Timbuktu in the Valley was started in 2018 as an informal bicycle kitchen which has since grown into a proper workshop run by the youth together with a professional mechanic.
The youth cycling team Team T was founded in 2022 by Tshepo Molemane, who left us way too early when he was killed on his bicycle in April of the same year.
Tshepo inspired, as the best wheel builder in town, as a friend to the team and father to the boys, and as a dedicated and great cyclist, and former Soweto champion.
Tshepo’s friend and colleague Prosper Anderson Mlilo has since come in in to hold space for the cycling program, making sure our friend's dream lives on.
Team Tshepo
We believe in the power of cycling as a tool for liberation and enabling young people to have agency as they grow up.
Our program has expanded from the core team to making sure every child who comes to the learning space knows how to ride a bicycle, even the smallest.
Our weekly learn-to-ride sessions are facillitated by the young cyclists together with Prosper. Our aim is to have 100% mobility rate at Timbuktu in the Valley.
Through cycling, our young riders have already managed to break through the invisible boundaries of the poverty-stricken neighbourhood they grow up in. Through weekly rides, we have explored the entire city of Johannesburg. Bicycles have taken us to the airport, the cradle of human kind, Soweto, Alberton, Vereeinigung, Sandton, Modderfontein, and other places.