Yes, Indeed - I’m Walking!

After being rather temperamental for quite a while, I decided to take my beloved car in for a service the other day and suddenly found myself without my usual form of transport.

Car gone. Now what?

There is some public transport in South Africa, but to date I have not been able to figure out how it works. I believe Pretoria has quite a good bus network, but there is a distinct lack of timetables, route maps and ultimately reliable services.

Given that I failed to understand how buses work, I never even attempted to decipher the cryptic symbols used by legions of seemingly chaotic yet surprisingly well organised taxi drivers. Taxi hand signs have been described as South Africa’s 12th (!) official language: there are 28 major (!!) hand signs for Gauteng alone and each sign indicates a specific route (!!!).

In theory, local transport seems to be an option. But realistically it would be far too complicated to figure out which signal to use and chances are I would end up at the other end of town!


So I came to the only logical conclusion: Walking is a – and in this case clearly the - way forward.

But South Africa is not an ideal country for walking: Distances are large, pavements non-existent, pedestrian traffic light phases rarely longer than two seconds and during the day the sun burns mercilessly.

As expected, walking is not exactly popular. Most people avoid it if at all possible and hence it is very unusual to see white people - especially women - walking. In the past, I have frequently been stopped by people asking me if I needed help when I “dared” to walk to my local supermarket.

So when I walked back home from town the other day – 7.5km through Sunnyside, an area generally avoided by white people, motorised or unmotorised - I attracted quite a lot of attention.


It took me about 1 ½ hours to walk home and all along the way people - black and white alike - stared at me in disbelief. Kids stopped their games, people their conversations, people’s eyes stuck on me as they drove past – and I am not even exaggerating.

I did not meet a single other white person walking and the division of space on the roads was remarkable: most people driving cars were white, windows up, grim stare forward; on the pavement, everyone was black, relaxed and greeted me with a friendly “Hi Sister”; and behind the big iron gates in front of all houses were white people in suits, who gave me confused looks wondering what on Earth I was doing.

I’m walking! Yes, indeed, I am walking!