This week’s guest writer Mandla Langa looks at one of the human tragedies behind taxi violence
AT 45, Charles Z Dlamini can cram myriad lifetimes into his own uncertain one. His bloodshot eyes have that long-distant, unsurprised look reminiscent of habitual survivors. Descended from a branch of the royal Swazi house and raised in Mpumalanga, he heeded his own father’s advice that he leave Nelspruit and seek his fortune as a commoner in Johannesburg and Pretoria, for the simple reason that active membership of that exalted house was a poisoned chalice.
His two uncles who remained in Nelspruit but still had pretensions to chieftaincy came to ignominious ends. A band of marauders descended on his uncles’ homestead in KaNyamazane and murdered almost all the occupants, including Dlamini’s nephews and the nightwatchmen.
“Even today,” he says, “whenever I drive up to Nelspruit, I never break bread with my relatives.” A cup of coffee, he reasons, could well be his last, so attuned is his sense of self-preservation.
This heightened instinct has stood him in good stead in the taxi wars, where he has developed this homegrown early-warning system. Dlamini has been driving taxis for as long as he can remember, starting a route from Pretoria Station to Pietersburg with his close childhood friend, Samson Mashigo. The two men poached passengers from the station, made deals with ticket examiners whereby they returned unused tickets – which were later resold – and divided the spoils. It was a good arrangement.
Trouble started in the mid-Eighties when the “smart guys came in and started this talk about the association”.
The Big Six taxi association was formed in response to pressure on taxi drivers to form a unitary body to help regulate the industry. Soon Dlamini found himself frittering away valuable driving time “sitting in kombis devising some strategy”.
The people who were gung-ho about setting up the association were newcomers in the taxi business, but they were the most vocal. Dlamini and Mashigo had allowed them space in the rank, because they believed that the industry could grow and there were hundreds of customers who appreciated the service.
Most of the newcomers came up with restrictive measures, limiting the numbers of taxis which should be allowed in. “Then they came, sometimes with six kombis,” Dlamini observes without a hint of irony, “and tried to edge us out, we who had opened our arms to them in the first instance.”
Although he doesn’t spell it out clearly, I detect his discomfort with and mistrust of these educated Africans. Instead of pulling people out of the mire on to steady ground, their selfishness plunged a whole industry into chaos.
The newcomers clawed their way into leadership positions where they could dictate policy and exact levies. “The joining fee,” Dlamini asks, “what does it do for the driver? Where does it go? When drivers die, we have to take up a collection for them – funeral expenses are not covered by the association.” The money, he reasons, is used to buy guns and hire killers.
The muscle-bound Lethlabile Taxi Association (LTA), formed in Alexandra Township, started making inroads into the Big Six turf. And then the pirates came in. Where the Big Six drivers had enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with local Pietersburg drivers who were allowed to transport fares from Pietersburg to Pretoria and back, a law was laid down that Pietersburg taxis should merely unload and return to base empty.
“I knew, then, that trouble was brewing,” Dlamini says. “I mean, we could transport people to Pietersburg and return with a load, but the Pietersburg drivers couldn’t do the same in our domain. Is that fair?”
This question answered itself on the Easter weekend of 1987 when the first taxi was peppered with AK-47 bullets: the driver and two passengers were killed at the Warmbaths tollgate. Dlamini told Mashigo that it was high time they left the taxis. But Mashigo, who thought he could still remain a Big Six while maintaining some tenuous friendship with the LTA, dismissed Dlamini’s concern as paranoia. While Dlamini withdrew, Mashigo continued with his route.
By 1989, violence had increased, with some of the taxi owners hiring hit-men from the hostels. There were killings and reprisals and counter-reprisals. Drivers were fetched from their homes and executed. Mashigo was visited at his Mamelodi home by men who riddled his body with 16 bullets, the balancing act between the Big Six and LTA having stopped as surely as his heart had ceased to pump blood.
On another occasion, Dlamini was sitting conversing with a driver friend at the back of a taxi in Pretoria. Suddenly, the friend’s eyes popped wide open and he dashed out of the vehicle. “He ran,” Dlamini remembers, “and then stopped as if he had forgotten to engage his kombi into neutral and then he dropped, like a stone.”
A malignant outgrowth of the taxi killings is the proliferation of hit-men who double up as security. In 1994, a man named Nokala, Dlamini’s one-time colleague in a meter taxi company, rode shotgun in taxis going to Beit Bridge. He was always in a three-litre vehicle, a Cressida or Skyline. Such vehicles are known as “squad cars”. Nokala was shot dead in Hillbrow near the BP filling station on Kotze Street.
Anyone venturing into Pietersburg in a three-litre vehicle is viewed with suspicion and hostility, and there is no guaranteeing that the vehicle won’t be hijacked and the driver killed, mainly because people associate these vehicles with hit-squad activity.
Dlamini puts the blame of the violence
squarely on the shoulders of taxi associations. “[Transport Minister Mac] Maharaj must ban all associations, field in more transportation inspectors and maintain a vigorous check on pirates.”
As he speaks, I am reminded of the rats that are the first to escape before a vessel sinks. What, I ask, is the future of the meter taxi industry? Is there trouble there, too?
“There’ll be problems with meter taxis also.” In fact, Dlamini says, it’s better to open a spaza shop or get a hawker’s licence. “Nigerians, Malawians and Mozambicans are now running taxis. You try and park in front of the Mariston, Statesman or Whitbeck Apartments and a Nigerian driver who can’t even speak Zulu, says to you `My frien’, whatchoo doin’, my frien’? We pick up here.'”
Three Sundays ago, Dlamini’s younger brother, Moses, was greeted by a man three times. Moses asked the man why so many greetings and the man pulled out a gun. Moses, because he knew the gunman, warned him about playing with guns, whereupon, in full view of other drivers, the man shot Moses dead at point-blank range.
The weight of the statement, the memory of what he has endured, cause him to shrug his shoulders. Somewhere, hidden in the depths of his loss, is an admission of failure, as if he blames himself for not pulling rank on his brother. “I’d always told him to get out of the taxi situation,” Dlamini says, a series of emotions wrestling across his face, “but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s dead.”
Whatever happens, whether or not he opts for the informal sector, one thing is clear: Dlamini will neither return to Nelspruit nor wait for the incipient rumblings in the meter taxi industry to become an explosion. If he wasn’t destined to rule, he was at least fated to survive.
Names in this article have been changed to protect those involved from the danger of retaliation. Mandla Langa’s collection of short stories, The Naked Song, is published by David Philip