Accident

Yesterday I saw a man get hit by a matatu. I was crossing the road, a horn blared, then a screech pierced my ears. I turned and saw smoke from the locked wheels as the matatu skidded into the man behind me. There was a thud as he was flung, a crunch when he hit the ground. By the second the crowd grew, someone shouted at the driver, the injured man lay still.

By now I had called my mum because I did not know how to contact the police or an ambulance. Slowly walking away from the scene, fearing maybe an outbreak of mob justice which i have observed on more than one occasion, I described what had happened and what was happening. As I gave the registration of the mat (KAB 066P) I saw that the injured man had been propped up. With a pained expression on his face his lips moved. He was awake, alive.

The crowd was outrageously huge, the turn boy, maybe fearing the crowd would turn violent, bundled the injured man into the matatu. This is where my observation ends, not wanting to get caught in an angry mob i hurriedly left, confident that the police would be able to stop this mat and the man would be able to get the medical attention he needed. It took me 20 minutes to get to my mum’s office. They were still trying to contact the police.

I am glad that that crowd never turned violent. It happens too often in this country, and innocent people are hurt, or even killed. I don’t know what happened to that man who was hit, if he ever made it to a hospital. But the thing that angers me most is that we were not able to contact the police. For two hours we tried but none of the emergency lines worked. If traffic laws were enforced, if a zebra crossing was painted at that busy intersection, that man would not have been hit. It scares me that i have to cross that road nearly every day and not only have i seen two pedestrians hit there, one of them was only meters behind me. It could have been me being bundled into that matatu.

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