Taxi Wars

By Bhuti Mopai

Taxi Wars: Book Description

In 1992, a nine-year-old boy learned to name guns by their sound.

That was a 9mm. That was a flywheel. That was a pump-gun.

Bhuti Mopai's family had always been on the road. From Witbank to Siyabuswa, from Gembokspruit to Middelburg to the shanty town of Crossroads, they moved whenever home stopped being safe. Then came Lebowa, and a house on the main road, right where two taxi associations were fighting over turf.

Every morning before school, the children would sus things out, listening to the silence, then run across the road and keep running until they were far enough away to dodge a stray bullet. Every evening the news arrived the old way, from mouth to mouth. So-and-so has been killed. So-and-so has been shot.

Taxi Wars is a story of violence, and also of memory. It follows the three months that taught one child how to read danger, and the promise he made himself years later: this story would be told, in a film and in a book.

Written by storygrapher Bhuti Peter Mopai, author of What We Lost in the Fire, Taxi Wars is a memory-driven story about the taxi industry's deadliest years, told from where it hurt most: the kitchen table, the school road, and the houses the bullets passed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HP3HVWX7
• ISBN13: 9798237669428
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Bhuti Mopai
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"