the 12th unofficial official language

There are 11 official languages in South Africa. English, Afrikaans, Ndebele, Sepedi, Xhosa, Venda, Tswana, Southern Sotho, Zulu, Swazi and Tsonga.

And then there is another unofficial language, taxi hand signs. It is a rich and complex but silent language and it is the primary way taxi drivers communicate every day with the transporting public. The upraised index finger, indicating you are headed to town and the hand turned palm-side up, the fingers grasping an invisible fruit to signify your destination is Orange Farm (a township south of Joburg), are read by minibus taxi drivers all the time and are the framework for a complex system of transport routes. Developed from necessity, and with ingenuity, this silent exchange of signs is the fundamental unit of communication for millions of minibus taxi commuters.

And it is the subject of a fascinating exhibit we saw recently at Wits Art Museum. Artist Susan Wolff is an artist-turned-cultural anthropologist who did extensive research to learn the language and create a visual dictionary for it. Her exhibition, Taxi hand signs: symbolic landscapes of public culture, is the culmination of nine years of research and artistic production around what has been called South Africa’s “twelfth official language”. In that time she has documented and deciphered Gauteng’s taxi hand signs and created a remarkable lexicon for blind people to comfortably use this mode of transport as easily as the seeing public.

Taxi hand signs are a shared language, learned by imitation and word of mouth. They are basic gestures tied to narrative threads that swirl through community life connecting today with history and folklore. Of course not everyone using them knows what they signify apart from a place name. To understand their meaning Woolf conducted interviews with taxi bosses, drivers and commuters. Woolf, a working artist, used her research on the taxi hand signs to complete her doctorate from Wits University. Because of the social nature of the work it spanned beyond the Fine Arts department. She pursued a cross-disciplinary PhD combining the study of Sociology with Fine Arts.

After seeing the exhibit I realized something about it looked hauntingly familiar. I did a little research of my own and found that I had seen Susan's work before in New York. Her drawings of the taxi hand signs were part of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011 named Talk To Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects. I saw that exhibit. Maybe that's why it spoke to me.