(Author: Suzanne Belling, Vol. 65 #1, Pesach 2010)
Susan Woolf is known as Mathabo (Mother of Happiness) by the people and taxi commuters of the streets of South Africa to whom she has introduced a concept that will change their lives.
She lives up to the credo in her personalised definition of art as a combination of creative and lateral thinking. In fact, her view on life, her skills and her multi-faceted talents have been put to use in such unique ways that she defined taxi hand signals as a whole new language, creating one for unsighted people into the bargain.
Woolf is a former student of the Johannesburg School of Art. Her Masters degree from the Johannesburg Technikon featured her five storey high aluminium mobile installation for Absa Bank, in collaboration with two architects. Through her art she now explores the previously undefined language of gestures deployed by millions of commuters in Gauteng and the other major centres in this country.
Her paintings of the taxi hand sign are schematic – in colours other than the skin tones of the peoples of our country, for the hands are non-discriminatory and gloved. This led to her production of a taxi hand sign booklet, complete hand signs, destinations and with maps of taxi routes.
Woolf has also designed simple tactile shapes that combine and code for all the taxi hand signs for blind people. It precedes the pocket-size booklet for sighted people as part of the thesis’s practical outreach that builds towards a shared social community endeavour. Shape recognition is often taught to visually impaired learners and, in a way, stands as a precursor to Braille learning. An educational component of workshops will correspond with the SA Post Office launch of the taxi hand signs for sighted and blind people on the SA National commemorative stamp for 2010. It includes ten stamps and two first day covers.
The taxi hand signs are incorporated in Mercia Strieman’s On the Ball – Getting to know you, an information book and guide for tourists to the various centres where the 2010 World Cup matches will be held.
Woolf’s art took on social connotations in the 1980s when she was invited to the Carter Presidential Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, and undertook a project designed to draw attention to the hostel crises of that decade. Together with Lesley Price and Steven Sack, she brought an exhibition “South African Art to Atlanta: Common and Uncommon Ground” to the 1996 Cultural Olympiad and Atlanta Olympic games.
For eleven years, her art studio was in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, on the top floor of a warehouse. Her route home every afternoon was along Louis Botha Avenue, and the idea for her taxi arts project was born when she saw taxi commuters using their hands to signal the many taxis plying the route.
In her “Taxi Hand Signs in Social Spaces”, Woolf expands as follows on she calls “a discourse analysis of taxi hand signs in Gauteng between language and aesthetics”:
Millions of commuters all over South Africa use taxi hand signs as a way of indicating their intended destination to the over 15 000 taxi drivers in the country. Over the past thirty years, until 2009, there has been a decline of the public bus services resulting in the private but organised taxi transport sector taking over many routes within Gauteng.
You have to have your wits about you to drive on Louis Botha Avenue, as hundreds of minibus taxis driving north and south weave in and out of traffic at will, hooting in perpetual ‘beeps’ to attract the commuters’ attention. Taxi drivers stop any place on the road, double-park, ignore no-go areas and yellow lines or block the flow of traffic for as long as it takes to pick up passengers along the way.
I became increasingly aware of the many people gesturing to the taxi drivers with different hand signs, not only on Louis Botha Avenue, but all over the city. I was fascinated, curious and frankly in awe that such an obviously successful, intrinsically South African form of interaction existed. I wondered how many signs there were, and when and by whom these signs were learned and communicated. Had the destinations and hand signs been documented? Why was this silent taxi sign language adopted yet taken for granted by so many different travellers? Are these taxi hand signs a curiosity for people who have their own means of transport? Do motorists even notice others signalling?
Woolf pondered on whether taxi hand signs constituted a language and how this form of communication compared to other established gestural languages, like sign language. She wondered if blind people took taxis and knew that commuters were using hand signals to alert taxi drivers:
I thought it would be a fascinating investigation for a social arts project and began to record on paper some of the hand signs I was seeing. My art has always had a social aspect to it, and as usual I started my research hardly knowing where to begin or where it would lead. My first objective was to determine and document all the taxi hand signs and their associated destinations, while the more interesting aspects of the phenomenon of taxi hand signs would be gleaned through a broader and deeper research strategy.
There appeared to be parallels in the research and social, community-based art investigation and aspects of anthropological exploration. Anthropological methodology and transcription would provide a solid, more accurate base through the research methodology. The gestalt from the experiences and knowledge gained in the field would augment the findings of the taxi hand signs as a specific South African phenomenon and allow for a more broadly communicative outcome in further encouraging an understanding between different sectors of the community.
