Baeletsi Tsatsi is a storyteller from Kuruman in the Northern Cape of South Africa. She moved to Johannesburg in 2013. She lives in Norwood, a suburb in the north-east, but works all over the city. Her experiences of Johannesburg are intimately bound up with her travels on minibus taxis, the most prolific form of transport in South Africa but also the most notorious, known for reckless drivers, disintegrating vehicles and chronic overcrowding. The stories she tells here began as part of an informal chronicle on social media, named #TaxiDiaries: part autobiography, part urban ethnography, part love story and part lament.

ONE

I get inside the taxi and sit in the front seat. The driver's wife is seated there. I know she's the driver's wife because it's not the first time we‘re riding together. I say hi with the hope that she‘ll see that it's me, but she greets back without taking her eyes off the thing she is looking at. She's looking at it the way people look at an artwork – with the hope of learning the artist's intention. I follow her gaze, and this is what she's looking at: a man at the Noord taxi rank sits gracefully on one of the fallen cement dustbins, almost like a queen, his barefoot legs crossed. He is wearing layers of tattered black clothes. His hair looks like an unwashed mop that has dealt with truths that couldn't be swept under the carpet. Parts of his body that are visible look like they were dipped in black oil and his back is up straight. One hand is on his waist, the way people position themselves when they‘re about to ask an offending question, and the other hangs at his side holding a zol [joint] that is burning away. His eyes are looking into the distance but he can't see. We keep watching him, me and the driver's wife. I‘m amazed at how he sits there and offers himself as an exhibit.

TWO

The taxi driver speaks Sesotho with a heavy accent. ‘I‘m sorry I don't speak isiZulu,’ says each word that he speaks.

THREE

It's cold. I‘m wearing a vest and a jersey. A lady sits next to me, she smells of coconut lotion and something else, it's familiar but I can't remember its name.