A ride on a minibus in Zambia is nothing like my childhood memories of riding the Cardiff Clipper. It’s uncomfortable, hot, cramped, smelly, but definitely not a dull experience.
Minibuses are the principal form of public transport, and are ubiquitous in urban areas. Apart from taxis, they are the only way of getting around quickly for the car-less masses.
The buses are all Toyota second-hand imports – old HiAces. They are not owned by the local council, but by some kind of oligopoly: a bunch of moneyed men who ship over a bundle at a time from Japan to an African port for collection. Once in the country they are stripped inside of their (what I imagine to be) reasonably comfortable seats. Then a new interior is fitted to minimise space for the passenger and maximise the amount of seats for profit (ah, capitalism!). There is no permanent isle space for walking along as fold-down seats are used, so there are four lateral rows spanning the area behind the driver.
Inside, the interior is nearly always dilapidated. I wonder if the buses ever look reasonably new once the interior is fitted and the van painted, or whether they are just made old. I am yet to see a minibus that looks like it has just been fitted out. The benches are not particularly strong and the metal rigging to hold the seats in place is usually broke. Everything just looks like an accident waiting to happen.
More often than not, there is a large portrait of Jesus hanging above the driver. And the rows that you sit on mimic pews in a church, so you find yourself in a mini mobile church of sorts. Fortunately there are no preachers. The exterior of these buses is also pious, with tokenistic Christian phrases painted on the top of the front or back of the bus. Classics such as ‘Jesus wept’, ‘In God we trust’, and ‘Forgive us Father’.
Routes bloody routes
The buses are used not just within towns, but also for inter-town/city travel. They are not safe enough to be used for this in my opinion. You often hear about one of these buses rolling and crashing, and people dying. In towns, though, they are reasonably safe as the driver cannot get up to high speeds because of the constant stopping to pick up and drop off.
In Solwezi, the minibuses ply the same route from the hospital to the western end of town. Two pin a journey (approximately £0.25). There are no formal bus stops. If you want to get on you just wave your arm. All that health and safety guff about not being able to stop away from a designated bus stop does not exist here. To get the attention of potential customers, the driver will beep his horn in short sharp bursts of two to three beeps at a time every few seconds or so (rarely do you see the people using the horn for its original purpose in Zambia).
Getting on
The buses are not designed to allow for ease of entry. Anyone over six foot, overweight or old will have trouble getting on. Forget health and safety and compo culture, if you injure yourself it is your own problem! Your human instinct is all you have – the assessment of risk. The side door is the entry point. You look inside and just see cramped darkness. You think that there is no way bodies can move around in there. And you can never clearly make out where the space is to sit.
One time I got my approach all wrong. I put my left leg in and thrust my hips forward and just got stuck between the seats and the entrance. I didn’t rectify immediately. I just stopped and laughed at the situation; laughed at how ridiculously small the buses are. People inside were laughing with me (but probably at me) as well. Once I managed to re-thrust my body onto a seat, the guy in front said, ‘Nice experience, huh?!’
No.
Ride with us
Once you’re on, you just have to hope that the journey passes without incident: that you don’t break down or stop too much. If you’re wedged in at the back, you have to hope that no one wants to get off otherwise you have to get out with bags in hand and then get on again. This is not easy when you have long legs.
I always (after many learning experiences) try and find a seat up front with the driver, thereby avoiding the chaos of the back. If I can’t get one up front then I try and take a seat in the front row of the rear. Sometimes a bus will stop and I will see only seats at the back, so I pretend I don’t need a ride and wait for the next one. Oh, and never sit next to a heffer, because you’ll have room for only one arse-cheek.
When in transit everything is OK, but when the bus stops, the heat is oppressive and the body odour of some people is unbearable. Sometimes I have to breathe through my mouth. It’s almost as bad as a 1990s boys’ changing room at a state funded secondary school, after the relentless pumping of Lynx Africa under bare armpits. (By the way, Africa smells nothing like Lynx Africa.)
The conductor
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the minibus experience is the conductor. Predominantly, the conductors are young men in the late teens or twenties. Utter characters, they are. They have two jobs: to get business in and to handle payments.
