MOVING SECRETS

Tiara Walters’ Uber routes are lined with intimate confessions

CAPE Town’s Uber drivers will apparently tell me anything. I sit in the back seat so the confessor does not have to look at me, which makes for better stories. It’s like a motorised confessional booth.

During a Sunday morning drive, Alphonse from Grassy Park reveals his predilection for white women, bashfully volunteers a picture of his son, aged six. Does he have others? He laughs shyly.

“You don’t want to know,” he ventures. I push him. “Okay, I have five kids by four women. Ek was ’n gruwelike mens [I was a gruesome person].” He is 31.

En route from Rondebosch, driver Peter tells me he was conscripted into a “liberation” army as a child soldier and rose through the ranks . Along De Waal Drive, he bemoans the fallen honour of his homeland’s president. “Nice guy. Power corrupted him. He had an enemy or two assassinated in Joburg.” “You know this how?” “I was his bodyguard.” “Oh.” He left “the industry” for a normal life. But life as an Uber driver isn’t normal.

“So this lady of the manor summons me to her Bishopscourt estate,” another driver recalls. When he arrives, she clicks open the cab door — but doesn’t get in.

“Next thing, a couple of poodles, Jack Russells and a dog as big as a donkey fly into the back seat,” he says. The donkey glues himself to the passenger seat. The itinerary for the afternoon? Taking his five hirsute charges on a sweeping joy ride of the peninsula: Chapman’s Peak Drive, Simon’s Town, Cape Point.

When he finds Chapman’s Peak closed, he reckons he’ll take a break. Lie low a bit amid the warm fug of dog breath. Except her gimlet-eyed ladyship has been following his every move by satellite. He gets a call about why he is chilling out in the Hout Bay burbs.

The beasts were deposited back home after a three-hour tour. “She gave me a R500 tip. I used R200 to clean the back seat.”

Sometimes I ply quiet drivers with confessions of my own. It’s a reciprocal tender of trust. One day I break an unco-operative silence by declaring my day “sucked”. My 75year-old mother had spent the afternoon trying to throw herself out of her hospital window while I was on deadline; a flying scorpion cockroach crowned it all by careening into my flat.

By now the driver is admitting to several phobias, like an inability to sleep with the bedroom door ajar for fear of phantoms.

More than 200 drivers, many from up north, have transported me across the city this year. I seldom get the same one twice. It’s lamentable; the story hunter in me wants to fill in the missing biographical details.

One driver wields a chain of Swahili names meaning “The Light!”, “The Bomb!”, “The Prophet!” and “No Fighting!”. Another introduces himself as Nick. When he came here he had to complete a Home Affairs form that required him to fill in his “nickname”. “My English wasn’t so good. I thought I had to write ‘Nick’.”

A Malawian prince escorts me to Green Point. A Rwandan genocide survivor ferries me from the foreshore to the Gardens. He can’t forget the images, he says.

Driver of the Year goes to a dyedin-the-wool Capetonian who launches into a tirade about the city’s shoddy motorists. To commiserate, I theorise a link between evolutionary psychology and the national driving culture: most Homo sapiens males devolve when they slide behind the wheel.

He finds this so funny he starts wheezing like a three-pack-a-day smoker and swerves across the pavement next to a reservoir. “I can’t see! I can’t see!” is all he can offer.

When I make it home alive, he gets a five-star rating. Not because he nearly drowned us, but because he let me peek through the confessional’s latticework.

Stumbling upon authenticity in a transitory encounter between sober strangers is a rare privilege. LS