Taxis

I always thought that living in a rural place would be awful. Not just a rural village in Africa, but I rural place pretty much anywhere. I am, by definition, a city girl. I mean I might not be from the largest of cities, but I am a city girl nonetheless. The idea of living in a rural area or even a small town has always scared me. Anyways, I digress.

Now that I live in a rural village in South Africa, my thoughts on this have started to shift. I live out of town, about a 30-minute drive. I don’t have a car, nor am I allowed to drive (Peace Corps’ rules). However, being "stuck" in the village doesn't really bother me. I actually like it. Who would have thought? I don’t get to town very often, but when I do (about once a week if I don’t go for work), I take a taxi. Taxis in Southern Africa are a phenomenon that is really incomparable to anything in the States. I’m generalizing them, because from personal experience I know that taxis in South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique are all very similar, so I just assume they are the same in other Southern African countries. The taxi that I refer to usually sits (legally) 15, but in the morning out of my village, sometimes fits an upwards of 23 (some of them being children). The newer taxis that the South African government are encouraging people to buy in time for the World Cup to improve safety standards are larger and much more comfortable (my village has one). The driver’s usually have some sort of music blaring so loudly that you can hardly think. It ranges from African house music to ministers preaching in Zulu to Celine Deon (yes, you read that correctly—she is very popular here).

You get a taxi by standing on the road in front of my house, waiting for it to appear for however long it takes. This can be really annoying and quite tedious. When you are leaving town to go back home, you get into a taxi at the taxi rank and wait until it fills. In the afternoon mine usually fills very fast, but in the morning it can take hours. Long distance taxis (from major city/town to city/town) can take forever to fill. Sometimes 2 hours, sometimes 4.

When I get on the taxi in my village I greet the people on board and then squish in. sometimes rows that are built to fit 3 have to 4 or the 3 people in that row are large, so the seating is so tight you feel like you cant breath. Unfortunately, this gets 100% worse when it is 80+ outside, which is most of the summer. For some reason, no one (especially gogos) never want the windows to be open, so you end up frying. You pay the fare by row, (mine costs R8/ 80 US cents) each direction. If someone shorts the driver (and this has happened to the taxi I have been on a number of times) the driver will just stop o nthe side of the road until the passengers figure out who shorted him and yell until that person pays, or someone gets fed up and just pays the difference.

So that explanation leads me to today’s interesting occurrence on the taxi…It has been pouring all day. My new center is about a 20 minute walk to the road where you catch the taxis. So my coworker and I, who had to unexpectedly go to town to get some supplies for the club, were walking to the taxi. It was 9AM so the taxis were hurting for passengers (most people who wanted to go to town had already gone or would be going after lunch). The taxi driver spots us walking in the field, still about a 15 minute walk. He waits for us—not even knowing if we want a taxi. It was amazing, and very nice. This is almost unheard of. Anyways, it was raining and I had forgotten my coat, so he even waited for me to run into my house and grab it. Crazy. So after I get in with Zodwa, we are crawling up the road into my village, eventually filling up (you get on early, even if it is still going into the village so you can make sure you get a seat). So, the taxi turns around so that we can go back towards the main road.

We are almost in front of my house again when another taxi drives towards us going at high speeds (on a dirt road in the rain, smart, right?). My driver decides to play chicken with him—he does not want to have to move out of the way into the ditch to wait for him to pass, so he tries to get him to move. Instead of this happening we almost have a head on collision. At this point all the passengers are yelling at the top of their lungs.

So both taxi drivers step out into the rain and start fighting, in Zulu, about what happened. The other taxi driver comes up to our taxi and opens all doors and tells us, the passengers, that it is he who is supposed to go to town to take us, not the driver we already have, and that we should get out and go to his taxi. My driver refuses and slams the door, continuing to yell. My driver is from the big taxi company in Bhekuzulu (4 taxis in my village owned by the same guy) and the other guy just drives it for someone else.

Both of the drivers, who are now soaked to the bone, get back into their respective taxis and start them again. However the other driver is still angry and starts to drive into our taxi, forcing mine to drive backwards in the wrong direction for about half a mile down a dirt road in the rain. The other driver was just following our exact path so we cannot get around him. The drivers get out of their cars to yell at each other 2 more times, but nothing can get this crazy guy to stop. At this point, all of the passengers are starting to yell loudly at the other driver (the passengers mainly consisted of gogos and umkhulus (grandfathers)). My coworker just starts laughing,--just another day in the taxi.

Finally, our driver is fed up enough that he drives straight and the other taxi and swerves out of the way just in time and gets around him. We are all realized—until the other taxi turns around and starts chasing us. The other driver goes around us at high speeds, almost hitting some goats, a cow, and a woman on the way. When we get out to the main road to town we see that the crazy driver has parked in the middle of the road and gotten out of the taxi and is no where to be found. We pass him in the other lane, barely avoiding an oncoming car, and then we are on our way to town. However, in order to make up for lost time, the driver went about 50 KM/HR over the speed limit, in pouring rain. I feel pretty lucky that our taxi did not flip or get crushed during that exchange.

When we got to town our driver was very apologetic about the other driver, and that was that. The passengers all got off of the taxi and disappeared into the taxi rank and out into town.