Riding the Kumbies

Public transportation is very different in South Africa is from what we're used to in the United States. Because so few South Africans can afford cars, most people travel by public transportation, which mostly means taxis – but not the U.S. kind of taxis.

A U.S. taxi is a car that is rented by an individual to go from one specific address to another. Here that is called a ″meter taxi″ and it's found only in big cities. Out in the countryside where we are there are a couple of other kinds of taxis – ″local″ taxis that run a more or less prescribed route, picking up and dropping off people along the way, and larger vans that run longer distances from one "shopping town" to another, or between a major city like Pretoria and a smaller town or village. (In small towns there are often no large grocery stores. The small stores that exist are ″tuck shops″ that are expensive and usually have a limited supply of non-perishable goods. So people who want to shop at larger stores with less expensive food have to travel to a "shopping town" to buy their groceries and clothing and furniture and fixtures.)

The local taxis in our area are uniformly Asian-manufactured copies of American mini-SUVs with a little added headroom. They look like Jeeps with high foreheads, and hold a nominal 10 passengers – or more if they can be crowded in.

The long-range vehicles, also Asian-built look like American minivans (Toyota Sienna, etc.) but they're larger, and hold more passengers. Factory-standard they have 13 passenger seats, and most are customized to carry another three or four people. They are called "kumbies." We don't know why. Maybe because they "come by" on an irregular schedule.

The schedule is irregular because no kumbie leaves with empty seats. It has to fill up completely before it starts out. The first time we went from our village to Pretoria we stood on the side of the road and when we saw a minibus we held an index finger up. It had room so it stopped and picked us up. Then it continued to go around on local streets until it is full. When it was full we started for Pretoria.

(The taxi gesture language in South Africa is much more sophisticated than just standing on a curb and waving your hand the way it's done in New York: if you're going "local" you point down and local taxis stop for you. If you're going "to town" you point up and kumbies stop for you. And in some places you point back toward where you came from in order to get a ride home.)

Once in the outskirts of Pretoria passengers would shout ″short left″ or ″short right″ to indicate to the driver that they wanted to be dropped off at the next left-hand or right-hand street, and the driver pulls over and lets the passengers off.

We ended the first part of our journey to town in at a ″thekisi renke,″ or taxi rank. That is a where kumbies congregate. In big cities a taxi rank can be an underground garage or an open parking lot where kumbies wait for passengers. A queue marshal controls the area. He is the final arbiter if there are problems. At the taxi rank we changed to a different kumbie for the final leg of our trip back to the training college. (The kumbie left the taxi rank full – we waited for about 45 minutes for it to fill up – but once it got out of the city and into the countryside and began to drop off a passengers the driver began to pick up passengers going ″local″ to fill the vacant seats.)

These kumbies are very snug when loaded with people and their possessions. When we traveled we had two flexible suitcases that fit in the small trunk and under a seat. One fellow Peace Corps volunteer had a large, hard-bodied suitcase, and had to pay for an extra seat for it – but it is unusual to have something that large on a kombie. On our trip people got on with babies and diaper bags, lots of groceries, big bags full of clothes, and more. One of the passengers had apparently been to a vegetable market and had about 10 separate bags full of produce. He had to sit in the very back row of the kumbie and when he left he handed his produce, bag by bag, to passengers in rows in front of him who in turn passed them on over the seats of the kumbie until they were up front near the door. A person sitting in the front somehow managed to hold onto them while the fellow struggled to climb over the passengers in front of him. We were so crowded and the spaces for moving in and out so narrow that it took him a while to extricate himself. This kind of crowding – and cooperation – is the way kumbies work.