Kick Start

Turning off the main highway in Johannesburg, South Africa, our minibus taxi is stopped by a police officer at a roadblock. Our driver, a jaunty Zulu-speaking teen sporting a black baseball cap and an ancient plastic armband that might have been a “LiveStrong” bracelet from another geological era, pulls over to the side of the road and rolls down his window. The officer reaches inside, hooks his fingers through the bracelet, snatches the driver out of the minibus, and begins punching him. None of my fellow passengers twitch. “The officer wants a 50 rand ($6.50) bribe,” suggests one, twiddling placidly on his smartphone.

It was an inauspicious start to a little experiment I ran to gauge Johannesburg’s readiness to host next year’s World Cup games: “precreating” a tourist’s potential trip from a hotel in the business-chic suburb of Sandton to the Soccer City stadium right outside the famous black township of Soweto, where the World Cup final will be held, and then back to Newtown, an up-and-coming inner-city nightlife and museum hub. I love Johannesburg, but I had been wondering how the hell hundreds of thousands of foreign soccer fans will navigate this violent, chaotic city. Jo’burg is infamous for car-jackings and home invasions, a security squad nicknamed the “Red Ants” that evicts squatters with crowbars, and urban blight so extensive that most big businesses have fled downtown for the suburbs. The latest trend is the hijacking of entire buildings.

Nowhere is the anarchy more epitomized than in Johannesburg’s public transit, a system most World Cup visitors will be forced to encounter. It’s a profoundly decrepit network in which, in a single 30-day span early this year, a bus got stuck in a river, drowning some riders; a drunk bus driver nearly drove his bus off a bridge; and two buses burst into flames on the street. Most public-transit users forgo buses in favor of the ubiquitous “minibus taxis,” which are barely regulated, sometimes un-roadworthy to the point of illegality, and organized into mob-like cartels whose internecine warfare has claimed several thousand lives. Lest you think risking getting caught in a turf war is better than risking getting caught in a toaster on wheels, the day before I rode one, I saw a Johannesburg minibus taxi burst into flames at a stoplight in front of my own car.

On my mock tourist’s journey, I brought along Brian Mahlangu, a journalist from Soweto, because hailing the right minibus taxi in Johannesburg demands fluency in a cryptic local sign language: an index finger pointed upwards means “town,” five fingers formed into a cup means “Orange Farm,” and so on. But I also asked him to accompany me because I am afraid of the taxis. I ride them in more relaxed Cape Town all the time, but never here, where a white woman alone sticks out on a minibus. In post-apartheid Johannesburg, the different races still circle each other on separate tracks. And the old public transit routes themselves help ensure it stays that way, as Brian and I see from the start.

10:17 a.m. -- Brian and I leave my car in Newtown and head down Bree Street towards the “Noord” taxi stand, where we’ll take a 5-rand ($0.65) minibus taxi to another downtown stand, then catch a 6.50-rand taxi north to Sandton. Inconveniently, the taxi routes all go through the city center--a legacy of apartheid, when public transit was oriented towards shipping black laborers to work in the city and back to their dormitory towns at night.

Turning a corner, we nearly run headlong into a man shouldering an R5 assault rifle. He’s guarding an armored bank truck, which have become a favorite target for gangsters unhappy with the pace of their post-1994 enrichment. Brian skitters across the street. “I don’t even want to be near those guys,” he mutters. “When the thugs come, they only want the cash box, and they’ll just blow you to smithereens, especially with the festive season coming.” I assume he means heists increase around Christmastime, not that thugs consider blowing people to smithereens an essential part of the holiday tradition.