Security for your car, but none for the guard

“You take it,” William Witbooi tells his estranged wife Maria, when a woman holds out R10 in a parking lot in Kalk Bay, Cape Town. His cloudy eyes are alert and gold-tipped teeth gleam when he smiles, which he does often on this sunny day when the tips flow.

Witbooi shares his prime spot with the mother of his two surviving children. “Last Sunday I was soaking wet, standing here in the rain, and he rode here on a bicycle and said, ‘Please leave work now.’ He was worried about me,” says 60-year-old Maria, as they bounce a pack of cheap Shasha cigarettes between them.

Now a pensioner, he has paced this parking lot across from the harbour for more than three decades. “Before I worked for the municipality for 18 years, doing jobs like cutting grass but I was retrenched,” he says.

Most days Witbooi hops on a taxi for the 10km ride from the crime hotspot Lavender Hill, where he pays rent of R800 a month, to the tourist area, where he earns enough to get by — except during the pandemic.

“Car guards felt the shock harder, like everybody in the informal economy,” says professor Derick Blaauw, from North West University's school of economic sciences.

Blaauw and fellow academics have interviewed car guards in Durban, Potchefstroom, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg's West Rand over the past two decades, releasing their latest research on “car guarding as a livelihood” midway through the pandemic.

People are tired of people asking for money at every street corner, car guarding is taking a bit of a nose dive
— Durban carguard

Witbooi says he had two Covid vaccinations and did not get sick, but still suffered as Covid waves peaked and ebbed in Cape Town. “We had nothing at home to eat and no money. People from England were scared to come here.”

Kalk Bay businesses rallied to help car guards with donations, says Britta Garthoff, manager of the Kalk Bay Quarter emporium. “We have two car guards on our block and have a good relationship with them. They are always the same, and very friendly.”

Maria Witbooi’s part-time job as a domestic worker was her lifeline during the pandemic. “I love my domestic work and earn more in it,” says the cheerful grandmother of three.

Surfers in Cape Town (pictured) and Durban give carguards their keys for safekeeping and trusting relationships have developed over decades. (Connor Berning)

The real income of car guards has been dropping since 2015 and only a fraction of them earned more than the minimum wage of R20 an hour by 2019, says Blaauw.

Diminishing opportunities threaten their future as parking lots are boomed off, video cameras installed and ticketing machines control access.

One Durban car guard, who has been working on the beachfront for 26 years, told researchers: “People are tired of people asking for money at every street corner, car guarding is taking a bit of a nosedive, we earn less now.”

In spite of this, Maria enjoys her shifts as a car guard. William says: “When I’m off duty, I try to fish in the harbour or buy fish. I like to make samp and beans.”

Even at Palmyra Junction, a busy shopping centre in Cape Town, the potential earnings seem slim. Most motorists greet the guards but do not tip, says a veteran, originally from Rwanda. He prefers, like several car guards interviewed across the city, not to be named.

The driver of a silver Freelander follows his signals and reverses out of a parking bay. He leaves, no tip. A red Mini departs, no tip. A white Chevy bakkie, no tip. A white Honda CRV, no tip. A white Haval slows down and the bearded driver hands the car guard R2.

Varsity College management lecturer John Foster, who wrote a PhD dissertation on car guards, says: “Most people are not eager to pay car guards and some people get aggressive, asking why they must pay foreign migrants.”

One such migrant, Jacques*, a car guard from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who works in the surfing mecca of Muizenberg, says: “At this moment it is very bad with [Operation] Dudula.”

Carguards come from all walks of life. They are black and white, and people who have fallen on hard times. Many of the migrants have tertiary qualifications but cannot find work

In the cities, most car guards are men and often they are migrants from elsewhere in Africa, researchers have found. Women tend to be excluded from these lucrative car-guard patches, and are more active in smaller urban centres and the platteland.

Foster interviewed 75 car guards in Durban, building on research done by his doctoral supervisors — professor Mihalis Chasomeris from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Blaauw — whose co-researchers have interviewed 250 car guards around SA.

He says: “Car guards come from all walks of life. They are black and white, and people who have fallen on hard times. Many of the migrants have tertiary qualifications but cannot find work.”

Charmaine Visser, 50, is among the women who do have a turf in Cape Town, a busy street in Newlands, where she sometimes also sleeps at night. “There are lots of tsotsis but I feel safe because of God, and people look after me,” says Visser, who shares her tips with her sister.

“I made a garden with yellow flowers and butterflies came, in the middle of a parking lot at the swimming pool where I worked for 12 years, but security chased us away,” she says.

Chasomeris says: “Two white women have worked at one hospital in Durban for more than 20 years and 10 years, respectively. Over decades they have built up strong relationships and people are grateful for their services.”

A 2009 study on tipping found drivers are motivated by the desire “to reward good quality service, to help the service worker, and to gain social approval/status”.

William Witbooi shares some of his car guarding shifts with his estranged wife Maria, at Kalk Bay, Cape Town (Ruvan Boshoff)

Car guards are a distinct group of informal workers, not to be confused with the men who don neon bibs to masquerade in the role.

The pretenders tend to beg, harass and intimidate motorists, provoking an antagonistic reaction, to the detriment of legitimate car guards who are committed to protecting cars and motorists.

