Horace and Jessica's marriage has settled into stagnation in the "wastefully wonderful white-washed world of the old South Africa". But, a series of unexpected events signals a swift reversal. On her way to fetch Horace from the airport, Jessica's car breaks down. She is "rescued" by Richard who in turn is hijacked at gunpoint and Jessica is thrown headlong into "the black experience" of Soweto. Her restricted perspective of South African life is about to change forever.
Van Rensburg explores communication problems within many spheres of South African society: between people of different race groups and especially within the urban rat-race of wealthy whites. He does not flinch from showing the class differences between people living in poverty in sectors of Soweto and the rich whites of the northern urban areas of Johannesburg.
Horace and Jessica's life is characterised by a lack of communication due to Horace's obsession with his work. As in the case of Die Vuurtoring, communication takes place within the restrictions of telephone answering machines and short telephone calls. Horace and his employer simply do not have the time for personal phone calls from their wives. Horace and Jessica's house looks like a fortress, with a sophisticated security system, a vicious dog and high security fences. The purpose is to keep the "enemy" out. In a very funny moment in the film, this security system literally backfires on Horace when he is attacked by his own dog and the security agency considers him to be a burglar.
When Horace arrives home after a business trip his world crumbles on finding a message from a black man on the answering machine, referring to Jessica as "Baby". He starts a long quest to find her. Suddenly his work loses its meaning. The quest resembles a similar process in Die Square, a comedy about a so-called pure Afrikaner, who loses his wife and sets out to look for her in the "strange" urban world of Hillbrow, in many ways alien to pure Afrikanerdom.
As in the case of Die Vuurtoring, the hero in Taxi to Soweto is confronted with his failed marriage by means of an audio-visual recording. Horace sees the break-up of his relationship with Jessica in the form of a television soapie. In a way this sequence becomes a critical comment on the portrayal of relationships in the Afrikaans film "soapies" of the local industry during the seventies.
The people who bring Jessica and Horace together again are, in fact, the "enemy" the blacks from Soweto. Jessica and Horace do get a new perspective on their lives and marriage, and on a changing South Africa. Unlike the pessimistic ending of Die Vuurtoring, their marriage is saved.
In Taxi to Soweto there are no outcasts, nor liberal whites who fight for the rights of blacks such as in A Dry White Season (1988), nor are there the ultra-right-wing Afrikaner stereotypes of Roodt's A Place of Weeping (1984). A human face, although critical, is given to both the activists and the rich whites.
The film was shot in Soweto and Johannesburg. Several languages have been used: Afrikaans, English and some indigenous black languages. This reflects the rich cultural diversity Van Rensburg is portraying. In many ways this is the first filmic presentation of the dawn of a post-apartheid South Africa." (Martion Botha, The Cinema of Manie van Rensburg: Popular Memories of Afrikanerdom, www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca)
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