Bang! Bang!

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Bang! Bang!

Fifteen Years Later

It is dark; they bang on the top of the car. This means there is a problem.

Women on the road

It is night, we are travelling in Northern Zambia, we are travelling towards a town were we shall be working to-morrow.

On the last miles of the trip, we picked up a group of women who were walking towards the town. As always they carry heavy bags.

It is a Japanese pick-up; the local habit is that you can transport any number of people on the back table. They were not many women, possibly five.

As it is dark and as I am tired I did not do my usual check to see that they are sitting on the floor and not on the sides.

We continue our trip towards the town, there is a slight bump on the road, nothing unusual.

They bang on the roof-top.

There is a lot of shouting; finally I seem to understand that one of the women has fallen overboard.

We turn around.

It is dark; it is as if the headlights are not able to clear up the darkness of the road, of the sky.

We drive and we drive and at the edge of the headlights we see something looking like a dirty old maize bag on the side of the road.

We stop, I turn around the car once again.

The woman is lifeless, like a limp package, with blood.

We want to put her inside the car then starts the usual mess between those that try to put her on the back seats, those claiming that she should not be put on the back seats because of the blood stains.

Then she is loaded, yes, indeed, not much better than that, loaded on the back of the truck, amongst the leg and feet of the others who grumble about getting dirtied.

We travel to the town, and then the memories are getting fuzzy.

The town must have been of some importance as there is a hospital and even a hospital that accepts urgent cases.

We also make the police declarations, they are not very surprised, apparently so called “jumpers” are a routine.

Next day I go to the ward to see the woman.

She is alive but appears to have a fractured wrist.

She survived, but how she survives, how her life was afterwards, I will never know.

The wrong kind of tyres

We were using for our work Japanese pick-ups, four wheel drive (the four wheel drive being practically never used), diesel engines. They were fantastic machines, fantastic work horses, they could get anywhere, never fail, you never had to be afraid that this or that would damage them, so long as you took care to stay within the permissible load. The Zambian habit was that the permissible load was to put as much as you could without anything falling off, had disadvantages. The suspensions gave up and the vehicles rolled over and all the passengers were crushed and maimed, but such is life.

But one thing was very annoying, to be effective on tar roads as well as in the mud, the tyres had to have a very narrow rolling surfaces and a large grip surface. As a consequence, a set of tyres would not last much more than 10.000 km, while in Europe you complain bitterly to your dealer if the tyres wear out before 40.000 km.

Further, we were using tubeless tyres but for some reason which I cannot quite remember now, we always added tubes to the tyres. Getting the right pressure in the tyres was a bit of a problem as all the compressors in the workshops has vanished a long time ago, and should they work, the pressure meter would not work. We had to resort to the old habit of kicking the tyre and listening to the rebound noise. Or we foot pumped the tyre until we were too tired to go on and then we considered that it was at the right pressure.

Then, at times we had to put our duty cars for servicing, and how do you check that the parts which were in the car when you brought it to the Service shop are the same as the parts that are inside the car when it is returned to you? Well, easy, they were not. It was sometimes a bit of a surprise to have a first punctured tyre and when opening it to discover inside a tube with up to fifteen patches.

Is it really worth spending ink and wasting your time by stating that only a fool would leave the car parked for some hours in Lusaka, the probability of recovering it with four tyres being less than slim. Of course being no fools we had anti-theft bolts on the wheels but any fool would have had the common sense to bring along a grip to undo the nuts. Even, careful as we were, tyres were borrowed.

So we had to find tyres.

The official way was to order them from Japan. The service was excellent, a telex to the Japanese corporation would get you a reply within less than 24 hours and within 48 hours you knew on which ship they would be sent (arriving in Dar es Salaam, but arriving for whose benefit?).

In the meantime we had to forage in the markets, not totally unaware that we were buying second hand tyres than had been borrowed from other les than careful owners.

First you were happy if you got a tyre, you did not get into such trivial details as to object if it was not the wheel size demanded by the manufacturer. The objective was to get the car rolling, not to be nice and beautiful.

Further, at that time, my knowledge of tyres was rather limited and I was under the impression that the size indicated, either 165 or 185 was referring to the circumference of the tyre and that if I bought a 165cm tyre, the only thing that would happen would be that the speed indicator would be wrong. And I was very wrong; the 165 size refers to the size of the section of the tyre, which means that a 165 cm tyre has a much narrower contact with the road.