To garner business when in motion, the conductor will hang his upper body out of the side window. One arm is raised in the air out of the window, whilst the other is holding a large bundle of cash (there are no coins in Zambian currency). When raising the arm in the air, the hand is fixed with four fingers tight together and the thumb just behind the forefinger almost in parallel. The arm is held up in the air and the hand is flicked in a forward motion to passers-by. The following are usually shouted depending on the type of human being:
Ma mi
Ma sister
Big man
Mama
Papa
Chief
Boss
The conductors are like hawks. They will spot custom a mile off, and they won’t give the signal to the driver to move until the bus is full. Sometimes a conductor will spot someone waving down a side road, and before you know it, the minibus is in reverse to mop up more business. Even as I walk towards the main road from my house I’ll see a minibus waiting with a conductor whistling and waving his arm. You can be 400m away and he will wait for you if you wave back. Never has getting a ride on a bus been so easy.
The advantage of all this competition is that there are always buses going by so you are never stuck waiting. You will often see conductors beating of rival conductors as they try to get a potential customer in their bus – fighting over another two pin for the coffers. The more business a conductor gets in, the more money he is paid at the end of the day.
Once in motion, the conductor will start collecting fares. This is usually done a few people at a time to avoid confusion when handing back change. Like mobsters with a thick wodges of fresh cash, they thumb through the notes with expert ease. If the conductor has managed to fill the bus, and thereby forsaking his own seat, he will stand half crouched over the person sat on the seat by the door to collect the cash. This is the worst place to be sitting because you get a box-office view of his crotch.
Getting off
If you want to get off then you tell the conductor your stop. Although there are no designated bus stops in Solwezi, there are landmarks: Zanaco, Shoprite, Mema House. The conductor will tap his fist on the roof of the van as a signal to the driver to stop. If you’re up front with the driver you just need to hope that the door opens using the latch otherwise you look like an idiot trying the lock over and over again. If you’re in the back, just hope you don’t trip on the metal rigging.
The relief at getting off is a good feeling. The only thing left to do is to check you have the essentials with you:
Wallet
Phone
Keys
Minibuses are the principal form of public transport, and are ubiquitous in urban areas. Apart from taxis, they are the only way of getting around quickly for the car-less masses.
The buses are all Toyota second-hand imports – old HiAces. They are not owned by the local council, but by some kind of oligopoly: a bunch of moneyed men who ship over a bundle at a time from Japan to an African port for collection. Once in the country they are stripped inside of their (what I imagine to be) reasonably comfortable seats. Then a new interior is fitted to minimise space for the passenger and maximise the amount of seats for profit (ah, capitalism!). There is no permanent isle space for walking along as fold-down seats are used, so there are four lateral rows spanning the area behind the driver.
Inside, the interior is nearly always dilapidated. I wonder if the buses ever look reasonably new once the interior is fitted and the van painted, or whether they are just made old. I am yet to see a minibus that looks like it has just been fitted out. The benches are not particularly strong and the metal rigging to hold the seats in place is usually broke. Everything just looks like an accident waiting to happen.
More often than not, there is a large portrait of Jesus hanging above the driver. And the rows that you sit on mimic pews in a church, so you find yourself in a mini mobile church of sorts. Fortunately there are no preachers. The exterior of these buses is also pious, with tokenistic Christian phrases painted on the top of the front or back of the bus. Classics such as ‘Jesus wept’, ‘In God we trust’, and ‘Forgive us Father’.
Routes bloody routes
The buses are used not just within towns, but also for inter-town/city travel. They are not safe enough to be used for this in my opinion. You often hear about one of these buses rolling and crashing, and people dying. In towns, though, they are reasonably safe as the driver cannot get up to high speeds because of the constant stopping to pick up and drop off.
In Solwezi, the minibuses ply the same route from the hospital to the western end of town. Two pin a journey (approximately £0.25). There are no formal bus stops. If you want to get on you just wave your arm. All that health and safety guff about not being able to stop away from a designated bus stop does not exist here. To get the attention of potential customers, the driver will beep his horn in short sharp bursts of two to three beeps at a time every few seconds or so (rarely do you see the people using the horn for its original purpose in Zambia).
