HEIDI HOLLAND

A long history provides too many grounds for disagreement. It's time for a change – and not from the government

The young lawyer who suffered terrible injuries while being dragged under a minibus taxi in Sandton has been much on my mind. After writing about her a couple of weeks ago, a reader's response to my suggestion that both victim and driver exhibited road rage made me look more closely at our "black" taxi industry.

He wrote: "If you take a step back then I believe it's taxi bosses who are essentially to blame and the government that needs to address it." Well, yes and no, I answered, pointing out that the industry had been tightly controlled originally, but that this had in itself led to a lot of trouble. It may be the owners' "fault" that the drivers are under pressure to make as many high-speed trips as possible to and from the townships at rush hour – but that's how they make their profits.

Discussing the overall taxi situation, the reader and I came to the conclusion that we might as motorists have a positive role to play in the taxi dramas that daily pollute our streets – as well as saying so much about us as South Africans. Here's how and why.

The origins of aggression from both taxi drivers and motorists go back a long way to the late 70s when the minibuses began to appear in large numbers. It was at a time when employed people still had to rise in the earliest of morning hours, like 4am, to catch state-owned trains and Putco buses. Townships being deliberately set far away from employment centres in the country's cities by apartheid's paranoid machinations meant that the new 16-seater public transport vehicles, later specially modified in Japan, were welcomed as perhaps the most liberating social intervention in South African urban history.

The multi-billion rand minibus taxi industry now carries over 60% of South African commuters. 14-million people spend an average of 65 minutes in a kombi taxi every day. Often fetching passengers in their own townships streets, sometimes with door-to-door pick-up and drop off, the taxis come from a highly politicized background – like everything else in our troubled nation.

They were from the start viewed as trusted friends by the majority of township residents, regardless of what motorists thought of them. As a result of their popular power, taxi owners began to push hard for deregulation during the politically turbulent Eighties.

It was the low-key but deeply corrupt regulating bodies that replaced the state's eventually-discarded rules which then led to the industry becoming increasingly criminal in nature. Turf wars in the competitive and highly lucrative sector soon exhibited mafia-like tactics, including the hiring of hit-men, all-out gang warfare and price-fixing. By the late Eighties, the Nationalists had taken fright at the extent of the ethnic rivalry, participation in which did not at the time suit their own agenda, so the entire industry was deregulated virtually overnight.

Thereafter, the Nats being quick to divide-and-rule wherever it served their purposes, the government is believed to have actively encouraged some taxi wars between opposing political parties like the IFP and the ANC so as to destabilize the black community. In 1998, for example, 13 police officers were charged with complicity in taxi violence.

As far as the mainly white motorists were concerned back then, however, the taxis drove recklessly and were a menace on the roads. The fact that black people were able to spend a couple of hours longer in their beds every morning never crossed most motorists' minds. Neither did the hazardous reality that municipalities had failed to provide pavement pick-up and drop-off points for the 120 000-odd kombis on South Africa's city streets. Taxi drivers, no doubt noticing official indifference to their needs and also spotting the driving public's disdain for the service they were providing for ordinary working people, began stopping in the middle of busy roads and intersections to collect and offload passengers, tit for tat being a common human response to challenge.

There's the background, and here's the deal the reader and I recommend as a possible remedy, bearing in mind that we can't always scream for government regulations to fix our problems – especially when these have failed in the past. (Now fasten seat belts and brace for major mindshift.) Maybe what we should do is change our own attitudes. In the self-empowering process, we might help to alter the risky behavior of the country's taxi drivers. That's the idea at any rate, based on the futility of impotent rage, not to mention the foolishness of being overtaken by it.

So next time a kombi swerves dangerously in front of you, stops without warning or in some other swashbuckling way infuriates you as a motorist, don't see red. Think pink. Think not only of all the road rules you breach yourself – going through red lights on the spurious grounds of personal safety from criminals, driving drunk, bribing speed cops – but think mostly of what those lawless taxis represent.

Inside them are factory workers, petrol pump attendants, maids, teachers, nurses, bank tellers and shop assistants – the people who make our world go round. They watch our snarling expressions as we curse the taxi drivers who are getting them to their jobs on time. What if we just learn to tolerate taxis instead of raging at them? Give way to them whenever possible, let them into the traffic, smile when driving alongside them. It's a corny, some might even say cowardly, response to aggression, an unsatisfactory alternative to fair play, but I guarantee it will dispel some of your own road rage, at the very least making you feel better about yourself - every day. And it's bound to rub off sooner or later on taxi drivers because that's how good and bad manners tend to evolve in society.

All things considered, it might just make paradoxical sense for our motorists to be nicer to our taxis.

Heidi Holland is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Dinner With Mugabe.