via A small victory – The Zimbabwean 20 January 2015
Sometime last week, a kombi from Mbare made a rather more complex than usual set of detours, which it would be tedious to describe in detail.
But the result was that, after filling up with fuel on Mazorodze/Charter Road, it was stranded in the middle of the road, trying to make a right turn but stalling every time a gap appeared in the oncoming traffic.
A situation like that can’t last long. Sure enough, the kombi was soon hemmed in by two motorbikes. I didn’t see a registration number on either, but I didn’t see the second one clearly enough to be sure. Each carried two youngsters in outsized riot police helmets – and I mean they were juvenile. Two of them had faces that had never known the touch of a razor, as smooth as a baby’s bottom. They announced they were impounding our kombi.
After some preliminary arguing and futile orders, the youngest “cops” had to push the kombi, full of passengers, to the roadside. Then the arguments really began. Most passengers refused to get out, insisting that we be taken to the destinations we paid to go to. The least junior of the cops tried to tell us where we’d be taken “because that’s the terminus for Glen View kombis”.
Someone told him we hadn’t come from Glen View. He looked as if he couldn’t believe we had come from Mbare because “Mbare kombis don’t travel this route”. When he realised we were all sticking to our story, he announced we’d have to choose between Market Square and Fourth Street, because “Mbare kombis don’t go to Copacabana”. He can’t really believe that, can he?
He must have noticed their friend Boss K’s fleet uses the roadside at Mashonaland Furnishers and sometimes even closer to Copacabana. But then he had already tried to tell us we were coming from Glen View, so he was having some difficulty absorbing any fact that wasn’t in accord with his rule book. Clearly the funny rules that somebody thinks up to make life more difficult for a driver trying to make an honest living represent a world more real to him than the one the rest of us live in.
One passenger tried to lecture him on contract law, “the crew made a contract with us when they accepted our money to deliver us to where they had promised”; that got nowhere. Another said “we’ll need to get another kombi to complete our trip and we’ve spent the fare. We want our money.” He didn’t seem to understand that line of argument either.
I don’t know which of those arguments convinced the passengers, but most of them refused to get out of the kombi. A couple of cops got in and ordered the driver to detour via Jumbo (passengers going there always seem to be heavily loaded) to Mashonaland. We got there without any further incident and one or two passengers even thanked the little Grey Bombers as we got off. A little politeness when you’ve won a victory, however small, does no harm and might make the next victory easier. That next victory might even be a bigger one.
I hope that offers a little cheer and a little hope that, however nasty the guys at the top may be, down in the ranks there’s still a bit of humanity hiding between the overweight boots and the monstrous helmet of the ordinary copper on the street.
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