On Driving and Culture

In Mozambique, drivers drive on the wrong side of the road -- that is, the left side. Of course, it is not uncommon to see a driver, impatient with the progress of traffic, turn on his hazard lights and bully his way down the lane of oncoming traffic.

Chapas, the local name given to the swarms of privately-operated transit minibuses, are notorious for doing this. They will make a centre lane in traffic, and flash their headlights, indicating to oncoming drivers that they had better get out of the way, because the chapa is not going to give an inch.

The chapas always win. The drivers rarely own their minibus, and abuse them accordingly. The Portuguese word, “chapa”, has a more general meaning as well: sheet of steel. And that seems to be the only requirement for registration as a minibus. Certainly having a windshield is not a requirement. Neither is having all four tires firmly bolted on. Nor having a working set of brakes.

Forget about seatbelts, too. If they are all working, there may be eight of them. Certainly not enough for the fifteen or more sweaty people shoehorned inside.

Traffic becomes most interesting when the game becomes chapa-versus-chapa. Winner-takes-all. Chapas aggressively pursue passengers, competing against each other in a high-stakes, flying steel match of leapfrog. The driver’s helper opens and closes the door, and provides extra eyes and ears on the road. He also shouts destinations, and pounds on the chapa’s rugged sides.

I recently watched a chapa up the ante to beat his competitors. Already overflowing with passengers bashing their heads on the roof with each bump, the chapa driver hopped the curb and raced down the sidewalk, splitting pedestrians like a combine harvester working a wheat field. His door helper had to run alongside to keep up; so too did a passenger desperately – for some unknown reason – wanting a ride.

In the end, the chapa driver was forced to concede defeat, retreating to the paved roadway behind the victor.

It is easy to think that riding a chapa requires an unnecessarily high degree of risk. Risk not worth its reward. But entering the streets of Maputo is a high-risk venture regardless of method: walkers, drivers, cyclists, transit-riders. We are all at risk.

When I first sat behind the wheel of a car here, I did not understand what I was seeing. Driving on the other side of the road, traffic seemed to flow backwards. Red lights did not seem to matter much, and they were hard to interpret: sometimes they would flash yellow before green, sometimes after. Missing are the familiar patterns and timing of home. Often, they do not even work, reducing intersections to life-threatening chaos.

Before understanding the rules and being able to decode the hidden order behind the chaos, driving was scary and stressful.

“Just find a hole, and drive through it,” was the advice that I received. There is barely a soul who will stop and let another driver through. Occasionally drivers will be honked at for grid locking an intersection. They will almost always be honked at for not grid locking an intersection.

I quickly got used to chapa drivers who would go around me while I was stopped at a red light and drive straight through the intersection ahead. I can count on that happening every day. What really set me back was when a pickup truck full of impatient police officers did the same thing. There was no emergency, but neither was there oncoming traffic so, apparently, no reason to stop.

I often run red lights, not because I am in a hurry but because I fear that not running the red light will result in the unexpecting driver behind me to run into the back of my car. Up to half a dozen cars run the red light at each change. Green lights, by consequence, do not signal clear passage.

Traffic is often terribly backed up, often traceable back to poor or selfish decisions by drivers or pedestrians. But now that I am comfortable with it, driving is enjoyable. For the most part, other drivers rarely react in anger when I make a mistake, perhaps only because "mistakes" are so common. And some rules are innovative: like extra-wide shoulders on highways so that slower drivers can pull off the road without inconvenience and allow faster drivers to pass.

It is easy to think that the roadways would run more smoothly if they would just adopt some of our rules from home. But whenever engaging new cultures, we must always strive to be quick to listen, and slow to speak. On the roadways and in the culture, it has been useful for me to step back and understand the structure behind the chaos before rolling up my sleeves to try to "fix" things.