. Cape Town afternoon breezes can be a little cold, so after a few minutes he popped in his head, called to the girl in the front seat who was wearing a fluffy hat, and asked to borrow it for a while. She duly consented.

It was like the other day when I was sitting there eating my apple and the gaaitjie pointed to it. "You want my apple?" I asked him. He nodded. "Friend, I'm still busy with it." I was only about half way through.
"That's fine sister," he smiled, "when you're finished."
I took a few more nibbles and passed it forward to him. Taxitiquette.

But it was on the taxi home-bound that things really took a turn for the interesting. About a year ago, me and my friend, affectionately nicknamed Bottles, were chillin' like villains in a taxi in Cairo. Traffic in Cairo is like a sandstorm meets a volcano meets 80s disco mirror-balls and flashing lights. So we were only partly surprised when the driver of the taxi we were in started reversing back up the highway when he missed our turn-off. Yesterday, sitting in the taxi on the way home, stuck in the dregs of the after-work exodus, my Cairo memory was relived. The driver clearly had no time for the traffic, so there in the Main Road, he did a U-turn and positioned himself in the middle of the two empty lanes going in the opposite direction. And then he started reversing.

At first my fellow-commuters and I were confused, mumbling to each other and looking around, someone might even have protested. But the driver kept reversing, getting directions from the gaaitjie and telling the people in the middle of the taxi to put their heads down so he could see out of the back window. Our responses were partly giggled, partly clucked. When he got to Rochester Road he pulled another U-turn, squeezed his way back into the trafficked throng and we carried on. Just like that.

Racial Profiling on the Main Road

Taxis leaving town, whether they're going to Manenberg or Wynberg, all go past Mowbray. So if you're on the Main Road at any point between Town and Mowbray, and you want to get off before or at Mowbray, you can jump on any taxi you please. However, if you're Wynberg-bound, your options dwindle somewhat. Who goes to Wynberg? Well, considering that the Wynberg route goes through the heart of the southern'burbs, it's them middle-class bourgeoisie, who are coinky-dink making use of public transport... Ok, so that doesn't work. Mainly, it's students and Americans. And the odd suburban adventurer, occasionally. Look, it's easier to say that anyone who isn't on the Town-Wynberg route, is darker than white. So when as a white woman, I want to hop on a non-Wynberg taxi, there are always questions, raised eyebrows, suspiciously pursed lips and the endearing refrain: "Where are you going girlie?"

(I should point out that usually you don't get asked where you're going until you're on the taxi and whipping out your coins.)

Point is, for a while now, I've been frustrated that I get little response from passing taxi's when I parade my waving hands in front of them as I try to go from Salt River back home to Obs--both stops along the Town-Mowbray route, so really I could get on any taxi. I had started to suspect that it is my milky hue that puts-off the traveling salesmen, so like any keen observer of social beings, I watched which taxis stopped for whom. I noticed that when on a Manenberg taxi, waving white clients weren't much cause for a pause, but that the taxi would slow-down and start a-cruising when it was a coloured woman waiting for a ride. Yesterday, I got my final clinching proof that gaaitjies do indeed engage in a bit of amateur racial profiling to target potential clients.

I was on a Wynberg taxi, driving away from town, and we had just past the Chippies when the gaaitjie tapped on the door in the universal "stop" signal to the driver, obviously having spotted a potential customer. The driver wasn't slowing, I assume this is what he was thinking: "It's getting late, and the time for going to campus (on the route) or shopping at Cavendish (on the route) is over. There aren't that many Wynberg-route users left on the roads, just a few late workers making their way back home to the Flats". So he kept going, until the gaaitjie shouted: "She's white!" and we came to a inconsiderate halt.

Know thy target market right?

Lego-brick Deck

The taxi deck in town makes me think of the Lego creations I used to make when I was a kiddie. My brother had all the architectural talent, I would just build and build and build and put little blocks wherever they could fit in. The more blocks I could squeeze in, the better. Similarly, the deck is just filled with little bits and pieces squeezed in next to each other, on top of each other, over each other, in fact in every prepositional relationship to one another as can be imagined. There are the lines of taxi lanes, filled with lines of taxis and lines of people. And then there are the men who walk with boxes of ice-creams in between the lines of waiting, and the men who walk with toilet-rim cleaners, with batteries, with packets of tissues and packets of Crack-a-Snacks. All of this is over the lines of the railway below, which you can see if you stand on the eastern edge of the deck and look down over the squat little wall covered in a blackish powdered smudge. And to the north, on the otherside of Strand Street, buses in their lanes chugging-chugging and empty lanes looked over by people with their shopping bags.