Our 4*4 were designed for 185cm tyres, and if you got a second hand tyre, it would probably we a 165. When fitted with a 165cm tyre, you felt as if you were driving on tyres made of wet soap.

At the highest moment of our power, we were the proud owners of 5 vehicles. Three of them were out posted.

One day we decided to allocate a vehicle to the Western Province, you know the Western Province, a kind of flat desert on the way to Angola. So my co-ordinator from Mongu came to get the vehicle.

He got a two wheel drive I had been using, possibly using too much, as the tyres were worn out and the only replacements I could get were 165 wheels. Even for an experienced Swedish driver, the car felt very odd, as if I was driving on ice.

My co-ordinator got the car and left. He made 200km and on that part of the road that runs along the National Park, he got into a pot hole and the car turned over.

My coordinator was brought to the Lusaka hospital, totally lame; he could not move anything from the neck downwards. I was convinced that I was responsible for having destroyed my co-ordinators life. He was not at all aware that I could have done anything wrong, he was quite aware that as any Zambian driving a well maintained car on a straight road he had been driving as fast as he could, which on pot hole riddled roads is a game with death.

I was feeling horribly guilty; he was feeling horribly guilty because he had destroyed a vehicle. Destroying a vehicle meant that a whole Province, an area equivalent to the surface of Belgium, would be without assistance.

The vehicle was recovered next day, I do not really know why I bothered, the road thieves had plundered everything that was or was not removable.

I visited day after day my co-ordinator at the hospital and a miracle took place. I knew such cases were possible, the swelling in his neck that was compressing his spinal nerves decreased and little by little he recovered his body.

Medical care at the hospital means a mattress, soiled from previous occupants, food, one bowl of boiled maize flour, if the nursing staff had not eaten it, and what would be the point of feeding a man that could move neither arms nor legs and you did not have to fear the tribe that was 500 kilometres away?

The miracle took place, he recovered and returned to his duties in Western Province, with only one strange effect, he never really recovered the use of his right thumb.

I never recovered from my fear and guilt feeling.

Why bother about a driving licence?

Northern Province was nearly 1000 km away from Lusaka, one long drive on a good tarmac road, drive only interrupted by the stops at the so-called Police check-ups every 50km, which were acting more as toll gates than Police check points. During summer time you would drive between two grass walls, seeing nothing and being in constant fear of an animal rushing out to cross the road or a M'toto (child) crossing the road for a childish reason.

The obvious solution was to post a car in the Province, in the car of a Provincial co-ordinator.

The Government of Zambia (GRZ) had very strict rules about using vehicles, technical officers were not allowed to drive them and only old trained drivers were allowed to drive them. Which o course meant that at night they were using the GRZ vehicles as another source of income, as taxi drivers.

Our co-ordinator had performed well, I was pleased with his performance and nobody found it necessary to inform this M'sungu (foreigner) that the co-ordinator was a known beer drunkard, that he had of course no driving licence and that he found it convenient to dispense of the services of an official driver and was using the FAO vehicle as a kind of private family car.

What was bound to happen happened. After a training course in the Northern Training College, they had a parting feast, the training course lasting usually 6 hours, the feast lasting any amount of hours, at least as long as the beer lasted.

When he drove back to town he was slightly confused by the fact that the tarmac road had been doubled and seemed to have become very curvy since this morning; he followed the road and took a turn that existed only in his mind. The car was a total wreckage.

The only sanction we had the power to give was to transfer him to an unpleasant Province, which was done. His assistant was promoted to become the new co-ordinator.

I felt that after such an example my assistants would be careful.

A few month later, I met my new co-ordinator driving the duty car, the official driver sitting next to him; I got the usual lengthy explanations as why this was very proper.

The official driver was put back at the steering wheel and we parted, I was not such a fool that I could not guess that my co-ordinator would be back driving the car once he was sure I was gone.

A few weeks later I was informed that my co-ordinator had taken the car on a Sunday, driven 20 km to pick up his girl friend, driven back and wanted to impress her with his driving skills, she got really impressed, especially when they were upside down in the car on the side of the road.

The story did not get any better when I was told that he had procured the car keys by telling de driver to hand them over to him as he wanted to listen to a football match report on the car radio.

He threatened to kill himself and was not sanctioned.

That was the end of our activity in Northern Province.

And the last drop of poison that killed the project.