Living for Disco

There is yet another report of a fatal collision in the paper today. It seems as if there are accidents like this every day at the moment. They always read something like:

‘A young mother and her two children aged 2 months and 3 years were killed today in a collision in Ongwediva. The accident occurred when a Toyota Tazz and a bakkie collided at traffic lights/an intersection/on a blind bend”.

It constantly amazes, and terrifies me the extent to which you take your life in your hands every time you drive on Namibia’s roads. I know the suicide rate here is high, but really, there are less selfish ways to end it all than overtaking before the brow of a hill and taking a bus full of priests and schoolkids with you on an extended vacation into oblivion, via the fiery path of vehicular immolation. Perhaps these fuckwits like idea of having company on their final journey.

People here either drive recklessly fast, or as if they have had their brains removed and replaced with little tiny pieces of biltong. They hare up behind you at a gazillion miles an hour, wait until you start to wonder if they’ve somehow become entangled in your back bumper, and then they veer off towards the oncoming traffic with a look of steely determination on their faces. At least, I used to think it was steely determination. Now I just think that they paint eyes on their lids and have a quick snooze when the endless driving all gets too dreary.

When I was driving around the country with Dan, the first day we departed from Windhoek I nearly got driven off the road by a combi* full of passengers coming round a corner doing 160km per hour on the wrong side of the road.

Combis terrify me. I got in one to go to Swakopmund at Christmas and ended up actually praying for my life. And I don’t believe in God. The only other time I’ve ever done that was when I found myself in the middle of a ferocious electric storm, while sharing a small plane from Trinidad to Tobago with 21 teary Irish travel agents. Every time lightning zigged outside the window the girl next to me wailed ‘Mother of God, we’re all going to die’, while I sat with my head between my knees, dribbling with terror, and muttering ‘please god, if we get back in one piece, I’ll become a rampaging evangelist’. Another promise broken. I’m going to hell. No doubt about it.

Anyway, the combi ride was on a par. We whizzed around one corner, the sides of our faces squashed attractively against the windows by centrifugal force, and lo and behold, a combi lay belly up by the side of the road, little wheels spinning. Bodies flung from inside lay covered in blankets as groups of people stood around helplessly waiting for the ambulances to arrive. There’s no such thing as rubbernecking in Namibia. People just pull over, and wander around, poking at the corpses with their feet and snacking.

People are also allowed to drive cars that are in an advanced state of decreptitude. One of my friends was telling me that the front of his car, which is a bit crumpled, came under police inspection when he was up north a while ago. The policewoman leaned down, and squinted at the front of the car in dismay, and then called over a colleague. He had visions of having to pay a small fortune to make the thing roadworthy again. Instead, after a bit of poking, they extracted a dead bird from the grille, and waved him on his way.

I don’t have a car in Namibia, which is fine. I can’t afford one because for some reason they keep their value, and nothing sells for less than a couple of thousand pounds unless it has no wheels, or half an engine or something. However, my bloke does have one, and he has to drive around in it a lot. He’s a great driver, but plenty of people on the road do drive as if they think they’re behind the wheel of a bag of cotton wool with a built-in 007 turbo booster, and it does worry me that in this place, you’re at the mercy of other people’s reckless idiocy.

*A minibus packed to the rafters with people, and then manned by a wannabe kamikaze fighter pilot with an incurable addiction to SMSing on the move.