JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Commuting from former homelands takes almost unbearable toll

Almost 40 years ago, The New York Times’ London bureau chief (and later the paper’s executive editor), Joseph Lelyveld, described the agony of “a nation of sleepwalkers”, a reference to KwaNdebele homeland workers, who travelled up to 305km each day to and from work in what was then white SA.

Almost 40 years later, there are still sleepwalkers who carry the same heavy toll of financial costs, poor health (insomnia, stress, impaired mental activity, which raises the risk of accidents at work) and nonexistent family life.

Lelyveld’s account (which happened under apartheid) and the new research (an account of happening under a democracy) speak of what Kiernan Ryan once described as “the heartbreaking conflict between what human beings need to be, deserve to be and could be, and what the time and place they live in condemn them to become”. Ryan, a professor of English literature, was writing about the Shakespearean tragedy.

A recurring theme in Lelyveld’s book, Move Your Shadow, South Africa, Black and White, which was first published in 1986, and recently published research is that these daily “trekkers” are lucky to have jobs. But their luck comes at a heavy socioeconomic cost that the postapartheid government has done very little to alleviate. This despite trillions in budgets for infrastructure.

Economists and social scientists say that commuting (time spent to and from work) is a cost borne by workers but falls heavily on the lowest paid. This is because commuting takes a bigger chunk of their net earnings, meaning that they are subsidising their employment.

Lelyveld’s commuters travelled a minimum of more than 300km a day, sitting on buses with hard seats made for short city trips, seats on which commuters had to make up for lost sleep. “The distance they travelled annually, I calculated, came to more than a circumnavigation of the globe,” wrote Lelyveld.

To catch the first Putco bus, Lelyveld and photographer David Goldblatt left their inn at 1.30am. “By [3.45am] the bus had reached the highway, and the ride was now smoother. Their heads covered, blankets over their shoulders, the passengers swayed like Orthodox Jews in prayer. Or, in the eerie light of the two overhead bulbs, they could be seen as a congregation of spectres, souls in purgatory,” Lelyveld wrote.

Ngaka Mosiane, a senior researcher at the Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO), has updated the story of the sleepwalkers in a chapter in the new GCRO report, “Landscapes of Peripheral and Displaced Urbanism”. He focuses on how the people of the former bantustan “are reworking their lives and their places” after apartheid. Mobility is for them as “critical to their daily existence” as it was when the apartheid government dumped them in the rump of the country — far from economic opportunities.

He quotes Tebogo (60 years old in 2018 when he was interviewed), a gardener in Pretoria since 1982, who left home at 2am and returned at 10pm. These early departures and late returns make commuters easy prey for criminals. Another interviewee told him that commuters complained of “having to wait a long time for buses and then having to stand in overcrowded buses”.

On top of the toll of commuting, residents of the former homeland must make do with poor basic services. When they get home deep into the evening, there is often no water. “Hence, their clothes and blankets do not get washed regularly.”

That’s the tragedy of postapartheid SA. 

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.