Reflections on sunday: The murderous machines of our times

They’ve spread like wildfire and now you’ll find them practically in every African town. When first I returned to Rwanda after 35 years of exile, I’d never seen a motor cycle used as a taxi in any of the East African towns that I’d lived in. I’d only seen pictures of Francophone West Africa’s ‘vélos moteurs’ (motored bikes) being thus used. Then I came to Kigali. In August 1994 I came to check exactly what my country of birth looked like. As our Kigali-bound minibus taxi advanced towards Kigali from the zone that had been controlled by the then Rwandese Patriotic Front rebels, I began to notice that Rwanda didn’t look like anything. It looked like death. The air was enveloped in a chocking stench of rotting flesh, the ground was filled with blood and all forms of putrid rubbish and every building looked like a skull staring at you, hollow-eyed. I was terror-struck. Apart from a few travellers who’d already been to Rwanda, all fell into shocked silence. Still, we pressed on and reached Kigali as dusk was beginning to cover the horror that was Rwanda. Of course, the horror stayed with you. If it was not the chocking stench, it was the scattered, rotting body parts being crunched under your feet. However, the dread of dreads was the fear of dogs. As there was no light in the ‘city’ (if not hell), you couldn’t tell that you were approaching a dog until you heard its chilling growl. That is when you stealthily slunk away to a safe nook. But the dogs were harmless as they were satiated from those corpses. I managed to stay for a week but took the first chance to escape when I was offered a lift in a UN transport aircraft. As soon as I secured the lift, however, another hurdle presented itself. The few Ugandan-registered minibus taxis that plied Kigali did not cover the 12-km route to the airport. I was only left with the alternative of a lift in the few privately-owned vehicles. Unfortunately, the few car-owners I knew were at work. As I stood by the roadside, a motor cyclist came zooming past me but quickly turned around to sail towards me. When he reached me, he stopped and planted his foot next to mine. “Uragenda?” he enquired, sounding impatient. He was asking if I was ready to go, as if he was offering me a lift. It took me time to understand that he was a taxi-man. When I told him I wanted to go to the airport, he told me to hop on, for 120 Francs.Putting my carry-all between him and where I’d sit, I put my hands on my would-be sit to lift my leg. Before I could settle, however, the man throttled his bike into gear and it lurched forward. My hands slid off and my feet hit the road with force. When he heard my carry-all fall, he looked back only to see me still rooted where he’d found me. He came back and this time waited for me to sit and clutch his jacket and shirt before we zoomed off. From the city centre we rode to ‘Payage’ and at ‘Sopetrad’ (‘Engen’ seems to have appealed to on one) we turned into today’s ‘Airport Avenue’ (?). At ‘The Lady and son’ roundabout, when he rose from the bend to shoot straight for the airport, I was flung some distance into the shrub in the middle of the avenue, still clutching pieces of his jacket and shirt. Luckily, I sustained only a few scratches. When next we set off, I appealed to him to go slowly, even if it meant missing my flight. I made it, anyway, and as I sat on the intertwined ropes that served as seats in the transport plane, I reflected over my ordeal. Who would blame me for not having learnt how to balance on a bike? In my youth, the nearest thing to a two-wheeler that I knew was ‘igihwerahwere’. We used to join pieces of wood and give them wooden wheels and voilà! Our bikes, which we called ‘ibihwerahwere’. ‘Ibihwerahwere’ were a far cry from bikes, however, as they relied on our brute force for their kinetic energy. Without you pushing them, they could not budge unless you could manoeuvre them downhill, in our notoriously ‘wind-winding’ paths. Otherwise, we used to load water containers and firewood onto them and push them. The tricky thing was that on a downhill slope, they pulled you instead. This was until I invented ‘breaks’, the property rights of which I possess to-date. When you fixed a piece of rubber onto a piece of wood above the ‘tyre’, you could use your foot to press the rubber down onto the ‘tyre’. Better breaks you’ll never see. Those days there was no riot of two- and four-wheelers that has resulted in many deaths, especially among our youth. It is with that that I join the bereaved family of Mr. Murangira and many other families that have lost their beloved ones at the hands of these murderous machines. ingina2@yahoo.co.uk