Getting on
The buses are not designed to allow for ease of entry. Anyone over six foot, overweight or old will have trouble getting on. Forget health and safety and compo culture, if you injure yourself it is your own problem! Your human instinct is all you have – the assessment of risk. The side door is the entry point. You look inside and just see cramped darkness. You think that there is no way bodies can move around in there. And you can never clearly make out where the space is to sit.
One time I got my approach all wrong. I put my left leg in and thrust my hips forward and just got stuck between the seats and the entrance. I didn’t rectify immediately. I just stopped and laughed at the situation; laughed at how ridiculously small the buses are. People inside were laughing with me (but probably at me) as well. Once I managed to re-thrust my body onto a seat, the guy in front said, ‘Nice experience, huh?!’
No.
Ride with us
Once you’re on, you just have to hope that the journey passes without incident: that you don’t break down or stop too much. If you’re wedged in at the back, you have to hope that no one wants to get off otherwise you have to get out with bags in hand and then get on again. This is not easy when you have long legs.
I always (after many learning experiences) try and find a seat up front with the driver, thereby avoiding the chaos of the back. If I can’t get one up front then I try and take a seat in the front row of the rear. Sometimes a bus will stop and I will see only seats at the back, so I pretend I don’t need a ride and wait for the next one. Oh, and never sit next to a heffer, because you’ll have room for only one arse-cheek.
When in transit everything is OK, but when the bus stops, the heat is oppressive and the body odour of some people is unbearable. Sometimes I have to breathe through my mouth. It’s almost as bad as a 1990s boys’ changing room at a state funded secondary school, after the relentless pumping of Lynx Africa under bare armpits. (By the way, Africa smells nothing like Lynx Africa.)
The conductor
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the minibus experience is the conductor. Predominantly, the conductors are young men in the late teens or twenties. Utter characters, they are. They have two jobs: to get business in and to handle payments.
To garner business when in motion, the conductor will hang his upper body out of the side window. One arm is raised in the air out of the window, whilst the other is holding a large bundle of cash (there are no coins in Zambian currency). When raising the arm in the air, the hand is fixed with four fingers tight together and the thumb just behind the forefinger almost in parallel. The arm is held up in the air and the hand is flicked in a forward motion to passers-by. The following are usually shouted depending on the type of human being:
Ma mi
Ma sister
Big man
Mama
Papa
Chief
Boss
The conductors are like hawks. They will spot custom a mile off, and they won’t give the signal to the driver to move until the bus is full. Sometimes a conductor will spot someone waving down a side road, and before you know it, the minibus is in reverse to mop up more business. Even as I walk towards the main road from my house I’ll see a minibus waiting with a conductor whistling and waving his arm. You can be 400m away and he will wait for you if you wave back. Never has getting a ride on a bus been so easy.
The advantage of all this competition is that there are always buses going by so you are never stuck waiting. You will often see conductors beating of rival conductors as they try to get a potential customer in their bus – fighting over another two pin for the coffers. The more business a conductor gets in, the more money he is paid at the end of the day.
Once in motion, the conductor will start collecting fares. This is usually done a few people at a time to avoid confusion when handing back change. Like mobsters with a thick wodges of fresh cash, they thumb through the notes with expert ease. If the conductor has managed to fill the bus, and thereby forsaking his own seat, he will stand half crouched over the person sat on the seat by the door to collect the cash. This is the worst place to be sitting because you get a box-office view of his crotch.
Getting off
If you want to get off then you tell the conductor your stop. Although there are no designated bus stops in Solwezi, there are landmarks: Zanaco, Shoprite, Mema House. The conductor will tap his fist on the roof of the van as a signal to the driver to stop. If you’re up front with the driver you just need to hope that the door opens using the latch otherwise you look like an idiot trying the lock over and over again. If you’re in the back, just hope you don’t trip on the metal rigging.
The relief at getting off is a good feeling. The only thing left to do is to check you have the essentials with you:
Wallet
Phone
Keys
And then you walk off and watch the sun glimmer off the cheap alloy wheels as the bus moves away.
