The highway that strikes due east from the commercial capital of Douala towards the administrative capital of Yaounde is smooth and reasonably well maintained, although its two lanes are barely sufficient for the heavy volume of traffic that it carries.
There are murmurs that the highway was originally funded (by one of those much-maligned international institutions like the World Bank) as a fully-fledged four-lane affair, a match for the logging trailers, buses and private vehicles that roar along it in both directions for seven days of the week. As with so
many other African development projects, half the resources apparently went into a variety of mouths well placed along the food chain of political power before the first bit of tar was laid, and so the country got only half a highway.
The remains of vehicles that have pranged themselves, or spectacularly pranged each other, lie littered along the sides of the highway, abandoned and gradually being devoured by the vivid tentacles of the forest. But you can’t blame all these accidents on the narrowness of the highway. Cameroonian road etiquette also plays a significant part.
In town or on the open road, a Cameroonian driver will go out of his way to leap out of an obscure side street without warning, straight into oncoming traffic. So accidents happen. It is only amazing that they do not happen more often, but that is due to the fact that everyone plays by the same rules: you leap out at me, I leap out at you. As long as you agree on the rules, everyone is happy.
The only ones who are not happy are the expatriates. They drive around, desperately gripping their steering wheels, teeth clenched, hoping for the best. You can feel their sense of Gallic bafflement that virtually everything they came and taught these people, the rules of the road that had been laid down at Versailles, are being ignored in such a cavalier fashion. But that’s post-colonial Africa for you.
In the towns, the presence of traffic policemen and women gives an illusion of order. These officers of the law are dressed in immaculate uniforms – pale blue shirts, dark blue trousers and outsize caps. They all wear shiny boots and the more fortunate among them (perhaps the ones who got to the quartermaster’s store before the last colonial quartermaster departed) wear shiny white patent leather spats, buttoned neatly to just above the ankle. The cops with the spats are usually wearing freshly whitewashed tropical pith helmets, too. The female traffic officers complete the effect with rouged cheeks, thickly etched eyebrows and wigs or elaborate weaves adorning their heads.
And yet, in spite of appearances, these officers can get quite tough. They don’t seem to have any interest in intervening in the leapfrogging circus of tightly packed cars as it circulates before them. But they will unexpectedly blow the whistle on anyone jumping a traffic light. And when there is that occasional but inevitable accident, they react with all the gravity implicit in the pompous power of their station. Everything around them comes to a standstill.
It usually happens when two vehicles have collided at an intersection. The traffic
officers will have been watching nonchalantly by the roadside as the accident that was waiting to happen happened. In town, because of the density of the traffic, there is seldom any danger that either vehicle will have been travelling at speed, so neither vehicle will be excessively damaged and there is seldom any injury. But it is never left to the two drivers to exchange addresses and insurance details, shake hands and go on their way.
As the drivers climb gingerly from their vehicles to inspect the damage, trying to avoid looking in the direction of the enforcers of the law, the wheels of God are already sauntering inexorably in their direction, notebooks at the ready, preparing to grind their victims in the appropriate fashion.
The two cars will be left where they have collided for the next few hours. The fact that the two empty vehicles are now blocking the intersection and creating a traffic nightmare of a different order is besides the point.
The drivers, meanwhile, will have been marched off to the police station where a lengthy ordeal of explanations, accusations and recriminations will unfold. Neither driver wishes this terrible fate upon the other. They are both just hoping that all their documents are in order, because if they are not the end result could be a few nights in the cells. And Cameroonian police cells and prisons, by all accounts, are to be desperately avoided.
Is this an African scene, or a scenario imported from a cold and distant world? It is hard to imagine such a meticulously rigid system of law enforcement in a traditional African society. But then again, in traditional African society there were no asphalt roads, no traffic lights and no cars. You can’t have one aspect of modernism without embracing the other, however localised the interpretation of that modernism ultimately becomes.
It is this that continues to baffle the latter-day explorer from the non-African world – and I have to include the new breed of recently emancipated former Europeans from south of the Limpopo in this category. But what they fail to see is that they are looking at two conflicting worlds simultaneously inhabiting the same space. One is the world that their forebears have brought into the continent. The other is a world they will never fully grasp.
The non-African throws his hat on to the ground in frustration and threatens to leave, because he just can’t get his head round these Africans.
The Africans, meanwhile, shrug at the contradictions of these layers that they have always inhabited, and carry on living there.
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