I have jumped into a taxi, travelling from Kampala to Jinja. We are 14 – plus the driver – on board. The El Nino rains have given us a break. A dry day. But also a hot day. I have a window seat. The afternoon sun is coming down like so many needles sinking into my right shoulder.
The potholes. The traffic chaos. The noise. Our old little bus bumps, trembles, rattles and hoots, tearing from the city like a desperate animal making its escape.
After Mukono and its heart-pounding multi-ridged road humps, a measure of peace is restored. But it does not last long. I was beginning to think. Not philosophy or any of those highbrow things. Ordinary things. Bricks, wood, nails, prices.
I wanted to construct a small something, and my head was forming shapes and making calculations around the little project. Many commuters must be like that. They need peace; the absence of anxiety. But, suddenly, my heart leaps as the driver presses the accelerator.
I am going to protest, to sound some caution … “Hey, pilot…’
I don’t know – okay, I know – why all these earth-bound steering-wheel rogues are called “pilots”.
He cocked up his head and glanced at me in the little mirror over his head.
“Speed… speed…” I half yelled.
The protest is ignored. I try to reason: the risk that is disproportionate to the dubious advantage of striving to overtake every vehicle that is ahead of us… If the oncoming drivers are as reckless as ours… If there is a collision… the huge forces of moving bodies that instantly fold up and explode… If a monkey darts across the road… If a stupid tyre blows up…
There is an empty head in one of the front seats, and someone else. They are counter reasoning: God has already set up everything.
If we are scheduled to die today, the driver cannot change God’s plan. Pilot, faster!
I am trying to be calm, even if the heart does not quite come down. Easy, old chap… easy. Just hope that good luck does it. It often does.
But now there is another menace.
The youth on my left is tinkering with his phone, and the little speaker in the works is squeaking and screeching. He is proudly holding the machine high and well in front of him, watching a movie, and I cannot make out the sense of it all.
The screeching becomes intolerable. I wonder aloud whether the young man could not try using headphones.
No. I was a hopeless old fellow who did not appreciate the wonder of a nice phone. He was enjoying his money, and I was poking my nose in his private sphere. He had a right … a right … a right to enjoy himself. Why didn’t I go hang.
Weeks later, I am contemplating these young Africans; one at the steering-wheel of a small bus, giving public transport, and his “supporters”, and the other armed with a phone.
Just a phone. For the rest of us, our hell was in their hands, and they had hardened their little egos into stone. They refused to see things any way different from the way they did.
Most troubling, they were not unique. I see their type everywhere, albeit in different guises. Small people; bigger people; very big people. To budge; to back down; why is humility such a sin?
We now have Pierre Nkurunziza on our hands, in a manner of speaking. All he needed was a touch of humility and a bit of reason, and the hundreds of lives lost in Burundi (on his account) since May could have been saved.
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