The deck is home to a hundred little white box-shops not quite as big as a single garage. No space between them, just lined up one after the other selling clothing and shoes, a hair salon next to a cafe, next to a man with a camera and a variety of painted backdrops, sitting on a three-legged stool and shouting to his neighbour. It's Xhosa and Afrikaans and English and French. Sometimes spoken across languages. It's loud and it's matched by a man playing music near the stairs that take you down to the station.

So you weave your way through the Lego bricks. Busy-busy-busy. Hooting taxis and shouting gaaitjies, you have to walk where you can, when you can, no one will wait for you here but they might slow down if you wave while you walk. Packed in with all the other Lego bricks into a taxi to Mowbray, you sit squashed in against the window between the old man with the cap who greets the bus with a courteous "Middag almal*" and the woman with the fuscia-coloured doekie who started wearing pink last year and just hasn't stopped and yes it is bright and summery isn't it.

Zoom, zoom, zoom and down past the Goodhope Centre and onto the Main Road. Away from the noise and suddenly it's quiet. They taxi is full so there's nothing for the gaaitjie to shout about. No music, no CCFM radio drama. Just quiet. The driver sits eating a PS Chocolate in a purple wrapper, you know the milk chocolate one..? One hand on the chocolate, one alternating between steering wheel and gear stick. He's chewing on that chocolate so assuredly, so patiently. His jaw moves slowly round and round like a cow chewing grass, not up, not down, but round and round. In this absurdly quiet taxi. The Lego bricks are left behind.

* Afternoon everyone

And the Main Road

Sometimes I deviate from the N2, and end up hopping on and off pseudo-roadworthy minibuses that alternately ramble and speed down Main Road. I love and hate public transport. On the one hand; you meet a cross-section of Cape Town's population, you have conversations that you wouldn't have otherwise, you listen to music that exists as a series of minute physical jolts, and you see the city as the spaces between buildings, between edges, between people. On the other hand; taxi's are only sporadically where you want them when you want them, as a "skraletjie*" you're often forced to sit on half a seat with more of your body in others' terrain than you're used to, and you're at the mercy of drivers and gaaitjies* who seem to have their own understandings of time and efficiency.

Mostly though, I love it.

Some things I've learnt along the way:

1. Drivers are more irritable on Mondays because their gaaitjies are not often at work and they have to take care of the marketing, debt collection and driving all by themselves. Absent gaaitjies are generally recovering from the weekend or "hulle's nog gesuip somewhere*" as one driver explained to me.

2. A "laptop" is that piece of fabric-covered wooden plank that fits in between the seats in a Quantum taxi, either balanced on a beer crate or perched on the edges of neighbouring seats, providing an extra surface on which to nestle an extra passenger. Laptops vary in comfort, but can be a bit slidey if your neighbours don't come to the party and keep the edges level.

3. Having a sense of humor is non-negotiable. When the gaaitjie starts professing his undying love, it's not appropriate to ignore, be grumpy or launch into a feminist tirade. This doesn't endear you to anyone. Rather, if he wants to "make business" with you, ask him: "Oh so you don't have a girlfriend?"
"Noooo, I'm telling you!" He says.
"Do you know why you don't have a girlfriend?" You ask.
"I was waiting for you." He reaches out to grab your hand.
"Lies," you shake him off, "it's because you're full of nonsense."
"Noooo, that's not true." He denies it, while:
"It's true, it's true!" Confirms the cackling driver.
"It's either that or you have a wife and three kids at home." You retort.
"Noooo, I promise you." He replies desperately. Driver laughs.
"Do you know why he's laughing?" You ask. "It's because it's true." Your final line clinches things.
"Ya, ok maybe." He chuckles back.

4. Marvel at the woman who sits with three pieces of baggage roughly the size of elephant-triplets on her lap, because she refused to pay an extra R6 for the baggage to have a seat because the taxi was empty anyway... And when she skells-out* the gaaitjie for his callousness, "mmmm" in agreement.  And if you encounter the gaaitjie who calls himself the greatest sit-down comedian on the Wynberg-Town route, know that the universe is smiling on you.

* Skinny one
* Literally "guard", but actually the man who yodels the taxi's destinations out of the window and collects your sweaty-palmed coins
* They're still drunk somewhere
* Scolds