Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

The contemporary African city runs on informal modes of public transportation. Typically, minibuses provide the core, but motorbikes, tricycles, and shared taxis all contribute to informal transport ecosystems. These privately operated services are ground-level responses to growing demand for mobility in the face of absent or inadequate formal public transportation services. For many African urbanites, it is impossible to imagine city life without its ubiquitous minibuses, which constitute a distinctive feature of many African urban environments and are the stuff of news, gossip, rumors, and urban myths. Far from being mere containers that form part of the mise en scène in African cities, the dilapidated yet decorated bodies of these minibus taxis mirror for urbanites the duplicity of the African city: both as a place filled with hope and joie de vivre and as a redoubt of stuckedness and immiseration. Minibus taxis account for an estimated 80% of Africa’s total motorized trips (Medium 2018), contributing 50% of all motorized traffic in some corridors (Kumar and Barrett 2008: 5). They go by various appellations: danfo1 in Lagos (Fig. 1), trotro in Accra, daladala in Dar es Salaam, poda-poda in Freetown, matatu in Nairobi, otobis in Cairo, car rapides in Dakar, condongueiros in Luanda, gbaka in Abidjan, kamuny in Kampala, magbana in Conakry, sotrama in Bamako, songa kidogo in Kigali, and kombi in Cape Town. Minibuses are supplemented by motorcycle taxis, popularly known as okada in Nigeria, oleiya in Togo, zémidjan in Benin, pikipiki in Kenya, and boda-boda in Uganda. This urban transportation complex expresses, shapes, produces, and refracts political, social, and economic relations. Informal transport indicates an alternate mode of flexible passenger transport services that cater to the urban poor in the Global South. Unlike modern mass transit systems with fixed stops, fares, routes, and timetables, informal transport services have no predictable schedule: “they depart when they have reached maximum capacity and they arrive when they have successfully passed through all the checkpoints, paid all necessary fees and bribes, and fixed all parts that have broken down during the journey” (GreenSimms 2009: 31). The failure of state-owned mass transportation services occasioned the growth and popularity of these local and ostensibly unregulated services. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s most populous city, okadas emerged in the 1980s as a popular means of mobility for hard-pressed subalterns during a time of massive economic crisis and urban population growth, when increased demand for mobility widened the gap between supply and demand (Agbiboa 2022a). In Nigeria, the Lagos state government aims to phase out the use of the iconic danfos. Former governor Akinwunmi Ambode (2015–2019) lamented that, “When I wake up in the morning and see all these yellow buses ... and then we claim we are a megacity, that is not true and we must acknowledge that that is a faulty connectivity that we are running. Having accepted that, we have to look for the solution and that is why we want to banish yellow buses” (NCR 2017). Ambode’s comment reproduces popular perceptions of Africa’s informal transport sector as a chaotic embarrassment that needs to be “modernized.” The favored substitutes are the Lagos light rail project (also known as Lagos monorail)— contracted to the China Railway Construction Company—and Lagos BRT (bus rapid transit) system,2 generally deemed more befitting of a modernizing megacity with world-class ambitions. This language of modernity combines with an aesthetic mode of governing, or what Asher Ghertner (2011) calls “aesthetic governmentality,” to (re)produce pathological assessments of the African megalopolis, a pathology of which Lagos is its ne plus ultra. The fabric of the African city is perfunctorily read as a planning black hole, an insoluble problem. Johannesburg, for instance, is read as nothing but a “crime city.” In similar vein, the rich complexity of Lagos life is reduced to detritus, disease, and death, reproducing the colonial imaginary of “dirty natives” (Newell 2020) and an “impending apocalypse” (Sommers 2010: 319). This dystopian and Urban Taxi Slogans The People’s Arts