Deadly Journeys: Thabo Jijana’s Nobody’s Business, the Minibus Taxi Industry, and the Racial Politics of Mobility in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the politics of mobility in post-1994 South Africa by paying attention to minibus taxis, which have received little consideration from literary scholars although they are ubiquitous in contemporary South African literature. Attending to the minibus taxis that pervade post-apartheid Black writing, I contend, sheds light onto the ongoing racialization of mobility in the country. Offering a socially situated reading of Thabo Jijana’s Nobody’s Business: A Taxi Owner, a Murder, and a Secret (2014), I show that the abysmal state of public transport in present-day South Africa is emblematic of larger realities of immobility which continue to structure the lives of most Black South Africans. Motivated by the death of his father, a taxi owner who was murdered at the job, Jijana’s searing investigative memoir provides a powerful lens into the underbelly of the minibus taxi industry and the violence that drives it. As it reveals the precarity that continues to characterize not just public transport, but every-day life for the Black majority, Nobody’s Business suggests that the politics of mobility in post-apartheid South Africa cannot be understood outside the racism and anti-Blackness that define the democratic dispensation.