Grand Theft Auto: Nampula Nights

If there is one thing in my life that has prepared me to come to Mozambique it has been Jesus. If there is a second, it is has been playing Grand Theft Auto.

As is my custom, I'll explain.

Despite whatever your first impressions are upon hearing that I have played this video game, please put them aside for a moment. Yes, it is a game filled with violence, drugs, women, booze, and pretty much every type of vice you can imagine. One version of the game was even set in the fictional “Vice City”. It is basically a big open map where you can steal cars and then drive around however you want to.

I would play this game with my brothers, usually us taking turns at facing different challenges in the game. Yes, the game was set in an absolutely heathen environment (the object of the game is stealing cars), but it is also noted for it's incredible realism. Pedestrians, other cars, gridlock make it is closer to a driving simulator than a video game. But when it was my turn, here were some of the things my brothers could often be heard saying to me.

“You know it doesn't matter if you hit other cars, right?”

“You know you don't have to obey the speed limit, right?”

“You don't need to obey the stop light. Just go!”

“No, I don't know if the game uses red-light cameras.”

“NO, I don't know if the fictional city where the game is set recognizes free right turns.”

“Yeah! You hit a pedrestrian! 10 points for you. No no no NO! What are you doing? Why are you stopping? Are you putting her in you car? You need to take her to the what? The hospital? What is wrong with you?!”

Eventually, they would grow frustrated with my taking the game to be too much like real life and would leave. However, if there is one thing that stuck with me from the game, its than in order to not get hit, you need to drive defensively aggressive. You see, the way the A.I. of the game is set up, if you drive at another car, often it will detect a collision and swerve to avoid you. So, oddly, if you want to avoid getting hit, you need to try to hit people.

Nampula is nothing like that video game. There are more cars, more people, small roads, and more accidents. Thankfully, I haven't caused one yet. I think the biggest thing I hit was I backed over a stump. Still, on the roads its a no-hold-bar, anything goes type of atmosphere.

The city struggles with a case of having too many people suddenly able to afford cars, so they go and buy one. Seems great, right? Except in order to get a drivers license you need to sit in hours of class learning the legal rules of the road, drive the learning car once around the block (literally, and it's a small block), and then you are granted a drivers license. Or you can just bribe to skip the class and then get behind the wheel of a one-ton, six cylinder killing machine.

Even more dangerous is that most people driving do not come from a culture where they have always known or seen how to drive. Here, the odds of you having been in a context of watching someone else drive---much less having been in a car at some point in your life---are relatively small. If I give people a lift somewhere, I am constantly reaching over to open the door for them when they leave because they don't know how.

The streets don't make it any better either. The road we take to go to the city passes through our local marketplace. The road is not striped and, even for small cars much less trucks, barely wide enough for two cars to pass without at least one putting a wheel in the dirt shoulder. And for cars coming in from out of town, it is the first sign of other people you see. Many cars and trucks will approach it going near 50mph (80km) before they recognize that they need to slow down.

The problem of safety in this stretch is complicated by people. Last month the city came through and demolished most all the permanent food stand and vending carts and told people to move them further away from the road. They were previously right on top of the road and in many cases people would put down, for example, their fruit cart resting on the pavement. And then, not only do you have people selling fruit, clothes, soap, beans, fish, snacks on the side of the road, you have the people that use the street as the thoroughfare for wandering about between the food stalls.

Most people that use the road aren't motorists, they're on bicycles. And not just people riding their bicycles commuting to work to be eco-friendly. On their bicycle, instead of a person ridiing, will be a basket of fruit, coal, bamboo, sugarcane, corn, whatever they they are taking from out in their farm to be able to sell in the city. Second most prevalent, behind bicycles, are motorbikes. People use them as personal transportation, commuting to and from work, school, wherever they need to go.

So in our market, there is a stretch of about 100 yards (90 meters) where food stands, shoppers, bicyclists, motorbikes, cars, trucks, and semis all converge in one narrow spot. Bikes and motorbikes use the road as driving on the dirt shoulder is often unsafe and filled with people. Cars pass bikes and other cars not being able to see what is ahead because of the blind curve. Semi trucks barrel through not recognizing the need to slow down until theyre on top of the market. People consider the street to be theirs and pass at will from one side to another. What happens when all these things converge?

People die.

Despite years of incidents and accidents, most people just refuse to take safety measures. After the city destroyed the vendor's stands, many people rebuilt just a little further from the road. Many more just started taking a mobile approach and laying their wares and goods on the ground beside the road. Cars hit people, bikes, and other cars. Bikes hit people and dart in front of cars coming from behind without looking twice.

The most dangerous times in the stretch are in the morning when kids are walking to school and more so in the evening when everybody is returning from work and converges to by bread and food at the end of the day.. Last week, a man stepped out from behind a parked car and got hit by an oncoming truck. He died on the spot. In February there was a kid of about 5 years old that wandered away from his mom and got hit by a motorbike. He died later in the hospital. Also this year there was a pregnant woman that stepped of the bus, stood still as the bus drove away, and then got hit by a truck that came through. Nobody is quite sure what happened to her after the truck took her to the hospital.

Last year there was a fairly famous accident, it made the news, of a taxi that hit three people in our market. Two of them later died from injuries. The driver was drunk and scared, and fled the scene in his taxi. Later, about a mile up the road he hit three more people before people subdued him before he could leave. About that time some witnesses caught up with him and held him till police could show up.

And the lack of people knowing how to drive goes up all the way to the top. Last month the prime minister was in our province when a kid riding in the truck in front of him fell out. (People ride in the back of trucks, dozens at a time.) The prime minister hit him and just kept on driving. Killed the kid. And nothing ever came of it. I had a friend remark that if anything like that every happened in America he would be run out of office.

So next time you're out driving around, offer up a prayer for us here on the roads of Mozambique. Especially as most the time I'm out it's with a truckload full of kids.