Harare Drive

I am back in Harare and it's fantastic to feel the energy of an African city again. The new meets the old, brand-new cars, out the box Land rovers and Mercs, alongside dilapidated colonial buildings of a previous era. Traffic lights that don’t work due to a power cut or a malfunction no one knows or cares. People everywhere coming and going en masse each of them with a purpose but with a relaxed air that comes with living in the sunshine. All year round.

And then there are the roads....and the drivers! What I call collectively Harare Drive.

Harare Drive also happens to be the ring road that kind of circum-navigates Harare, but not in quite the same way, as the M25 does so in London.

The star protagonists in Harare Drive are the commuter buses which are not buses but 10 seater vans or kombis. I say 10 seater but that was only a guide line by the manufacturers. There is no set number which is capacity, and every journey provides an opportunity to achieve a new record, or so it seems. This challenge is directed by the tout who rides shotgun assisting the driver and enlisting passengers along their route. He will invariably be under the stimulating effects of marijuana, shouting and whistling at prospective customers. Once the commuter is fully load they take off at break neck speed without having to comply with any of the traffic rules that are being followed, in a haphazard way, by the rest of the participants in Harare Drive. As you can see windows are a luxury in some cases ;)

If the 'fireman' ,as the touts call themselves, has succeeded in packing the taxi to almost maximum capacity, he travels on the outside of the vehicle, either hanging out of the door or standing on the back bumper. Being outside he has an added advantage to survey the road ahead for more customers and to communicate with them while at the same time shouting at the driver. This can lead to sudden changes in direction and stops. Not quite the same as bird watching, but similar.

The average commuter driver and fireman are not part of what I described earlier as the relaxed sunshine genre of an African city. There is another group who dont qualify either and for a different reason. While the commuter operators are driven by the mission to max the money and are, for the most part, on something. The other group have already made the money and are driven by a sense of entitlement that is evident in what they are driving and the way they drive. These are the noveau riche in their top of the range, latest model dream machines. When you are driving a car like this, mere mortals must understand that you come first, and they must clear the way for your magnificent progress.

This brings me to perhaps the pinnacle of the Harare Drive experience. The Blue Lights. They can appear at any time and the fact that they are approaching passes through the motoring public at the speed of a nuclear reaction. Cars, even the commuter kombis, dive for the kerbside and freeze. The chaotic traffic stops and waits and then they are there, blue lights flashing, sirens of various calibre, the entourage of 6 identical matt black latest Discos ( landrovers ) and the same number of other vehicles, one being an ambulance, they rush through the frozen traffic and are gone. As suddenly as they arrived. Then everything starts up again, with the commuters charging off on the heels of the Blue Lights.

I hear you asking where are the blue lights that one has in other cities of the world? They are here, do not worry! They are predominantly pedestrian, and they have lost their blue lights (to the group mentioned above) but they are on the road, literally, at their road blocks. You are traveling along and suddenly there is a tail-back that turns out to be a car radio license check. In the history of Harare Drive there have been far worse roadblocks than this, but currently in 2024, we have this one. If you dont know the rules you are about to find out what they are. Do you have a license for your radio? What radio? Ah, but you have an aerial, therefore you need a license for the radio that you might be hiding, at the moment.

The car radio license thing has become such a cause of roadblocks that the authorities have decided that everyone will pay for a car radio license, when they renew their car licence, irrespective of whether they have a radio or not.

I have drifted away from Harare Drive, there are still tales to tell but enough said for now. There is one man who epitomises Harare Drive for me, and I am pleased to say he is still at his station, where I saw him a year ago. At the same traffic lights, known here as robots, that continue to fail for whatever reason.

Here he is, on a sunny afternoon, in Harare Drive :)