Now that I've collected taxi stories in three different colors, it's as good a time as any to return to this old favorite. Though they vary in degree of seriousness, they all serve to remind me how quickly life can change. Public transit seems to carry an inherent risk with it and eventually, I figure my odds are going to run out.
I am hoping my new spot will allow a walk to work. I have come to recognize a small stress in the search for a taxi every morning. (Crossing the main road after work for the ride home practically deserves its own post. It holds a high spot on the won't miss list and is a major stressor. I hate that road.)
The morning commute appears less dangerous, mostly because there is usually less traffic and no major road to dash across. But I do need to make sure I have exact change and on some mornings, even that isn't enough. There are mornings when taxis are scarce. There just aren't any. It's the randomness of these mornings that creates the stress. You can never be sure until you get to the road and start trying to hail a cab if there will be any (to hail, or any with space.) One morning, one of those scarce taxi mornings, a driver actually refused my fare, because he was looking for more than the regular price. The law of supply and demand in full, frustating effect.
On the morning of my story, however, there was nothing remarkable about my yellow taxi search. I'd found a cab and squeezed in the back, perhaps the uncomfortable middle, but on my way nevertheless. We had just passed the new roundabout- where mintues can make the difference between a two second circle or a twenty minute standstill. Timing is everything in the morning. And this morning, timing seemed good. There weren't too many cars, although you could see it was beginning.
As we rounded the turn and began to exit, a large SUV also began to exit. I am not exactly sure what happened, lost in the daydreams of my morning commute. The drivers began yelling at each other through open windows and the SUV began to put the squeeze on, narrowing our driving lane until the chauffeur had no choice but to stop or pull up on the sidewalk, a place well crowded with pedestrians.
The men exited their vehicles as the insults quickly turned into punches. Not yet 7 am and they had a brawl going. They were so close to my window I could see the struggle on the face of the SUV driver, the surprise and frustration as the blows landed.
A passenger in the front seat got out and ran between the men. With some effort he managed to pull them apart. It took long enough that questions began to run through my mind. What are the qualities that inspire a person to get involved? The man next to me didn't make a move to get out and offer any help. Why not? I felt stuck in my inner seat, but knew I couldn't get out, or intervene. (Years with sons have taught me that I am usually the one to get hurt in these kinds of scuffles. Inadvertently, perhaps, but I had no place intervening in a grown man's squabble. And then I was frustrated by that thought and my lack of muscles.)
Eventually everyone returned to their cars, driving off with a last bit of rage. "Meet me at 9kilo...he's got to get out sometime," our taxi driver snarled, referring to the passenger who had stopped the fight. I wondered what kind of rage fueled such anger before the sun had even gotten comfortably into place. I wondered what the woman in the back of the SUV had been thinking the whole time and I wondered if the chauffeur would still have a job. My stop was less than a block away and I marveled at how easy it was to put the whole mess behind me as I walked in to school.
The following week I found my story in the cover of night with the neon glow of fancy gbaka lights. While I don't really remember the color of the gbaka, inside it always seems a flourescent blue. Gbakas in Abidjan have some of the fanciest interiors I have ever seen, often strung with LED tube lights and flat screen T.Vs spewing the latest videos into our evening commutes. This one had all the amenities.
I was coming from my Friday night dance class, meaning traffic was inevitable. When we reached the main intersection, the red lights of stopped cars shone brighter than our interior blue light show. Drivers have all kinds of tricks for evading the lines of stalled traffic, and our driver did not disappoint. He rode the narrow edge between the curb and the open sewer gulley ( the same place where I'd seen a gbaka nearly run a woman over some months before.) He took the 'short-cut' through the gas station and joined the queue of vehicles who'd also taken this route. We found ourselves, as short-cuts often lead to, at angle incongruous to the precise lines of cars in front of us. We were directly behind a large truck and it soon became clear there was problem. I am not sure if someone reversed, or someone pushed ahead too quickly, but we seemed to be attached to the truck in front of us.
The apprentis jumped out and there was a general congregation of people in the middle of the road, forming a soup of men and lights and vehicles, swaying and rocking and shouting and figuring. Finally, we were unstuck and the road ahead cleared a bit. We assumed our driver would continue and take the right turn in the direction of our intended travel. Instead, he followed the truck through the next turn around and began heading off, back in the direction we had come from.
Passengers started shouting and the apprentis started banging ( there is always a lot of banging involved in gbaka travel) and finally the driver stopped for a minute. "Saute, saute. On vas marche," a woman next to me shouted. We jumped into the dark waters of the night street like passengers abandoning a sinking ship.
