| Violence, Urbanization and Rationalization in Cape Town's Taxi Industry (1990-2010) |  Printable version
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Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 15.30-17.00
Room: 1A27 (first floor)
Speaker: Dr Erik Bähre, Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology, Leiden University
Discussant:
Jan-Bart Gewald
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
Every day, thousands of minibus taxis roam South Africa's streets,
hooting, swerving between lanes and endangering the safety and comfort
of their passengers. Blom Hansen (2006) argued that the South African
taxi world conveys a sense of freedom, a place where rules do not
matter, where taxi drivers operate in a niche that allows for new hybrid
identities and other expressions far away from political and economic
constraints. But there is another side to the taxi world: it is highly
constrained by taxi associations, political institutions, government
regulations and financial limitations. What are these freedoms that Cape
Town's taxi owners and their associations represent and how can we
connect these to the political and economic constraints that taxi owners
must face?
Zaloom's image of the maverick aesthetic of future traders in Chicago
and London helps to understand the contradictions between freedom and
constraints in the taxi world. The maverick aesthetic that Zaloom
encountered might also offer insight into the taxi world where freedom
and audacity are intertwined with severe political and economic
constraints. What do taxi entrepreneurs and drivers convey when they
transgress legal and social norms, when they intimidate taxi
entrepreneurs, drivers and passengers, and when they introduce
themselves by explaining how violent they can be? It appears that these
are not so much expressions of freedom but rather displays of authority
that are at the heart of survival in the taxi world.
Historical analysis of taxi associations and their conflicts reveals
that the rural-urban divide, the old apartheid division between a black
population with urban rights and a black population that was denied
those rights and was confined to the Bantustans, was at the heart of
political and economic rivalries. These experiences and memories still
inform contemporary struggles among taxi associations or over
government-initiated rationalization projects.
This seminar is based on interviews with taxi entrepreneurs, drivers and
members of taxi associations that live and operate in Cape Town. Most of
them belong to the Cape Amalgamated Taxi Association (CATA), the
successor of Western Cape Black Taxi Association (Webta) and the
interviews were held between 2005 and 2010, mostly in Khayelitsha,
Crossroads and Nyanga. Some of the men and women interviewed were key
players in the taxi world and were often intimidating figures who had
been imprisoned for assault or murder. For safety reasons, my research
assistant Edith Moyikwa accompanied me on research trips. I also made
use of policy reports, newspaper articles and the TRC hearings about
taxi violence.
Dr. Erik Bähre (EBaehre@fsw.leidenuniv.nl)
is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development
Sociology at Leiden University and a research fellow at the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).
He specializes in South Africa and has worked extensively in the
townships and squatter settlements of Cape Town. His main research
interests are how dramatic economic change affects social relations, and
financial mutuals among neighbours and migrants that provide commercial
insurance, social grants and entrepreneurship. He completed his PhD in
2002 at the University of Amsterdam and has since worked at the
University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu Natal), University
College Utrecht, the University of Amsterdam and the Department of
Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He has been awarded a
KNAW NIAS fellowship to write a monograph manuscript on insurance in
South Africa (2011-2012).
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