Cycling activist aims to get more people riding
● Lebogang Mokwena sees cycling in black and white. When she’s at Thembelihle High School in Khayelitsha on Friday afternoons, helping to put kids on bikes to go to school and back, or teaching women to ride in Mowbray on Saturday mornings, cycling is black.
When she was a spanner’s throw from parliament, making her first address as Cape Town’s inaugural bicycle mayor on April 21, the audience was almost entirely white.
It’s part of Mokwena’s mission to join those dots. And a lot more besides. She hopes to turn what for some is a sport, for others transport, and for still others an expression of their hipsterism, into an integral part of what it means to live in a city that predates the car by more than 200 years but is dominated by the engine.
“I’ve had one white woman sign up for riding classes,” Mokwena says. “The rest are black and a few coloured and Indian. I don’t know if that’s linked to Cape Town and its geography, and how much harder it is to penetrate if you’re from the Flats.
“Beyond feeling black and white, it feels deeply gendered. Every time I’m cycling — just going to get milk — I’m more likely to see men riding about. Very rarely do I encounter women, and if I do they tend to be white. When I was training to do the 2017 [Cape Town Cycle Tour] it was interesting to see big pelotons of coloured men. Other than the white male community, that seems to be the next big, coordinated, organised cycling community in Cape Town.”
Mokwena, 34, is not an elected or appointed official but is part of the Bicycle Mayor Programme, an initiative run by the BYCS organisation, which has placed people in similar positions in nine other cities around the world, including Baroda in India and Beirut, Lebanon. Their task, according to the BYCS website, is to “work with citizens and city stakeholders to ensure all voices are responded to”.
Pushing pedals
Mokwena is realistic about the limits of geography. “The further out you live from where you’re likely to get a job or where you actually work, the less likely you are to even contemplate a bicycle as a means of transport.”
There is also the issue of social aspirations. “At the heart of society is upward mobility, which is linked to particular sets of material acquisitions. And the car is a big part of it — preferably German, preferably fast. Part of our challenge is changing the imagination of the average South African about what success looks like, and that success can look like a R500 secondhand bicycle that allows you to save your money and do different things with your financial resources as opposed to pumping them into a depreciating asset like a car.”
Mokwena sounds like a cycling lifer, but she learnt to ride in 2014 as a “broke student in New York”. She grew up bikeless in Sophiatown, where a generation earlier many people would travel to work by pedal power, and in Soweto, where she was, in her own words, “the fattest sedentary chatterbox”.
In 2016 she bought her bike — which she still rides — at a Brooklyn jumble sale for $65. It has taken her all around New York, Italy, and now Cape Town. It has paid for itself many times over.
“Every trip I’m not paying for an Uber or a taxi or a bus, it’s a saving that goes right back to the money I used to buy the bicycle. For the average South African household even R800 is a big ask, so part of our challenge is to think about how we enable more people to gain fairly cheap, subsidised access to a bicycle. That’s not easy but there’s lots of room for corporates to get involved and brandish their logos.”
Mokwena applauds projects to build proper cycle paths but says people shouldn’t wait until then to get on their bikes. “Infrastructure alone does not make people more respectful of cyclists.
“I cannot justify calling for cycle lanes when people don’t have water or a toilet or houses. As we meet some of these basic needs we can put more pressure on the city about cycling infrastructure.”
Serving as Cape Town’s bicycle mayor is only part of what Mokwena will be up to in the near future.
“I’m four months pregnant. I’m looking for a ‘baby on board’ sign, but I can’t think where I’ll put it.”