Apparently our chauffeur intended to follow the truck driver- in the wrong direction with a bus full of passengers- to seek revenge. Road rage at its craziest. Again. luckily for me, I was less than a block away from my stop and quickly walked to the next leg of my transit. Other passengers, however, had been intending to go as far as Faya, and would need to find a new ride at the main intersection. The apprentis had enough mind to collect my fare before I disappeared into the night, but what about the others? Do you have to pay when your driver suffers from an irrational fit of road rage and only gets you half-way to your destination?
I found myself asking this same question a few short weeks later. This time, I was in an orange taxi- taxi express in Kinsahsa terms. Orange taxis generally take just one passneger and offer you door-to-door service, or street-to-door as the case may be. I was returning from a new tutoring job, this one well across town. We were returning at dusk, an hour when the threat of traffic looms on the horizon. Our route took us past the president's quarters, which can be a sticky area. But we'd made it past there, and the occasional back ups by the Golf Hotel without much of a delay.
I was busy in my mind when I happened to glance up. There's no escaping the cliches. I saw everything in slow motion. The car in front of us, another red taxi (everyone calls them red, but they are so obviously orange- I don't really get it.) The back end was getting larger and larger. There was no sign that we were slowing down but I didn't say anything. Until it was too late. Perhaps I gasped, or sucked in a breathe sharply, or maybe I even said something. But it wasn't Hey! Stop! or Attention! It was nothing useful.
By the time the driver came to, because surely he was off in some daydream of his own, we'd already slammed into the car in front of us, which had, in turn, slammed into the car in front of them. Three car pile up.
We all exited the vehicles and I began wondering what to do. In Kinshasa, the rules were clear. Get away. In the US, you stay to file a report. I wasn't really clear what the rules were here- and did I have to pay? Because once again, I hadn't quite reached my destination.
I hung around for awhile. I asked the driver of one of the other vehicles what would happen next. They seemed to be debating about whether or not to call the police- well, I guess they call the sapier pompiers- the firefighters- but everyone was debating how long it would be before they showed up. The taxi drivers had to call their bosses. A passenger in the other taxi was injured and bleeding. He didn't leave the backseat and alternated between sitting with his head down and laying on the backseat. The woman with him kept asking the (my) taxi driver what he was going to do.
"He's bleeding," she kept saying as the drivers walked around the cars assessing the damage. "That's material things. What are we going to do about him?" she asked. Another taxi driver stopped for a minute, perhaps to offer support (again, what makes people get involved? I took a class on this way back when and poignant moments have never left me. Victims and Their Experiences it was called. And it was mind blowing.)
Bystanders streamed out from the plant and garden stands along the roadside. I wondered if I was supposed to stay and give my testimony. It seemed pretty clear which driver waas at fault. However, he said there were no brake lights on the other taxi, so it wasn't completely his fault. I couldn't speak to that. I didn't remember if there were lights shining as the back of the taxi loomed closer.
I knew that my head hurt, I'd managed to block most of the impact but not all. The next day a deep and angry bruise appeared on my knee, but I didn't feel it at the time. I was nauseous and tired and I couldn't tell what was accident related or just the result of working too late on too little sleep for too many days. Eventually I handed my driver most of the fare and headed home on foot. I found a yellow cab after 10 minutes of walking and continued my commute, wondering what had happened to the bleeding man, grateful there were no serious injuries that would haunt me into the night.
Except. sometimes, possibility haunts us as much as reality. Traffic accidents are a major cause of death in Africa, something I think about everytime I am on the road. It is a false sense of comfort to think if you are driving you are more in control, but I don't even have that to offer a bit of solace. I am at the mercy of chauffeurs who succumb to road rage, who battle with money to keep their taxis in safe working conditions- so many times I have diagnosed a problem (having a mom who worked for years in the automotive industry has taught me a thing or two about the sounds cars make, not to mention years of tooling around in my own clunkers) but often drivers don't know or won't admit the problems their cars are suffering from.
It's a risk, public transit in Africa. Everytime I get in a taxi or gbaka, I think of my children. I wonder what would become of them. I think of myself. Will there be pain if the gbaka tips over? How long will I wait for treatment if my accident is serious? Will it be the waiting or the injury that does me in? It takes a lot of effort to close my mind to the possibilities, the risk. I always imagine that meme I ran across, about stalled traffic in Germany versus stalled traffic in Africa, and the comment, il faut changement de mentalite. The images and lessons from Defensive Driving are never far from my mind. I think courses like these might make a difference. But, of course, I am not really sure how many drivers have even passed any sort of test about road rules or practical driving.
There is no shortage of driving schools, though the clients I see there are generally women. For me, the plus grande question, we call the boy who rides the door and calls out the destination, we call him apprentis- but what is he really learning? And in a few years, he will move to the driver's seat.
