Of course our maid showed up late for work on Monday. We were totally incensed, as is the wont of the new bourgeoisie. I mean, unlike the old bourgeoisie (who didn’t see her and her ilk as human beings with families and a life and all that) we have been paying her a good wage even before the government’s new so-called Maids & Madams Act, and we give her the weekend off — not just Thursday afternoons, as was the case before people like us were even allowed to have maids.
Anyway, when the maid shows up late on a Monday morning, you start having those involuntary feelings of whining aggressiveness that we used to observe from afar when we watched white families in the big house take it out on our hard-working grandmothers. Debate, under those circumstances, is simply out of the question. The maid is wrong and you are right, and a red card that will send her back to her Bantustan (or at least back to Soweto) is the first thing that springs to your mind.
The thing is (as she explained to us when we finally started listening to her side of the story), she was late because she wasn’t even able to get out of Soweto to come and graft for us like she’s supposed to do here in town. And the reason for that is that the taxis were on strike that day, protesting at the fact that the government was actually showing signs of starting to take the law into its own hands and issuing traffic tickets when said taxis were in violation of municipal regulations.
The Top Six taxi owners’ association had therefore issued instructions to its drivers not only to refuse to pick up passengers, but also to block roads if necessary to prevent Putco buses or any other form of transport from picking up workers struggling to get to Johannesburg. All this so that the government would back off and let them wend their bloodthirsty, zigzagging, cowboy way in peace.
Now we have quite a thing here. These so-called taxis are the latest refinement of the gaping hole that was left in the apartheid government’s forced-labour strategy — by which I mean that the apartheid system (which began not with DF Malan in 1948, but with Jan van Riebeeck, Lord Kitchener, Cecil John Rhodes and others of that ilk, by the way) forced all black people off the land and obliged them to come and work for the enrichment of seedy immigrants from various parts of Europe.
The one thing the apartheid system forgot about was how these black people were supposed to get to their unpleasant jobs, considering the fact that they were forbidden to live in the towns where the jobs were. Hence, bit by bit, the creation of an informal, black-run taxi service that eventually became so huge it had to be formalised and legalised, at least in name.
My point is that the taxi industry as it exists today is an uncomfortable, and frequently lethal, example of how far we still have to go in the transformation of the country. If Dullah Omar is often described by his own colleagues as the dull boy of the Cabinet, we have to ask ourselves if it is not because he has been given one of the most implacable sectors of transformation to wrestle with.
The lack of a convincing and effective public transport policy is one of the biggest failures of our new government, and remains one that cannot simply be left in the tied hands of a single ministry, but should be taken on as a national and even (dare I say it?) presidential priority.
After all, we keep on being told that the country has to roll its sleeves up and get to work. It’s nice work if you can get it, but why should the means of getting there be in the hands of a clearly racketeering series of gang bosses worthy of the mantle of the late Al Capone, who held Chicago and a series of other North American cities hostage in the 1930s?
To what degree is the government justified in keeping its hands off the taxi industry as a visible but deeply faulty symbol of black empowerment, while balancing this with an obligation to the bulk of its citizens, who are dependent on that same taxi industry’s capital-driven whims? Where, in fact, does empowerment end and a new and even more vicious kind of exploitation begin?
These are some of the questions that, willy-nilly, we have to ask ourselves in our interesting new dispensation. And these are questions, interestingly enough, that are being raised in a book just published by a man who makes no bones about having been a co-architect of the economic side of the apartheid dream.
It was Professor Sampie Terreblanche’s job, in the latter part of the 20th century, to devise ways of taking the disempowered Afrikaner minority into the Promised Land, where they would be freed from the tyrannical clutches of the English-speaking Pharaohs (read: Rhodes, Oppenheimer et al) who dominated the South African landscape.
It is remarkably instructive that, in his retirement, he now sees his (unpaid) job as being to devise ways of taking another disempowered section of society, the impoverished black majority, into a much more promising version of the Promised Land — the world after apartheid and the Cold War.
For his pains, Terreblanche has received nothing but brickbats from the highest echelons of the government and the African National Congress, which formerly stood for precisely the policies he is arguing for in his new book, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002.
Which leads us to the inevitable question: who’s who in the zoo these days? When former apartheid warriors are standing vocally and visibly to the left (if not the ultra-left) of the former liberation movement, what does it say about our political environment?
And when taxi warlords can wantonly play havoc with my maid’s entirely reasonable desire to rush across town to fulfil my every humble need, what does it say about the future direction of black empowerment?
And furthermore, who in the government (apart from Dullah Omar) actually gives a damn? I rest, as ever, my ever humble case.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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