In August 2009 Johannesburg became the first city in Africa to implement a full Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system named Rea Vaya (or ‘we are going’). Largely based on the South American model, which includes exclusive bus lanes, enclosed bus stations and high service quality, the first 26 km-long trunk line connects eastern Soweto with the CBD, while feeder buses extend its reach into other parts of Soweto. Simultaneous with the construction of the bus corridor, the City of Johannesburg has been upgrading bus station precincts, including landscaping public spaces and redeveloping buildings (CoJ 2009).

Rea Vaya can thus be read as another instalment of the City of Johannesburg's efforts to transform Soweto through a combination of infrastructure and policy interventions (as described in more detail in Chapter 15). But Rea Vaya is also more than this: through the incremental roll-out of further bus corridors across the city, the intention is to provide a network of metropolitan public transport that ‘improve[s] access and reduce[s] travelling time for residents to employment, education, recreation and markets’ (CoJ 2010: 241). The BRT is intended both as a sustainable transport option, capable of attracting car users and reducing congestion, and as an affordable option for low-income users. This dual mandate makes BRT a potentially important tool in the transformation of space in post-apartheid Johannesburg.

In this chapter we ask how successful BRT has been in achieving its second mandate, namely leveraging economic advancement for the poor. If BRT is to be instrumental in achieving social objectives in Johannesburg in years to come, the question is worth asking even at this early stage. The success of the Rea Vaya experiment is, however, also relevant in the context of national policy, as BRT has become an important element of the South African government's efforts to transform cities through spatial integration and provide ‘equitable basic access for all citizens’ (DoT 2007: 3). BRT systems are operational or under construction in at least four other South African metropolitan areas. Early lessons from the Rea Vaya experience could be valuable in assessing and perhaps adjusting the trajectories of these developments.

By many measures Rea Vaya can be considered a success: passenger numbers have steadily increased, new services have gradually been added and the taxi industry seems to be co-operating and participating in the transformation of public transport.

I first got to know Gabeba Baderoon in an English Literature Honours class at the University of Cape Town in 1990, where we were classmates in three seminars: one in feminist literary theory and criticism, led by Dorothy Driver; another in black South African literature of the 1970s and 1980s, led by Kelwyn Sole; and the other in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, led by Terry Boxall. I was struggling to find my feet in graduate literary studies – still learning its codes and protocols – in a cohort of students then considered one of the department's brightest groups.

I was constantly trying to decode other students’ approaches in their seminar papers, looking for that formula or method by which I could gain power over the discipline. Of course there wasn't a formula, but there was a series of “tricks” that were akin to paradigm shifts for me at the time. Nothing about critical method – how to go about writing a critical essay – was taught or made explicit in any way. The bright students seemed to have been born prepared, while I felt like a novice trying to uncover the sleight of hand of magicians.

One of the paradigm shifts for me occurred when Gabeba delivered a paper in the Eliot and Lawrence seminar. I cannot remember whether it was on an Eliot or Lawrence poem, or both, but her presentation was framed by what at first appeared an oblique angle. She was using an article about physics – perhaps it was on Heisenberg – from Time magazine. Not only was it an oblique angle, but she was using a non-literary source– and, to me, also a “non-scholarly” source – in a class that was very traditional in its scholarship. Of course I know now that this was nothing innovative or scandalous, but to me as a novice it represented a profound shift: knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, no matter how oblique it may appear, can illuminate things otherwise obscured.

On any weekday in any street in Johannesburg one might encounter a lean, bowed person straining to pull a vast load up a hill, round a bend or across a busy traffic intersection, cramping to the side of the road out of the way of impatient cars and trucks, or pausing to lean on the trolley handles to catch a breath. Bulky brown hessian bags squatting on flat platform trolleys are stuffed with cardboard or paper, metal or plastic, making their trundling way by human muscle power alone to a recycling depot where their contents can be exchanged for cash.

