In South Africa, Taxis Give Black Majority a Chance in Driver’s Seat

As dusk settles over the quickly emptying city and a crush of white office workers, in gleaming BMWs and Mercedes, heads for the M-1 expressway and the manicured suburbs of northern Johannesburg, another migratory ritual is played out almost unnoticed in the opposite direction.

Huge crowds of black workers spill off the sidewalks of Sauer and Bree streets, frantically pointing fingers in the fading light.

Nothing is said, but the language is understood: A “V” sign means the intended destination is Sharpeville or another black township in the Vaal River triangle south of Johannesburg; fingers circled mean Orlando, in Soweto.

Crowd Into Buses

Long lines of commuters, stretching for a block or more, slowly shrink as the black workers crowd 16 or 17 at a time into minibuses, encouraged to move faster by a driver who can barely make himself heard over the rock music blaring from his radio.

In an hour, the streets of South Africa’s largest city are practically deserted.

The metamorphosis is accomplished mostly by the black taxi industry, an increasingly powerful institution in South African life and one that holds the potential for political as well as economic muscle for the country’s disenfranchised black majority.

In just five years, the membership of the burgeoning South African Black Taxi Assn. (SABTA) has grown from 8,000 to 45,000 licensed jitneys, and it has set its sights on a membership of 100,000, planning to bring in about 55,000 pirate taxi operators in the next 18 months.

Grown Spontaneously

The black taxi industry has grown spontaneously, much to the chagrin of the white-controlled public transport industry, from black public demand for better service than that offered on buses and trains.

Apart from becoming a major economic force--SABTA’s taxis use 211 million gallons of gasoline annually, making it the country’s biggest private fuel user--its lobbying potential already has been recognized by conservatives and radicals in black politics.

Its president, Thupane Ncgoba, recently testified against economic sanctions before a U.S. congressional committee. At the same time, young black township radicals, known as “comrades,” are acutely aware that no boycott or protest strike can succeed without the cooperation of black taxi operators.

When the late Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd and his social engineers made the concept of “grand apartheid” a reality, state-controlled or subsidized public transportation was regarded as a linchpin for moving cheap black labor from the newly created tribal homelands and satellite black townships to the city workplace.

Human-Cargo Rail Network

Out of that strategy evolved a human-cargo rail network owned by the government’s South African Transport Services and a privately owned but heavily subsidized monopoly bus company called Putco controlled by Albino Carleo, the son of an Italian immigrant.

The rail and bus networks are still in place. The crowded trains and pale blue Putco buses still carry hundreds of thousands of workers daily from the homelands and townships to the factories and businesses of South Africa’s big cities.

But the black-owned minibuses, offering faster and often cheaper service, are eating steadily into the white-run transport monopolies’ profits, forcing the government to increase its subsidies to Putco and to absorb greater losses on some of its rail routes.

More importantly, say SABTA leaders, the black-owned jitneys are helping to create a new class of South Africans--black entrepreneurs whose economic clout is seen by some as a vehicle for dismantling the apartheid system of racial separation.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Historically, the taxi industry in South Africa has been an example of the government’s success in suppressing the black majority’s entrepreneurial spirit.

In 1892, when black carriage owners flourished in Cape Colony, the government passed legislation forcing them out of the business. It was not until 1930 that the first black-owned motor taxi began operating, in the Katlehong township near Johannesburg.

In the early 1960s, secondhand Chevrolets became popular as township taxis, but it was 1970 before the government allowed black taxi owners to use minibuses to carry up to eight passengers.

Pretoria briefly banned the use of minibuses for black transport in 1980, but the newly organized SABTA fought the decision and got it overturned.

SABTA’s victory increased the average black taxi owner’s income by 70% almost overnight, triggering a boom in the industry, association officials said.

‘Never Looked Back’

“Since then we’ve never looked back. We’ve had to push hard for everything we’ve gained, and we’re still pushing,” James Chapman, SABTA’s national adviser, said in an interview at the association’s Pretoria headquarters.

Chapman, who is white, has been responsible for much of SABTA’s rapid growth, although he said he takes his orders from the black executive committee and limits his efforts mostly to marketing strategy.

He said he was operating a service station in Pretoria when he realized the economic potential of black jitney-taxis and asked the drivers to support his business. In return, he met with the association and helped it to reorganize and expand.

Cash Business

Because black taxis are a cash business in the informal sector of South Africa’s economy and drivers are reluctant to tip their hand to the tax authorities, SABTA does not disclose its members’ incomes.

But the association’s rapid expansion is illustrated by its consumption statistics. Its members spend more than $400 million a year on spare parts and accessories and $85 million annually in insurance payments; they buy more than a million tires a year and represent South Africa’s biggest private purchaser of vehicles.

Its ambitions reached a peak last year when it came close to buying the Carleo family’s 52% interest in Putco for $120 million, but the deal fell through at the last minute in a dispute with financial backers.

During the attempted buyout, a consortium of Afrikaner businessmen tried to block the deal, first by offering more money and then by threatening to go to the government’s Competition Board.

“We’ve proved already that we are busy changing the economic landscape. We are not regarded as just a junior partner anymore,” Chapman said.