South Africans and Bicycles

In this week's Mail & Guardian John Matshikiza laments the state of public transportation in South Africa. In so doing he also raises a question I have asked often: Whither the bicycle in the Rainbow Nation?
Matshikiza does not really answer the question to anyone's satisfaction (including, presumably, his own) but here is a start:

[. . .] The fact is, when you come to think about it, the only time you see somone on a bike in South Africa is on Sundays, when you have to avoid all those well-toned whities -- helmets on their heads and brightly coloured lycra shorts clinging to their hairy thighs -- preparing for the 94.7 Cycle Challenge or the Cape Argus Cycle Tour, or possibly just getting into shape for the next ethnic war that certain senior politicians have been predicting in recent days. The population as a whole generally regards the bicycle as a shameful and demeaning object of loathing and degradation.

This is something that I have been curious about for a long while. In other African countries the cheap and practical bicycle creaks about everywhere, in town and countryside equally. Husbands ferry wives and children on crossbars and on the buttock-flaying carriers at the back. Farmers ride down rutted tracks with the week’s produce swaying dangerously behind them, and market traders vie with each other as they weave in and out of motorised traffic, their wares on their heads, strapped to the sides or tied anywhere else to the two-wheeled, muscle-powered machine that inventiveness permits people in the struggle to get around and earn a living.

South Africans generally wouldn’t be seen dead on a bicycle. It’s just not the done thing. Rather risk life and limb in a rudely crammed combi than let the neighbours see you with your skirt tucked into your underpants, pedalling off to town. A bicycle would make you look like any other old African moegoe.

I remember in 1997 travelling all across South Africa with my dear friend David and asking why someone had not really worked to get bicycles to people in both townships and rural areas, and Dave's response was simply that Africans look at the bicycle as being a bit degrading, and indeed maybe men even saw them as effeminate. But this answer, like Matshikiza's, is unsatisfying. If someone brought them, would Africans ride? It's an important question the answers to which could have far-reaching social implications.