/ 12 March 2010

Pot luck on Zim’s roads

Pot Luck On Zim's Roads

A Bulawayo child once swallowed a marula fruit and the kernel stuck in her throat.

As the desperate parents were ferrying her to hospital, their car hit a huge pothole, making the child hit the roof of the car and spit out the kernel. So the child was saved by Bulawayo’s potholes.

At least, that’s what my city’s mayor, Thaba Moyo, concluded when he related the story during an official initiative to spruce up the place. We all laughed.

But it made me reflect that in Bulawayo, in Zimbabwe and generally in Africa the state of the roads provides the best barometer of state affairs.

Forget the predictions of economists and the rhetoric of politicians: if you want to know about a country’s rate of inflation, level of corruption or economic growth, just look at the roads.

Bulawayo’s roads were made in style and paved with passion. They were famed for being some of the widest on the continent to facilitate the turning of teams of oxen. And on a busy day in modern times, you’d never jaywalk unless you had a death wish.

The street names have a colonial elegance and ambience. Take the former Selbourne Avenue, a massive runway of a road stretching straight for some 5km.

It passes through some of the best sights in the city (or what used to be the best) — the centenary park, the natural history museum (that once had one of the world’s largest mounted elephants), the Bulawayo theatre and, of course, our architectural beauties, the city hall and the national gallery. This same road leads you to Gwanda, Beitbridge and into South Africa.

Then you change gear — from the precarious 40km/h you risked until then to well over 120km — if you have the kind of car and the fuel to burn to reach those speeds on South Africa’s freeways.

During my travels to Egoli, I heard of the ‘freeway” (or N1) and the six anaconda-like roads slithering out of the belly of gold-rich Gauteng. And I have watched with awe signs of what makes South Africa tick. For sho.

I have seen more than David Livingstone did when he first saw the mighty Mosi-O-Tunya (Victoria Falls). I see a lot of creative marketing on the roads of South Africa, especially at traffic lights — young men with faces and upper bodies painted in white, desperately failing to clown.

Then you have the marketers who will get impulsive buyers to part with their rands for trinkets, caps, motor stickers, posters, soft cuddly monkey toys, fake sunglasses — the list is as long in the peak-hour jam. Such highways to heaven are alive and kicking.

Take, for instance, the Francistown-to-Gaborone road in Botswana. There’s nothing particularly fancy about it, but its expansiveness, especially the double lane closer to Gabs, is a marvel and the biggest advert for Botswana’s diamond wealth.

In Malawi, by contrast, I was warned that I should never travel late at night: some of the major roads are killing fields because of the single-or zero-headlighted trucks using the cover of night to travel and make money.

And in Kenya, watch out for the matatu (minibus) drivers — they stop anywhere, anytime and anyhow, just like their blood brothers who drive the kombi ’emergency taxis” in downtown Bulawayo.

With the start of the rainy season, many will drive into potholes; and if you dare complain, they will tell you to walk next time.

Drive from Lusaka to Zimbabwe and the hues of difference tell their own tale. Downtown Lusaka is clean and welcoming — its roads, such as the Great East, are maintained and repaired. Is it the copper boom?

But your confidence wanes as Lusaka recedes in your rearview mirror and the Chirundu road stretches on the Zimbabwean side while snaking past hills and breathtaking mountain views. It’s littered with potholes and invitations to less sober drivers to park their cars down a ravine.

A crass old joke was that if you were driving in Zambia at night you had to be extra cautious when you saw two bright eyes in the middle of the road because they belonged to a giraffe in a pothole.

Well, that joke has driven a few kilometres across the Zambia border to Zim. Why waste your money going to Tanzania to see the Ngorongoro crater when you can see a better crater in downtown Bulawayo for free any day?

Busani Bafana is a journalist who lives in Bulawayo