When Bongani Mbonani matriculated in 1998, he enrolled on a catering course, convinced he was equipping himself with marketable skills. After completing the one-year course, he spent the next two years filling in job application forms, faxing his CV and knocking on prospective employers’ doors.
His dream of cooking for the rich and famous soon collapsed, and with two children to feed he became increasingly desperate. And, like generations of men from KwaZulu-Natal before him, he set his sights on getting a job in the big city.
”My homeboy said ‘kuyazameka eGoli’ [there is always a plan in Johannesburg] and brought me with him”, Mbonani (26) explains. The two expected to have no problem finding jobs in the city of gold, but their illusions were soon shattered.
Their families were expecting them to start sending money home and, faced with the prospect of no income and no place to stay, they employed a little entrepreneurial flair and set themselves up as a luggage carrying service.
As out-of-towners they realised that the taxi and bus ranks in the Johannesburg city centre are far apart, forcing travellers to walk long distances with huge piles of luggage in order to get transport for the next leg of their journey. Mbonani saw a gap and decided to fill it.
Each day he wakes up early and braves the highveld winter to take up his post at a traffic light at Noord Street taxi rank by 5am. He is on the lookout for travellers with lots of luggage, or hawkers who take their stock downtown in the morning and back home each evening.
”We charge them R10 to Park Station and R5 to other places around town,” says Mbonani. He says most of his customers are from Pretoria.
”They always have big bags because they are travelling to other places through Johannesburg and most of them don’t know their way around the city.”
Essential to his business is a shopping trolley that is used to transport clients’ belongings. The luggage carriers buy the trolleys for R30 from young boys who steal them from the big supermarket chains. The stores often stage raids to recover their trolleys, which can cost up to R725 each to replace.
”That cripples our job because we cannot do anything without wheels,” he says.
Mbonani acknowledges that it is wrong to support trolley thieves but says that, like him, the boys need to make money to survive. ”It’s painful when [the stores] take [the trolleys back] because they are our biggest tool. Sometimes you buy it in the morning and they take it before one o’clock.”
As we talk, a taxi draws up and one of Mbonani’s colleagues runs to the door with his trolley. A woman alights holding a child by the hand, with another on her back, and struggles with her bags and parcels.
Khehla offers to put the bags and the child in his trolley and push it to a nearby taxi rank for R5. The child squeals with delight as his ”chauffeur” weaves the trolley along the pavement, dodging pedestrians and potholes.
But given Jozi’s reputation as the capital of crime, luggage carriers often struggle to win the confidence of prospective clients.
Mbonani approaches a young woman carrying two bags and offers to help her. She is obviously frightened and shouts at him angrily: ”Ngithe angifuni [I said I don’t want your trolley].”
This happens all the time and Mbonani says he knows why. ”It is because of fake luggage carriers who run away with customers’ belongings,” he says. ”Now because it’s winter and women buy beautiful blankets, they steal them.”
He says that he is very open and friendly with his clients and many have become regular customers.
With more than 4,6-million people unemployed in South Africa (28%), competition is tough, even for these ”informal” jobs. Luggage carriers have clearly defined turf and competition can be brutal, often leading to serious brawls on the street.
The drivers of meter-taxi cabs also feel threatened by the luggage carriers, and have created no-go zones for trolleys. Mbonani points to the corner of Bree and Von Weilligh streets: ”They don’t let us do business that side because they say people should use their taxis instead of trolleys.”
While a luggage carrier will charge a maximum of R10 to transport a passenger’s goods from one end of town to the other, a meter-taxi charges at least R25.
Mbonani says he was recently beaten up by taxi drivers after they caught him with a client.
”They blame us for not getting customers and they tell us their cars do not have petrol because of us.”
He says the taxi drivers will attack any luggage carrier unfortunate enough to be caught alone on the street, and use saws and axes to chop up their trolleys.
Mbonani makes just enough money to pay his rent, buy something to eat on a daily basis and send at least R600 home for his children each month.
It’s not exactly the dream he cherished when he left school, but it is a way to survive. He has no patience with those who sit around and expect government to provide jobs, because he believes there is always a way for an enterprising person to make money.
”You can wash cars or sell loose draws [cigarettes] for 50c like my friend.” As the idiom goes, ”indoda iyaphanda” (a man can always make a plan).