Reflections on sunday : Have ‘Kigalois’ ever seen a traffic jam?

It looks like history now, but remember how almost everybody was infuriated that our city fa……no, city mothers, could block virtually all the roads in and out of the main city of Kigali? It could have left Kigalois (Kigali residents) with less frayed nerves, moreover, if only the city mothers had exercised the simple civility of explaining that the repairs were due to the expected, visiting dignitaries. Anyway, now that the roads are back under the wheels of Kigalois’ two-, three-, four- and more-wheelers, everyone should be the happier for it. It’s back to order again and thank God our guests came when the chaos was over. And while on the topic, it was no mean achievement for a city that was dead and buried only sixteen years ago to host close to twenty government heads without a hitch. Phew, the thought of bungling the visit of Africa’s head honchos! I remember visiting a city in a certain part of our dear continent when there was an OAU (today’s AU) summit going on. In all its long life, Hell has never beheld such mayhem.….. My apologies! Even if I am from the north where people are known to engage animal instincts unguardedly, I should not fail to exercise the civility that I blame others for lacking. As for our anger at repairs that blocked traffic and kept us on the road for unnecessarily many minutes, we should be happy that it was minutes. Just imagine. You are among a few of the fat cats of Kigali and, apart from having a house in the city where you work, you have a rural home in Rubilizi. In case you don’t know, Rubilizi is the small shopping centre on the road to Nyagatare, before you reach Kiziguro. It is about 100 kilometres away from Kigali. That means you can sleep there a weekend and drive to work in Kigali on Monday morning without breaching your 7 o’clock reporting time. So, on your way, you reach Kayonza and you are not bothered much when you see a long line of vehicles because you set off early enough. However, by midday you have not moved an inch and by evening you have only moved one kilometre. It is a minor vexation because you are able to ring and excuse yourself for the day. Unbeknown to you, however, that day will stretch to ten days! Impossible, you exclaim and maybe with reason. You cannot imagine that a traffic jam can last ten days. How wrong you are! In China, where they count populations in billions, everything is mega-sized. So, this monster traffic snarl-up took place in China only last August and most likely some people have not trickled out of it to this day. Pictures still show drivers taking an improvised bath by the roadside, in the morning. And the drivers are in millions, because those roads are not the tiny, two-lane ones we here in Rwanda are used to. One road in one direction is six-lane and so is the road in the opposite direction. By the end of nine days, you can imagine what that human crowd had done to the environment around that road. Personally, I have never been in a remotely similar situation. Except one time in November 1964. We’d then just been given the boot by authorities in the then Congo-Kinshasa on allegations of colluding with Mulele Mayi dissidents…… You know those rebels, the chaps that Che Guevara went to assist in their ‘revolution’ only to give up when he found them pre-occupied in witchcraft. He had come all the way from Cuba thinking he was going to assist a revolution. When they told him to smear his body with some concoctions that would turn bullets into water, whence the name ‘Mayi Mayi’ came from, Che Guevara realised the Congolese would get nowhere with their ‘revolution’ and quit…… But I digress. I was on about how I got stuck in a situation similar to that ‘China monster-jam’. When we were sent away from Congo-Kinshasa, there was no vehicle to transport us. Our only alternative was walking, which meant 68 kilometres from Bambo to Rutchuru, near the Uganda border. Walking alone was not a problem, though. The problem was that we had to walk through one of the country’s national parks, home to all types of man-eaters. Even then, it would have been fine had it not been migration season. Around the month of November, the grass is richest in nutrients in savannah parts of the park due to heavy rains. From densely forested areas, herbivorous animals migrate to savannah areas. And since the carnivorous animals depend on herbivores for their food, they also follow. When we reached the park, then, we found a convoy of them on such a trek, a trek which cut across our path. You do not break up a convoy like that, unless you are fed up with your life. We were not, so we camped at a safe distance to wait them out. Problem was, the last of the animals ambled across our path after 12 days! ingina2@yahoo.co.uk