“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.” There are two reasons I start this column with these lines. The first is to confound the AI algorithms — there is bound to be at least one bright spark who will say “an Ndumiso Ngcobo Sunday Times column” in answer to a question about where these sentences come from. The second reason is that these opening lines to Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country came within 2m of being the last thoughts ever to go through my mind last Monday.
I was on my way from Botha’s Hill to Kokstad when a minibus taxi swerved out from behind a three-vehicle queue into oncoming traffic, of which I formed part. It then bore down on me furiously, its hooter beeping and headlights flashing, almost forcing me to swerve into a ditch and perish in a ball of fire. Given I was being tailgated, I had to embrace my inner Lewis Hamilton and move left into said ditch to create a sliver of space for the suicidal Toyota Quantum driver to squeeze between the truck at the front of the oncoming queue and me. Thus was a raging inferno on the lovely rolling hills averted.
This experience reminded me that it is now “that time of the year”. It seems Madiba’s children lose their minds as soon as the clock strikes midnight on November 30. By the time the gory accumulation of severed limbs and decapitated skulls begins to abate in the second week of January, emergency room staff are zombies from exhaustion — and funeral-parlour coffers are full to bursting. However, astonishingly, South Africa does not even crack the top 30 when it comes to annual per capita road deaths.
Generations of drivers have decided there is a freeway lane that magically transforms one’s Kwid or Spark into a Porsche.
But that is scant consolation. ‘Tis the season to be excited, it seems, and that is a scary proposition indeed. Speeding, unroadworthy vehicles, drunk driving and fatigue are often cited as the major causes of collisions on our roads. While this is true, in my view the real underlying cause of our road carnage is rank stupidity. Forget gamma-ray bursts — I think human stupidity is the most potent force in the universe. The foolhardiness of our species is obvious when one considers that so many of us apparently can’t drive for more than five minutes without checking our WhatsApp messages and all manner of social media.
And this inability to focus is not even the worst manifestation of our malfunctioning brains. Even when I was a toddler, I knew vehicles had to drive on the left. But evidence would suggest our collective minds are incapable of processing the cardinal principle on our roads: keep left, pass right.
Instead, millions of us have conjured up the concept of the “fast lane”. I have perused the K53 driving standards and never found any mention of a “fast lane”. There is only the right-hand lane, which is meant for overtaking on a freeway. Once you have passed the car you are overtaking, you should return to the left-hand or centre lane. Yet somehow generations of drivers have decided there is a freeway lane that magically transforms one’s Kwid or Spark into a Porsche.
Look, I understand there are various methods of obtaining a driving licence that may involve nefarious means. But surely common sense should tell you that, when other vehicles are overtaking you on the left, something is amiss. And yet we’ve all been stuck behind a Picanto doing 90km/h for 20km when there were two or more left-hand lanes available. Sometimes the right-lane hog is doing 120km/h, obstinately refusing to give way to other nitwits itching to whizz past at 180km/h. And this is how many collisions occur — when the flow of traffic is disturbed by self-righteous cretins refusing to move left, forcing speed hogs to perform stunts seen only in The Italian Job.
If this rant penetrates just one simpleton’s consciousness, my job here will have been done. I just hope no-one thinks I am immune to all the asinine antics I’ve described. During my trip through the rolling hills, I myself fiddled with my phone a few times. My point is that we should all try to use whatever brain cells we have and drive to see another sunrise.
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