Freewheeling spirits
Pedal power in the townships
Growing up in the township of Thabong, outside Welkom, where there were only bumpy sand roads, I didn’t own a bicycle. Instead, we played with skipping ropes and devised games with things like old pantihose, which we filled with stones. Ninety-year-old Puleng Solomon Masemene remembers the days when a black person on a bike raised the suspicion of the cops. “Owning a bicycle back then, I used to get stopped by apartheid police and asked if I was the rightful owner of the bike.”
A jumble of small businesses line Dr Immink Drive, which runs through Diepkloof Zone 5 and is one of the longest roads in Soweto. Masemene’s bicycle shop stands out among the eclectic fish and chip joints and the mechanics’ and barbers’ shops.
He started his business at the back of his home, way back in 1944. “I started buying parts little by little and fixing my own bike.” Dressed in a blue overall and black apron, Masemene starts his day at 7am in the back room of his house and ends only at 6pm.
A stroke in 1991 left his right arm permanently disabled, but this doesn’t stop him from doing his work. He smiles as he wields a tool in his working hand as he repairs the bicycle frame resting on his lap. “I wouldn’t let anything stop me from doing what I love,” he says.
“My best customers are the kids; they keep me going.”
His grandchildren have opened another bicycle repair shop a block away. There, Grade 9 pupil Katlego Zini spends his spare time fixing
bikes. He confesses that it keeps him from running around and getting up to no good.
Masemene’s grandson, Tshepo Mohlapeng, says he decided to give Katlego an apprenticeship after the youngster had been caught red-handed modifying a bicycle stolen from his niece.
“His uncle asked us to take him in and mentor him to get him on the right track.” After his mother gave him a bike when he was nine, Katlego started fixing his friends’ bicycles.
“But I also started helping thugs strip down stolen bicycles and make them look different. You just need the frame and you can turn it into a new bike.”
Mohlapeng says: “Cycling teaches a way of life. That there’s a straight path which is steep and the rides can be long, but you don’t give up until the finish line.”
Down the road, a woman wearing a blue coat is pushing a blue and white bicycle. Angie Molapo is taking her bike for repair at Masemene’s shop before making her way to church.
The fit 61-year-old runs an NGO called Angie Community Projects and teaches elderly and disabled people how to exercise.
“I’ve been riding a bike since I was little in Witbank. I used to ride my uncle’s bicycle. That’s all I did growing up.”
She says she’s noticed more kids and adults on bikes in the area.
Bernard Mokgatla goes to church every day on his bicycle. At 89, Mokgatla, a pastor in the Zion Christian Church, says he is as supple as he was when he took his first ride.
“I don’t do any kind of exercising besides cycling to get around,” says Mokgatla, who moved to Diepkloof from Ventersdorp in 1971.
“As a young boy, I was given mine to run errands for everyone at home.
“When I was sent to town, I would be stopped by the police and asked what I was carrying in the plastic bags. They never finished harassing you without ending with the word ‘k **** r’.
“You’d swear a black man was not supposed to ride anything.”