Catch a bus to the city centre for the cheapest show in town, writes Merle Colborne
There was a cow on one once. It stood in the aisle and shat. No extra charge. In the bus business when you can gross R4 500 for ferrying the main course and 75 wedding guests from Umtata to Durban you don’t get dainty about such things. This story was told to me by a bloke called ”Breakfast” – named presumably after the English not the Continental variety, he is a big man – who supervises the arrivals and departures of some of the 700 privately- owned and hugely accommodating buses in Durban’s tumultuous Warwick Triangle. Though one or two buses lean towards delinquency, most are well kept, some with airbrushed exteriors of flamingos, leopards or big-haired religious leaders. The interior decor is whatever takes the fancy of the two-man crew – some of whom have worked together for decades. Manchester United is big. So are Hindu deities garlanded with fairy lights and plastic flowers. Love is hot, too. When the weather is the same and the windows are wide, and the red damask curtains bang their knotted hems against the panes, and the red satin hearts with their white embroidered messages, ”I love you” and ”I’ll love you always” and even ”I’ll love you always and forever”, bob alongside the stuffed toys above the driver’s head, there’s a buoyancy among the passengers exchanging shy grins through the shrill melody of one desperate woman’s private emergency, ”Jolene, Joleeene, Joleeeeeene, please don’t take my man/ just because you can”. Buses with names like Lovers Paradise, Free Willy and Bad Boys throb with ferocious rap – long chains of rude words that assault the sensibilities of the hijacked passengers and, at 140 decibels, pop their eardrums, too. ”Some of the aunties like it,” says the driver in wraparound sunglasses. ”They go to the back of the bus and sit on top of the bass speakers so they can feel the ‘doef-doef’ go all the way through them, and smile.” Some of these buses have airline seats and TV screens, and show the type of lunchtime videos that make middle-aged women get off sooner than they should and school boys miss their stops. My favourite bus deals in nostalgia. It’s scrubbed clean and decoration is confined to the ”Certified to carry …” sign. The music, if there is any, comes from the occasional spon-taneous outbreak and the joining in of passengers, which can bring a lump to the throat of one not used to such democratic joy. And instead of just handing your fare to the bloke hanging out of the door as you get off, the conductor, courtly in his peaked cap, comes around and issues real paper tickets and wise, leathery smiles.
Conductors are constantly busy – directing the drivers, helping the elderly, and hoisting crates of beer, bags of maize meal and small children up and down the stairs. They’ll also happily load the stock that helps some people make a living: bundles of freshly made brooms, 4m-long sheaves of newly cut sugar cane or branches of litchis. A single street trader can sometimes bring as many as seven or eight boxes of fruit, cool drinks, beer, chips and even ice on board – without anyone batting an eyelid or adding a single extra cent to the fare. To lean in among the press of rail-hanging bodies or to sit clutching someone else’s shopping or feel the sprung surprise of one’s hand on the puffy hair of the spellbound toddler on one’s lap and feel vitally connected to the whole drift and spin of the extraordinariness of South African life is often to feel humble and, sometimes, blessed, too. And at a R1,50 for the 10km trip to the city centre, it’s the cheapest show in town.