The Mbudzi Roundabout
- Colette Kirk
- Apr 10, 2020
- 4 min read
As I guided my car cautiously through the chaos, I decided to really look around and see what I was surrounded by - perhaps it wasn’t that bad.
To the left, my sworn-enemies of the road, combis (1), covered in their garish stickers with little or no meaning, over-excited men hanging wildly out of broken doors, screaming to each other and potential passengers, were taking up over half of the potholed road, leaving the rest of us to dangerously squeeze into the right lane and avoid collision with others in the same situation, fighting to move in the opposite direction.
Beyond the combis ,standing on rocky sand, were cheaply-constructed pine market stalls, hung with multicoloured muck newly arrived from Beitbridge (2) on buses swaying madly with the weight of their loads. Loads which more likely than not would have been knocked from their perch by the tollgate I was yet to reach.
To the right, battered station-wagon taxis, crammed so full of people that their bottoms hovered just above the rubbish-strewn ground, narrowly avoiding at least ten accidents every moment as they shoved their way uncaringly and unceremoniously into the ongoing stream of traffic, looking blankly at any red-faced driver who lost it and waved fists and protruding fingers out their window, swearword - driven spittle splattering onto windscreens.
Behind the taxis sat make-shift shops - more stable than the ramshackle stalls of the other side, but no less illegal; tiny shacks made of discarded asbestos and rusted metal sheets, each sharing flimsy walls with its neighbours, they were all crammed high with their own assortment of paraphernalia - tins of expired food, rejected stationary, second-hand cellphone spares, deceptively brightly coloured vegetables grown with the waters of the Manyami - the acrid smelling river where Harare pumped all of her poisons.
As I made slow progress, the sights on my right hand side remained relatively similar, although the wares changed somewhat - here there were more panel beaters and shady cement dealers, all sharing some dry open space behind their boxy entrances, dribbly hand-painted signs fading on the walls.
The left altered more noticeably - the combis thinned out (they preferred to try and get as close to each other in one place as possible, than to perhaps park a bit further out along the road), and junk stalls were replaced with rows of mismatched furniture - chunky sofas in gaudy material, fragile-limbed dining room suites, wardrobes and chests of drawers that may have been new yesterday, but which had been scratched into old age on their journey from wherever they had been bought - and which would probably be unrecognisable by the time they found themselves unloaded from some smoke-spewing lorry or flat-tired pick-up at their final destination. There were also mattresses of all shapes, thicknesses and dusty colours piled in tottering towers, and, my personal favourite, seats ripped out from old buses, or stolen from new, ready to be resold, perhaps to the very combi or bus from which they had been wrenched, or to an entrepreneurial station-wagon chauffeur who wished to add some more chairs to his chariot.
In front of the furniture, vendors slumped in the dirt in front of cooler-boxes of ice-cream and cold drinks, or piles of tomatoes and ox-carts of sun-stewed bananas, or orange loaves of bread and mealie-cobs (3) roasting over open fires. Scattered everywhere were airtime and newspaper salesmen in luminous yellow and orange vests, walking in the traffic with hundreds of other people; drunkards and smartly-dressed dames alike, all moving at a slow pace suggesting that this was not in fact a road made for vehicles, but for them to meander about on their way to buy a one litre carton of Chibuku (4) or a plastic cup full of molasses posing as honey, or perhaps one of the funeral wreaths that looked as if they had been stolen, flowers dried up and augmented with plastic ones, from the graves they had ornamented, ready to be given to a second, or perhaps third, crumbling corpse.
As I finally reached the end of the bottleneck of madness , I did not know whether to scream or smile at what I saw when I took a moment (whilst I waited for a small tobacco-laden truck to make an illegal u-turn in front of oncoming traffic) to turn my head and look out my tinted back-window. On the summit of a goat-infested anthill next to a random model of ‘Great Zimbabwe (5)' (odd place for a tourist attraction), overlooking the whole uncivilised, law-breaking spectacle, perched a police-station, its inhabitants peering curiously out the pane-less windows or lazily leaning against poles on the veranda.
I thought back to why I had looked around in the first place, and shook my head as I pressed the accelerator to the floor and wrenched the gears up one by one, racing for the quiet sanity of the farm - this roundabout was that bad.
Mbudzi is the Shona word for goat.
1 - Combis are what Zimbabweans call the illegal minibus taxis that are the primary form of public transport in Zimbabwe. They are notorious for disobeying road rules, cramming 30 or more people into a bus designed for 15, and having regular and violent clashes with other road-users and the police.
2 - Beitbridge is the main border crossing between Zimbabwe and South Africa.
3 - Meali-cobs are corn cobs, commonly seen roasting over open fires on the side of the road, and served with plenty of salt.
4 - Chibuku is a very cheap beer, made from sorghum and corn, and very popular in Zimbabwe.
5 - 'Great Zimbabwe' is an ancient Shona city in the south-east of the country. It was abandoned in the 15th century and is famous for being erected by stones simply balancing on each other - not held together by any form of cement or mortar.
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