Meet Cape Town’s new bicycle mayor
Sindile Mavundla, a cycling enthusiast from Khayelitsha, has been appointed as the bicycle mayor of Cape Town.
The 33-year-old is the founder and managing director of Khaltsha Cycles bike shop, and he is on a mission to get people to use bicycles as an alternative mode of transport.
The Bicycle Mayor Network is an initiative by BYCS, an Amsterdam-based global NGO that believes bicycles can transform cities and, in turn, transform the world.
There are more than 100 bicycle mayors in more than 30 countries, according to BYCS’s website, and the mayors work with residents, activists, government and industry to promote cycling.
Mr Mavundla will hold his “bicycle chain of office” for the next two years, and one of his objectives is to help bike instructors to own bike shops.
“When I started the business, I saw that it was local plumbers and electricians riding bikes because they wanted to get to point B from point A. And I wanted to change that.
“In Khayelitsha five years or six years ago, there were no people that were cycling and now we have introduced that culture.”
He plans to push the City of Cape Town to include non-motorised transport on all new and revitalised roads.
“I want to embark on a campaign called bike to work and I want to encourage people to cycle to work. I will also use my time to advocate for the interests of cyclists.”
As his love for cycling grew over the years, he started teaching people about it and discovered that the bicycle was once a key mode of transport in the black community, but today in the townships the bicycle is trying to shrug off its reputation as poor man’s transport.
He says he started Khaltsha Cycles because he wanted to share his love of cycling with others.
In 2017, he started classes, teaching people how to ride a bike. Twenty-five women from Khayelitsha came to the first class and it grew from there.
He says he expected to see more men in the classes, but there hasn’t been one since he started them. He suspects men generally think - incorrectly - that they should automatically know how to ride a bike.
‘’My dad taught me how to ride a bicycle at the age of 3, and we were still living in Langa at the time. That was how the love of the bicycle was installed in me, and my father never knew that this would turn out to be like this. I then used a bicycle to commute to school. I then moved to racing.“
Mr Mavundla says his vision is to have at least five bicycle stores in Khayelitsha, hiring local people who have shares in the business.
But like hills on the road that a cyclist needs to climb, the bicycle business also has its challenges, and accessing funding and suppliers is proving to be one of them for Mr Mavundla, who says that as a young black man in what is still very much a white man’s industry, he has to slam brakes on assumptions about people in the township not having money.
He’s racked up a lot of debt by financing everything from his own pocket, he says, but he believes his investment and hard work will pay off over the next ten years.