Thus Woolf’s approach to Professor Carel Nel, of the University of the Witwatersrand, led to her starting the first cross-disciplinary arts and anthropology doctoral thesis at Wits. The thesis investigates taxi hand signs and corresponding destinations through dialogical social interventionist art and engaging sampling and semi-structured investigative methods of anthropology.
Her book for SA Libraries, published in 2007, will be updated each year as the thesis research progresses. She has designed a system of shapes to code for all the taxi hand signs. The “Taxi Hand Signs Book for the Blind” was launched on 30 September, 2009, at the exhibition l’Afrique at Museum Africa [see Lana Jacobson’s article ‘l’Afrique: A Tribute to Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel’ in the Pesach 2009 issue of Jewish Affairs – Ed.]. A pocket-size booklet for sighted people was completed and launched in January 2010.
The objectives of Woolf’s thesis are inter alia:
- To identify taxi hand signs in Gauteng and the destinations they indicate.
- Define and specify how taxi hand signs are visible in the city as a silent gestural language, one that communicates in a way that has become a distinctive visual logo for Gauteng.
- Design symbols that code for all the taxi hand signs for blind people.
- Compare taxi hand signs to other gestural
hand sign languages and provide a parallel between specific corresponding deaf language signs.
- Make explicit taxi hand sign origins, meanings and/or connections geographically, historically, politically or culturally within the context of the community of South Africa and particularly that of Gauteng.
- Use the anthropological field methods of participant-observation, sampling and semi-structured interviews.
- As a social interventionist arts endeavour, to create a performative space in which the community (taxi drivers and commuters) can engage in conversations around the history, significations and social implications of taxi hand signs. This will be incorporated in a documentary arts film along with the data collected from the overall research. The conceptual framework for the film is still being developed.
According to Woolf, scholars and researchers have recently written on the undeniable link between contemporary art and anthropology, particularly in the area of research methods:
Literature on contemporary art and anthropology in this review aims to support a personal research objective: to illustrate the successful integration of anthropological methodology with my own investigative arts project on taxi hand signs and their corresponding routes. Schneider and Wright propose that “anthropologists are increasingly wary of the assumption that text and language are the only paradigms for understanding and explanation” (Schneider and Wright 2008:8), and suggest that there are other ways by which meaning can be revealed apart from exclusively translating and decoding texts (Schneider and Wright 2006:8). I propose that, through collaboration with other disciplines in the sciences and the arts appropriate to the project at hand, such endeavours may reach a far wider audience and be more holistic and accurate.
Anthropology requires that the observer also be a participant in the field. Social interventionist art requires a similar commitment as the artist engages with the community through enquiry, creative and interactive input and communication critically – also through actual art outputs such as artworks or film. Theory found in Schneider and Wright’s Contemporary Art and Anthropology provides the intellectual context I am looking for in order to position my thesis relative to the context of anthropology and art. They propose that while anthropologists study other cultures, artists have been understood to be adding something to their own culture (2006:24). An arts intervention in uncharted territory such as taxi hand signs incorporates aspects of anthropology in the research methodology and is a study of a ‘melting pot’ of a variety of cultures. At the same time, it adds to a further understanding between diverse cultures in the context of South African society.
Woolf feels her study will reveal the way in which artists have understood, communicated and contributed to society by unusual or alternative methods of engagement and communication.
Details of the final arts/anthropological portfolio will emerge, she believes, as the research, artworks and documentary film develop. Furthermore, the documentary film, portfolio of images and transcriptions from the research processes, and interactions and conversations within the community would “collectively contribute to a complete arts portfolio.”
Woolf argues that the taxi hand gestures are in themselves a kind of movement and performance which codes and denotes the city. Her thesis attempts to identify and delineate how these signs make the city legible. In constituting a language that communicates, they have become a visual logo for Gauteng. It is important to note that she addresses cultural and language barriers as the communities’ shared stories and collective voices will be heard and transcribed. English is often not a respondent’s first language, she says:
Addressing the topic of taxi hand signs is timeous because they are continuously evolving. Despite controversies raging at present over taxis and the new rapid bus transport system, it is expected and planned that taxis will be one of the main forms of transport to the FIFA World Cup soccer games in 2010. However, my aim is that the artworks, transcription in the thesis, books and film that document taxi hand signs, be recorded historically over time. This must be communicated to the general public as a celebration of and insight into an innovative, practical creative travel language invented by the taxi commuting public in South Africa.
Journalist and international correspondent Suzanne Belling is a former Editor of the SA Jewish Times, Johannesburg Jewish Voice, SA Jewish Report and other publications. She is a Board member of Jewish Affairs and past Executive Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.
