David Goldblatt

For the white South Africans of Some Afrikaners Photographed and In Boksburg, home was close to work, and if it was not, various modes of transportation allowed fairly easy travel to and fro. Black South Africans, meanwhile, were often forced to face enormous distances between home and work. This barrier to travel played itself out at its most extreme in the daily journeys of black workers between their unchosen homes in the semi-independent homeland of KwaNdebele and their places of work in the white metropolitan city of Pretoria. The distances between the homelands and the commercial centres necessitated the establishment of expensive subsidized bus and train services between ‘home’ and work. Goldblatt’s photographs, taken in 1983 and 1984 for the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, document the three-hour PUTCO (Public Utility Transport Company) bus journey between the Wolwekraal depot in KwaNdebele and the Marabastad terminus outside Pretoria. With the first bus leaving KwaNdebele just before 3am, one-way journeys could be as long as 160 kilometres and take over three hours to complete.