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C H A P T E R 5 Movement, Sound, and Body in the Postapartheid City The rapid accumulation of wealth in South africa made automobile and bus transport crucial elements of urban life from the 1920s. With apartheid ’s more comprehensive approach to urban planning and segregation , an extensive road system was laid out to service white areas across the country. areas for people of color were connected to this grid by separate access roads, bus routes, and rail lines. It became possible for whites to commute between work and home and shopping facilities without ever passing through nonwhite areas. Whites would enjoy the freedom of individualized movement that cars afforded, while “nonwhites ,” not yet ready for freedom, were supposed to rely on public transport. The small african-owned taxi industry was simply disbanded in the late 1950s as townships were built. Instead, bus transport became dominant. Long-standing frictions between Indian bus owners and african customers in Durban, and the successful alexandra bus boycott in 1957 in Johannesburg,1 prompted the authorities to extend an urban commuter train system that was designed to transport labor from the townships to urban centers and commercial districts. The characteristic yellow and grey trains with their limited and rigid timetables, their rundown carriages, and recurrent incidents of muggings, pickpocketing, and violence soon became one of the most resented features of urban life during apartheid.2 The Indians played a dual role in this racial division of modes of transport in Durban. as early as the 1920s, Indian businessmen acquired cars and buses, and soon emerged as the primary providers of transport to Durban’s burgeoning african workforce. Later in the 1960s, the city authorities tried to limit the operating hours and range of Indian bus companies . The city wanted to minimize the presence of buses on Durban’s roads and to force more people into the suburban trains (Singh 1999, 150–53). In the 1980s a new phenomenon, the kombi taxi, emerged as a successful alternative between private cars and public transport. Small african entrepreneurs were the first to invest in this industry, and soon Indians and colored followed the trend. By 1995, kombi taxis provided Movement, Sound, and Body • 177 65 percent of all public transport in the country, a market that is heavily concentrated in townships and informal settlements.3 More than any other sign, the kombi taxi marked the beginning of a new way of using urban space, a new form of automobility, movement, and also play and violence, which has come to define the postapartheid city. after apartheid, the use of cars, taxis, and public transport emerged once again as major areas of friction and contention in the city. But let me briefly explore the place of the car and vehicular mobility in urban theory before i turn to the relationship between physical movement, the morality of exchange, and public recognition in the postapartheid city. the Steel Cages of Modernity Until quite recently, urban theory treated motorized transport as a negative and alienating force that disrupted the flow of pedestrian life and social interaction in the streets. Lefebvre mentions the car only as a symbol of alienation: “There are many individuals who ‘realize’ themselves by driving their car. They deploy qualities that lie fallow elsewhere: daring , virility, mastery of self, energy and even sexuality. . . . It is laden with ideology. and the pathetic comedy begins: conversations about the car, anecdotes, stories about accidents, etc.” (2002, 212). In Jane Jacobs’s classical work on american cities, along with real estate speculation , cars and the road system were key elements in the destruction of urban life (1961). De Certeau’s canonical essay, “Walking in the City,” never mentions cars. his only attention to transport is to rail transport, which he conceptualizes as a subspecies of the general disciplinary powers of modernity (1988).4 recent writings on cars and the global “system of automobility” also emphasize the destructive and atomizing effects of cars on social and physical life in cities.5 The car is indeed a deeply controversial and divisive topic in political life and in social analysis. The proponents of private cars see themselves as promoting the key instrument of true liberal emancipation of the full potential of human beings against what they see as the latent socialist potential of public transport. alan pisarski, of the so-called automobility and Freedom project,6 argues that cars and the associated “democratization of mobility” and urban sprawl are cornerstones in providing women and...

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