Someone recently posted a historical note on exTwitter about the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott. Reading the comments that followed the post, I realised how little people knew of the history, and how much of what they knew was wrong.
You can find a broad outline of the event on WikiPedia, and a fuller account here, in a chapter of a book by Ruth First, but few have any conception of what it was actually like. The boycott began in early 1957 when the Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO), which ran the bus service between Alexandra Township, 11 miles north of the city centre, raised the fare by 25%. People who worked in the middle of Johannesburg walked or cycled to work rather than ride on the buses.
I was then 15 years old, and attended a boarding school, though the boycott actually started in the school holidays, when I was at home. A few months earlier I had read Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which had a description of an earlier bus boycott in the 1940s. I was fascinated to see history being repeated before my eyes. Almost everything Paton had written about it was being re-enacted, almost exactly as he described it.
My mother then worked as an estate agent, and had a nearly new car, a Wolseley 4/44, which in addition to travelling to and from the office, she used to show clients houses they might want to buy. When she passed along Louis Botha Avenue, the route most of the bus boycotters took to and from work, she would stop to give some of them a lift, usually women loaded with parcels, or older people who looked tired. Occasionally, if they looked very tired, she took them past where she usually turned off to Sandringham, where we then lived, and took them on to Alexandra.
Putco was a commercial company, listed on the stock exchange, and the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce took their side, and tried to break the boycott, among other things by persuading the municipal traffic cops to ticket motorists who gave lifts to the boycotters. In those days the Joburg traffic cops wore very smart charcoal grey uniforms, and rode powerful BMW motorbikes, and they would give tickets for a variety of alleged offences, like obstructing traffic when motorists stopped to pick up boycotters, or running an unlicensed taxi service.
On one occasion, when I was back at boarding school, I had to go to the dentist in the middle of Joburg. I had money for the bus fare from school to town, and my mother was going to pick me up after work and take me back to school, but she forgot. I didn't have enough money for the bus fare, so I walked home with the bus boycotters, since it was the time when everyone was going home from work. I did it one way, once, but they did it twice a day, morning and evening, for nearly six months.
A few years later I went to work for the Johannesburg Municipal Transport Department as a bus conductor, and one of the older conductors told me that during the bus boycott many of the boycotters got on the municipal trams at Yeoville and rode into town from there. It shortened their journey by a couple of miles. Putco and the municipal services were entirely separate, and so travelling on a municipal tram did not break the boycott. The municipal tram service was also segregated. Trams for black people were painted silver, while those for white people were maroon and cream. In 1960 the Yoville trams were replaced by buses -- trolley buses for whites, and oil buses for non-whites. The buses for black people weren't painted silver, but the same maroon and cream, but had bords on the front and side saying "Non-Europeans Only/Slegs vir Nie-Blankes". For more on the municipal transport services, click here.
During the bus boycott the tram service, the old conductor told me, was almost overwhelmed. He could only collect fares on the lower deck and didn't even try to get to the upper deck. But his waybill would still show that he had carried a full load.
A few corrections to misconceptions revealed in comments on exTwitter.
Someone thought that the bus boycott was the occasion for the introduction of minibus taxis. It wasn't. In those days "Second Class Taxis" (as taxis for black people were called) were mostly 10-year-old American saloon cars, most popular were Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge and Desoto, with curved sloping backs. Ten years later, in 1967, they were still 10 years old, but 1957 models, longer, wider, and with enormous tail fins. It was in 1969 that the first Toyota HiAce minibuses were landed at the Durban docks, each with two nuns installed in the front seats. And from then the min ibus taxi undustry began to grow, about 12-15 years after the bus boycott.
The Putco buses, like the one in the picture above, were painted dark green, with "Public Utility Transport Corporation" painted on the side. Nowadays they use the acronym PUTCO. There were some buses that had "PUTCO" written on the side -- they were painted blue-grey, and travelled between Johannesburg and Pretoria. They were only for white people, and on the sides was written "PUTCO Operating and Technical Services."
The boycott ended when the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce agreed to subsidise the bus service by paying the increase. That always struck me as a strange anomaly -- subsidising a profit-making company. It would have been better to subsidise the municipal bus service, to pay for a public service, and not subsidise the shareholders' profits.
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