Encounters With Mortality, Part Two
In urban Canada, the pervasive use of heavy-duty vehicles stems mostly from environmentally destructive ego-tripping as opposed to any actual utility in road navigation. The proverbial marketing image of an SUV climbing steeply up the Rockies reveals itself to be utter nonsense when, in reality, said machines spend the majority of their lifetimes cruising well-paved expressways and idling in expansive parking lots. As a result, I suspect such vehicles are now designed to be little more than big and shiny- a suspicion brought about by the observation of such vehicles having just as much a propensity to get stuck in snow as their much smaller, car-like counterparts. The ‘utility’ aspect of SUV has grown largely meaningless and, judging by the girth of our waistlines, so has the ’sport’.
In the northern reaches of Mozambique around Pemba, however, a whole other reality was to be found. To describe the road network there as rudimentary would be to erroneously imply that the rough dirt tracks which comprised the vast majority of it could be considered roads at all. Two lonely single-lane paved highways served the region’s sparse road traffic, the only chance at a journey in which one’s backside was not irreparably damaged. Unfortunately, these oases of pavement where often only the very start or end of a long journey: to get to most villages involved the lengthy navigation of cratered dirt tracks, many of which were further obliterated during the heavy summer rainfalls. The infrastructural engineering feats of industrial humanity have yet to encroach on this space, and the landscape still dictates, often limiting, the scope of human movement. There was nothing unusual about spending several hours to travel a mere 20-30km.
Pemba, as the provincial capital of Cabo Delgado, was somewhat of a diamond in the rough in this regard. Isolated on the tip of a peninsula by an enormous bay, its old colonial core had a small network of paved streets on which travelled the town’s traffic of motorcycles, scooters, pickup trucks, battered sedans and beaten up chapas (the Mozambican version of the globally ubiquitous private minivan service, complete with East Asian characters still painted on their sides). The main road stretched from the old port through the town centre, past the airport and down the peninsula and out onto the mainland (where it became one of the two cherished paved highways). A half-hearted police checkpoint left over from more tumultuous times marked, quite literally, the boundary between this small pocket of urban bustle and the vast interior beyond.
Under these conditions, heavy-duty 4X4 vehicles were not symbols of conspicuous consumption gone awry but rather essential tools to anyone in the business of semi-serious road travel. In and around Pemba, that consisted in no small part of NGOs, international development agencies and government ministries- in fact, most vehicles in town apart from the white sedan taxis and chapas had some manner of logo, national flag or donor agency name plastered on their doors and bumpers. One was never in doubt that ‘development’ was one of the major employers and key industries in the area, for better or worse, populating the roads with shiny Japanese pickup trucks (the Land Cruiser being a particular favourite).
The organization I worked with had its own small fleet of such vehicles, manned by a dedicated team of pothole-hardened drivers. They were responsible for the driving on all field trips, generally trying to maximize speed and distance covered while minimizing bodily injury. They were a friendly, talkative lot (as drivers always are, it would seem), laughing and chatting away while honking some poor unsuspecting cyclist into the roadside brush in a cloud of dust. My experiences of the road in Mozambique consisted largely of sitting in the passenger seat as these men worked their magic over potholes and around ditches.
Of course, the roads in this region were not all fun and games. For reasons that an economic geographer could better explain, the roads passed right through the heart of villages, or alternatively created village clusters as people erected their huts on the side to sell firewood, warm Cokes and faded David Beckham t-shirts. This caused a particular problem when it came to the two paved highways in the region, however, as they played a risky dual role as high-speed thoroughfare and residential pedestrian street. It was a semi-regular occurrence for high speed travel along the lonely highway to turn a corner into a pseudo-market taking place on and across the roadway at a crucial road junction. The preferred response? Lots of honking and a number of leaping people, goats and chickens.
Unfortunately- but unsurprisingly -in these conditions, pedestrian road fatalities were slowly becoming part and parcel of the scene in the area. On one particular field trip, the vehicle in which I was traveling had reached a central junction (’central’ in these parts meaning a cluster of huts and shacks made from mud, wood and grass) when we were waved down by the police. I thought we were being randomly controlled as part of the profitable enterprise that is law enforcement in such places. Instead, the police chatted calming with the driver and the next thing I knew a few uniformed officers had hopped in the flatbed of the truck and we were back on our way. They weren’t pulling us over- we were giving them a lift! I felt that particular sense of bemusement possible only when one finds themselves witnessing the culturally surreal in a foreign land, the perfect fodder for laughs and nostalgia over drinks with friends at a later time and another place.
My sense of bemusement waned when I learned the purpose of these hitch-hiking cops. Not being up to scratch in high-speed Portuguese, I caught next to none of the conversation that led to our vehicle doubling as a police cruiser. A co-worker along for the ride, however, humoured me and explained what was going on. There had been an accident in one of the village down the road, and the police officers were needed at the scene- but they had no way of getting there (perhaps their vehicle and/or fuel was being used for decidedly non-official purposes at the time by someone else, which was nothing out of the ordinary). They had asked the driver if he could give them a lift to the scene of the crime, because we were heading that way anyways.
The police knew of the accident, I learned, because the driver involved had told them about it as he passed through the junction where we had picked them up. Apparently, the man had hit someone on his way through a village, but had not stopped for fear of being attacked by the angry residents. So he continued on and duly informed the officers at the next police post. What became of this driver I never found out, but my guess is he went undisturbed on his way.
A little while later, our vehicle slowed as we approached the village in question. There was a crowd gathered on the road side, comprised of everyone from the village elders to the usual mischievous toddlers with wild hair. It was not uncommon for a vehicle passing through a village to cause a certain amount of waving and shrieking on the part of the younger residents- I’m sure foreign faces passing at high speed can be exciting when you are a kid. Within this crowd, however, there was little sense of welcome. The people were not hostile, but neither were they warm. Instead a cold hush seemed to permeate the scene, with people’s eyes exhibiting tension and uncertainty. As we stopped, I saw the source of their consternation.
In the middle of the road lay the victim of the high-speed accident, deceased and peacefully draped with a blanket. The small outlined shape was that of a child.
The police officers hoped out of the back of the pickup truck and thanked our driver for the lift. The eyes of the village were fixed on our vehicle and the white faces inside it, and a combination of unease and guilt started to wash over me. Guilt for what? I’m not really sure, to this day. But in that particular instance anything and everything that had to do with development and privilege somehow felt responsible. The sort of privilege that values those able to travel by car over those trying to scrape an existence out of selling wood on the roadside, or toiling all day in fields of maize.
Before the situation could even begin to sink in, we were off on our way. Our pickup truck, sporting shiny agency logos and a donor country flag or two, took off back into the dirt, leaving behind the dead child to an angry village in mourning. They couldn’t leave the mortality behind with a shift of gears and a cloud of dust- my surreal memory of a transient event was their much more permanent tragedy.