Daily the waste discarded by businesses and residents of Johannesburg is actively salvaged in the transition between private property and public landfill. In the dark early hours of the morning, empty trolleys and deflated bags rumble briskly from central areas to the suburbs, scheduled for the city's refuse removal service that day. The journey out can be many kilometres and several hours of walking. Reclaimers must arrive at bursting wheelie bins before the Pikitup trucks do, before the formal recycling companies collect their hauls, before pedestrian competitors arrive with rattling trolleys hungry for loading. Bins and bags are systematically trawled for particular goods: white A4 paper perhaps, PET plastics or scrap metal. When hessian bags are full enough to make the long journey back worthwhile – today, or perhaps only tomorrow, after another suburb is scoured – the backbreaking journey to the depot begins.

Both physically and institutionally, recyclers operate in in-between places and spaces: recycling businesses use their hauls – indeed depend on them for source material – but the recyclers are self-employed, without wages, job protection, insurances or medical aid. Their strenuous manual labour, eye for the cash value in rubbish, diversion of volumes of material from landfills, and low carbon footprints are not lauded and applauded. City residents and businesses generating waste are mostly ambivalent – occasionally recognising and facilitating the reclaiming process on their doorstep, sometimes complaining and chasing away ‘dirty vagrants’, but mostly ignoring their fellow residents and road users. City authorities, too, mostly overlook recyclers while they do their work – indeed, appear blind to their existence and their labour. A different response, however, is provoked at the gathering points for sorting and storing accumulated materials, and by the recyclers’ nightly sleeping arrangements.

The front page of the Cape Times on Monday 5 August 1996 was called “the most dramatic front page in the long history of the [newspaper]” (Spencer-Smith, quoted in Vongai 1996: 2). The emergence of Pagad into national and international prominence through images of masking, violence and militancy interrupted the longstanding picturesque tradition and changed the way Muslims would be portrayed in South Africa. Media coverage on that day and in succeeding weeks struck me not only as a story about the group called Pagad, but as a new idiom for representing Islam in South Africa. This chapter returns to the “recursive beginning” of images of Pagad in the mid-1990s and places them in the context of the growing force of menacing images of Muslims, an effect resulting both from local dynamics in South Africa and the power of a global imaginary about Islam. The unique local trajectory of images of Islam I have traced in the preceding chapters has nevertheless had moments of strong cross-fertilisation with transnational debates. This was particularly true in the period after the end of South Africa's cultural isolation in 1994, when the South African media became interpelated into international discourses about democracy, “freedom”, “terror” and Islam.

My interest in Pagad was prompted by the set of highly gendered photographs of the group that appeared in the media, tilting the oscillating pattern of images of Islam in South Africa from the picturesque in the direction of violence and alienation. The central image in these narratives was the masked man – an image that soon became indispensable to telling the Pagad story, and which required the erasure of the significant female leadership and membership of the group.

At the vantage point at the end of Cape Point Nature Reserve, about an hour south of Cape Town, visitors are invited to gaze at the exact point where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, where some say one can see waters of different hues of blue collide and merge. In truth, the actual southernmost point of the African continent is at Cape Agulhas, approximately four hours’ drive east, and if oceanic waters could ever be distinguished, that is where the two would join. The indeterminacy of the dividing and the meeting points of the two African oceans is an apt metaphor for contemplating the theme of the sea as an archive of intricate meanings about Muslims and slavery. Recent South African poetry, memoir, fiction, art and accounts of pilgrimage present the sea as a protean theme that observes neither national nor temporal boundaries, combines public history with private and autobiographical narratives, and re-envisions the country's geography and temporality. The texts reveal “alternative modernities” alongside those of imperialism, including the temporality and geography of the hajj, and assert new affinities across spatial and historical boundaries (Hofmeyr 2007: 13). In the writings below, the sea is a metaphor for experiences that transcend conventional categories, the juxtaposition of multiple histories, the transformation of the self, and memories of slavery. They map the ocean through memory and ritual.

Despite the country's extensive coastline and long transoceanic history, South African literature has been strangely mute about the sea (Samuelson 2010: 543–57). Because land has been a great obsession for whites and a measure of anguished loss for the indigenous people of South Africa, the fraught theme of land is everywhere in the country's literature and art. As a consequence, it has been possible to turn away from the sea. But the oceans have had a profound impact on South Africa's history and present, so their absence is weighted and meaningful. If we turn back toward the sea, what might we perceive?