Sithutha Isizwe ("We Carry the Nation"): Dispossession, Displacement, and the Making of the Shared Minibus Taxi in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1930-Present

Abstract

This dissertation interrogates the growth of shared minibus taxi vehicles in South Africa over the course of the 20th century – along with their antecedents – to show how a century of forced removals targeting black South Africans in diverse rural and urban communities, homes, and homesteads, and forcibly relocating them to impoverished ghettoes created a “black taxi” revolution (BTR) in late 1970s and early 1980s, while also undergirding a pandemic of “black-on-black” “taxi wars” in the twilight of the racist apartheid regime. In today’s transport technology boom, few remember the history of South Africa’s shared minibus taxi industry, a black entrepreneurial powerhouse inadvertently catalyzed by South Africa’s racist and repressive apartheid state. The 16-passenger shared minibus taxi vehicles were created and increasingly manufactured and marketed to buyers in late 1970s, but had historical antecedents at the turn of the 20th century, as a response to forced removals, racial segregation, and poverty in the urban ghettoes the apartheid state created for displaced black South Africans. Within this environment, taxi operators struggled to get their businesses off the ground in an apartheid economy that privileged private and SATS-backed (read “white”) modes of transport – i.e. buses and trains – and that undercut and forbade black enterprise anywhere but in the homelands. But through diligence and racial solidarity, the taxi industry grew to become the black-owned and operated transport powerhouse it has been since the late 1980s. This is the story of one of South Africa’s revolutionary black enterprises, a story that turned sour in the 1990s with the proliferation of the Taxi Wars. Although few retell the narrative of “the black taxi revolution” now, the story of a successful black business in sub-Saharan Africa in the face of colonial and apartheid restrictions and oppression continues to inspire models of development through entrepreneurship. Moreover, the taxi story still figures into a collective memory of the struggle against apartheid.