Dispossession, Displacement, and the Making of the Shared Minibus Taxi in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1930-Present
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Sithutha Isizwe (“We Carry the Nation”): Dispossession, Displacement, and the Making of the Shared Minibus Taxi in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1930-Present A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Elliot Landon James IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Allen F. Isaacman & Helena Pohlandt-McCormick November 2018 Elliot Landon James 2018 copyright Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................. ii List of Abbreviations ......................................................................................................iii Prologue .......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ....................................................................................................................... 17 Introduction: Dispossession and Displacement: Questions Framing Thesis Chapter 2 ....................................................................................................................... 94 Historical Antecedents of the Shared Minibus Taxi: The Cape Colony, 1830-1930 Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................................... 135 Apartheid, Forced Removals, and Public Transportation in Cape Town, 1945-1978 Chapter 4 ..................................................................................................................... 165 Black Capitalism in the Black Taxi Revolution in Johannesburg, 1970-1990 Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................... 223 Taxis in the World of Neoliberalism and Post-Apartheid South Africa, 1990-2000 Chapter 6 ..................................................................................................................... 269 Reinterpreting the History of Taxis: A Gendered Analysis Chapter 7 ..................................................................................................................... 315 Conclusion Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 320 i List of Figures 2.1 Cape Town Post-Apartheid Racial Segregation, 2011 ........................................ 96 2.2 Nationwide Railway Passenger Traffic, 1890-1985 .......................................... 100 2.3 Cape Province Population Growth, Relative to Transvaal, 1890-1985 .............. 101 2.4 Nationwide Commercial Vehicles and Passenger Cars in Use, 1920-1988........ 101 3.1 Railroad, Commercial Vehicle, and Passenger Car Growth, 1948-1978............ 138 4.1 Soweto Commuter Bus Ridden into Ditch ........................................................ 173 4.2 PUTCO Commuter Bus Backed into Building ................................................. 173 4.3 Commuter Bus After Explosion ....................................................................... 174 4.4 Destroyed Commuter Buses Side by Side, Interior View .................................. 174 4.5 “Stay Away” Signage ...................................................................................... 175 4.6 The official and ONLY journal of the Southern African Black Taxi Association ...................................................................................................... 190 4.7 Profiling Who (Not) To Trust in the Taxi Industry ........................................... 190 4.8 Marketing Masculinity in the Taxi Industry ..................................................... 191 4.9 A Paper for the People ..................................................................................... 192 4.10 Furniture Discounts for Sabta Members ........................................................... 193 4.11 “Nissan Donates 32 Taxis to Sabta” ................................................................. 194 4.12 “Rags to Riches:” Middle-Class Dreams of Owning a Taxi .............................. 195 4.13 Sex and Young Women in the Taxi Industry .................................................... 196 4.14 M. J. Sekamotho’s Taxis .................................................................................. 198 5.1 Nationwide Commercial Vehicle Growth, 1972-1995 ...................................... 225 5.2 “New Ford Husky: The Bus You’ve Been Waiting For” .................................. 231 5.3 Shared Minibus Taxi and Commercial Vehicle Growth, 1979-1989 ................. 239 5.4 “SABTA Meets Schoeman [in] Historic Taxi Talks,” Drive On, September 1981 ............................................................................................... 247 ii List of Abbreviations ANC African National Congress BRT Bus Rapid Transit BTR Black Taxi Revolution CATA Cape Amalgamated Taxi Association Codeta Congress of Democratic Taxi Associations DoT National Department of Transport GTA Groblersdal Taxi Association GUTAC Groblersdal United Taxi Association Committee HODS Hands of District Six Campaign IFP Inkhata Freedom Party LAGUNYA Langa, Guguletu, and Nyanga Taxi Association LGBTI Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex (Community) LRTB Local Road Transportation Board MK Umkhonto weSizwe, armed wing of the ANC NAAMSA National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa NAFCOC National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry NAFTO National African Federation Transport Organisation NARS National Archives and Records Service NTA National Taxi Alliance PADNETA Pretoria and District Non-European Taxi Association PTA Peninsula Taxi Association PUTA Pretoria United Taxi Association PUTCO Public Utility Transport Company SABTA Southern African Black Taxi Association SALDTA South African Long Distance Taxi Association Santaco South African Taxi Council SAPS South African Police Services SATS South African Transportat Services SPP The Surplus People’s Project TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission TTA Transworld Taxi Association UCT The University of Cape Town UWC The University of the Western Cape VOC Dutch East India Company WCARS Western Cape Archives and Records Service Webta Western Cape Black Taxi Association iii PROLOGUE I grew up believing suburbs grew trees to beautify the roads to the city. This ahistorical, a-geographic worldview captures the epistemology that my Bronx bus-driving father, and my train-commuting, driver’s license-less mother, through no fault of their own, instilled in me as a working-poor native New Yorker. It took writing this dissertation to begin pondering New York City’s real environmental history: that various Dutch and British commercial entities cleared mountains and forests to make room for the city, the suburbs, and the roads that connected them hundreds of years ago.1 In the process these companies dispossessed indigenous communities of their claims to the valleys, hills, pools, and waterways, and created European markets and settlements in their stead. Colonial dispossession also frames the story of my objects of historical inquiry in the Global South: specifically, the multitudinous minibus vehicles that carried humans and their belongings across Southern Africa’s historically traumatized rural and urban space, when South Africa’s apartheid state legalized the 10-seat minibus taxi the year after the 1976 Soweto Uprising.2 1 With their similar histories of the British Empire taking over the Dutch East and West India Companies, which had cordoned off indigenous people from accessing the Atlantic Ocean by setting up trading towns, New York City and Cape Town offer wonderful comparative historical insight. I will go through the post-abolition case in Cape Town at length in Part One of the thesis, but for New York City’s colonial history, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 Rhetorically, “1976” signals a crucial turning-point in South Africa’s history because the year witnessed the radicalization of black, youth-led anti-apartheid political activity. Precisely because 1976 has such rhetorical weight, for the purpose of my study, I will use “1976/77/78” to indicate the birth minibus taxi in the historical record and the shift from Cape Town taxi history to Johannesburg taxi history in architecture of my thesis. Though not explicitly part of the Alex van Breda Commission Road Transportation Act of 1977, which legalized minibus taxis, bus boycotts culminating with the destruction of buses during the Soweto Uprising moved the apartheid state to employ myriad strategies to 1 My early beliefs reflect the present state of knowledge in South Africa, where there have been few attempts to begin histories of transport and transportation3 in any geographical context that may also correspond to the narrative of state-sanctioned human and environmental dispossession and displacement. Precisely because transportation, expansion, sprawl, and settlement are so closely tied to visions of modernity and societal progress, beginning transportation histories with colonialism seems counterintuitive – particularly in the West, and certainly in the United States. However, in late 20th-century South Africa, where the story of true democratic progress has also been tied to reconciliation between peoples, one cannot begin any story of transportation and people moving – in the context of the privileged