One Durban car guard told researchers: “We are often threatened by beggars, we chase them away and they threaten me that they ‘wait for you tonight’. [I was] told I have a hit on my life for R50.”

From the car guards’ perspective, drivers usually slot into broad categories: their supporters, the shallow-pocketed sympathisers, the harried, the unseeing and the abusers.

We are often threatened by beggars, we chase them away and they threaten us.
— Beach car guard

Car guards build relationships with motorists who regularly park on their turf and give them tips, food or soft drinks. Along popular beaches, they forge trusting bonds lasting decades, for example, with surfers handing over car keys for safekeeping.

The sympathisers acknowledge car guards but are less predictable tippers. When people are rushing, they tend to fall into the harried group, unwilling to engage.

But the drivers who treat car guards as fixtures, either ignoring or abusing them, cause them the most stress. Two out of five car guards ranked their wellbeing at one or two on a scale of 10, in a study conducted on the West Rand.

“They are taking strain. Some drivers find them irritating and a lot of people are unkind to them. They are vulnerable to whatever tip they get,” says this study’s co-author, Marinda Pretorius, an economics lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.

Joseph Mafu is a carguard in Gardens, who relies on his tips to eat. (Ruvan Boshoff)

Most car guards work six or seven days a week and up to nine hours a day. They’re on their feet all day, exposed to verbal or physical abuse, and home is a shelter or informal settlement. They rely on state clinics for health care.

Hilton Benzance, 39, who sleeps in a tent in a park, holds out a red, swollen hand and points to the bites that he says were inflicted by mites that live in the dirt around him. “I am surrounded by dust,” he says.

Nearly 10 years ago, he came to work as a car guard in the CBD to escape gang violence in Mitchells Plain. A bullet wound scar on his ankle reminds him why he left.

Further up Kloof Road, grey-bearded Joseph Mafu slowly patrols past “his block” of cars, waiting for his next tip. More often than not people give him R5 or R10, he says.

The paltry, unpredictable income is a stress car guards feel in their bones. They have families who depend on them and the migrants and refugees among them wake up every day to an increasingly hostile land.

“I am 30 and I have nothing,” one car guard on the West Rand told researchers.

Car guarding sprang up in SA in 1990s because of ubiquitous crime, not from an economic rationale, says Blaauw. “They discourage crime by being there.”

According to urban legend, the practice started when some Gauteng holidaymakers in Durban asked a vagrant on the beachfront to watch their vehicle for a tip. Foster says: “Now it is also starting in Mozambique and some African countries, and in Brazil.”

Some car guards put themselves in the firing line trying to protect vehicles. “I was threatened with guns when [some men] stole a car,” says one car guard from Kalk Bay. He reported the theft immediately to armed security.

Foster says: “These men show exceptional bravery when the tip might be as low was R2. One guy I interviewed … said he wishes he could learn to duck bullets.”

Jacques, who says he once worked as an interpreter and has a business diploma, is among those with the confidence to leap into action when they sense trouble.

“Three years ago, people from Germany were followed by criminals from the airport all the way to the beach,” he says. When they tried to steal the car with its suitcases, Jacques says he gave chase, screaming, “until these skollies jumped out” of the vehicle and fled with whatever they could carry.

“There are plenty of criminals here. I will look at one and he will realise I am watching,” he says.

The Private Security Industry Regulatory Association has been trying to enforce a minimum-security training course for car guards which, says Blaauw, “they simply can’t afford”.

To sidestep the training requirement, car guard agents are rebranding the guards as “trolley or customer assistants”.

Blaauw says these agents demand a daily fee from the car guards in return for a bib and/or a cap and allocating parking bays, but they usually take little or no responsibility for “their workers”.

These men show exceptional bravery when the tip might be as low was R2. One guy I interviewed … said he wishes he could learn to duck bullets

In the West Rand study, 80% of car guards paid a fee to an agent or a shopping centre for their bays, but sometimes did not make enough from tips to break even.

“Car guard agents are convenient for shopping centres — a nice way to keep car guards at arm’s length,” says Blaauw. The agents saw a gap in the market, he says, comparing them with exploitive labour brokers.

Car guards are adapting to the growing trend of a cashless society. Some carry swipe machines so motorists can still tip if they don’t have cash, or they have Snapscan QR codes, generated by the NGO Tip4Change.

Foster says South Africans need to appreciate the contribution car guards make to fighting crime. “This is just common decency, to be grateful for what we have and to help those we can.”

Jacques says people reveal their true character in the way they treat car guards. Pocketing one tattooed surfer's car keys, he says: “When they see you have nothing, they do not hide who they are. They treat you as they like and show their true selves.”

* Not his real name

CHARITY VS SURVIVAL

“In my view, car guards do informal work which is borderline similar to begging. It’s different in that there often is genuinely a service being performed, but it’s desperate work and it is like begging in that whether they get paid, and how much they get paid, is entirely discretionary. Being able to get the basic income you need to survive should not be dependent on other people’s discretionary giving — getting what you need to survive should be a matter of justice, not charity.”

Lucy Allais, professor of philosophy at Wits University and Johns Hopkins University, US