Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I was surrounded by pushy men, their mouths overtaken by yellowed teeth and gold caps. Glistening Nikes peeped out from underneath their frayed trousers as they sat on the hoods of their cars, scanning the crowd for potential customers.

“Please sistah, come in this car, it’s going to leave first. Come to Mowbray, lady.”

I walked along with a South African friend, swatting at flies and absorbing the goings-on, when suddenly I was bumped from the side and fell forward onto the pavement. I looked around, puzzled to see a minibus driver sticking his head out the window and shouting at me.

“Get out of the way, hey!” he shouted. “Why were you in the way?”

“Don’t blame me for what you did!" I shouted. "You should be apologizing! Pedestrians have the right of way!” Still talking, I was yanked away by my friend as the minibus driver roared off laughing.

“You never ever get into a fight with a minibus driver,” my friend scolded. “They’ll all be on his side.”

That was when I learned my first lesson about minibus etiquette.

Lesson One: The minibus driver is always right.

A few days later, I was coming home from the grocery store. Not used to living in anything but a suburban monstrosity, where I use a car to drive everywhere, I had overestimated how much I could carry. Just 10 steps out of Pick and Pay, I had to drop my bags and hail a minibus.

“Do you have room for me?”

“Yah, yah sister! Come!”

The minibus crier jumped down and grabbed some of my bags, while I climbed into the cab looking for a seat. As the crier put my bags under the seats of various people, I turned around and asked, “Where do I sit?”

“There.”

“There” was the lap of two very large elderly women. Declining this invitation, I instead stood and crouched down to avoid hitting my head, grabbing onto the bony shoulders of a nearby man for support. As the car lurched forward, the driver shouted at me to sit down. The minibus crier, the man who assists the driver, looked at me and made a motion with his hands like squashing a rising piece of dough. “Where do you want me to sit?” I asked. “On her lap?”

I kept standing until we came to a stop. The door slid open and the crier alighted. “Come! Come!” He pointed at me, and with the practiced hand roll of a traffic conductor said again, “Come! Come!”

“This isn’t my stop. I need to get out at 7-11.”

“No sistah, come!”

“No, this isn’t my stop!”

“Out! Out!” He grabbed my grocery bags from under the legs of passengers and dropped them on the pavement. Outraged, I tried to stand up and hit my head on the ceiling. I squeezed my way forward and hit my head again on the edge of the roof as I stepped down. One of the weighty old women, whose lap I had saved, descended from the bus with a sigh. I had forgotten that there were passengers behind me and under me who might have wanted to get out. But as I was pondering my thoughtlessness, the crier hopped back on the bus, slammed the door, and without a backwards glance, left me in a cloud of dust.

Lesson Two: You must find a seat.

The next week, my friends and I tried to board a vehicle in Cape Town and were sternly reprimanded by the driver. “Hey! No, go to that one!” He pointed to a lone minibus waiting under a “Sea Point” sign.

One of my companions intervened. “But we have to go to Camps Bay.”

“Eh, sister, he’s going to Camps Bay.” Not believing him, we nonetheless trooped to the other car. A man waiting by the door confirmed that he was going to Camps Bay and ushered us inside. I noticed that the door was heavily rusted and the seat cushions had torn vinyl covers.

An hour later, we still had not arrived at Camps Bay. Our driver stalled five times and needed to place the door back on its hinges each time a passenger exited. A bit before Sea Point, on the seedy side of town, we began to slow down.

To our right, we saw an obese white man who had climbed out of his minibus and was shoving his driver, a black man. We crowded around the window to watch the fight, when our minibus suddenly swung itself past the truck ahead of it and lurched to a halt. My head slammed against the window.

“What’s going on?” someone asked.

Our driver got out of the van and shouted back to us, “I’ll be back in just one minute.” He ambled across the street, heedless of the cars that swerved to avoid him. Ever aware of the racial tensions that lurk behind so many encounters in South Africa, I was almost afraid to watch the confrontation.

Then, to my surprise, our driver stepped in. But rather than throwing a punch, he had some words with his fellow driver and cajoled the man back into his minibus. I looked at our driver with a new sense of awe. Here was a man who could drive at breakneck speeds, re-hinge car doors, and perform mediations between a black driver and a white passenger.

It took us almost two hours to reach Camps Bay, but I didn’t complain.

Lesson Three: You’ll get there when you get there. Relax, and enjoy the ride.