When I looked Death in the Face
- Category: Peering Eye
- Date 11-09-2005
- 453 views
For about ten meters, the car raced through my footprints as if purposely searching for me. Realising it was headed for a head-ward collision with the bigger car from which I had just alighted only a minute or so ago, the man behind the wheel apparently stepped on the brake pedal with abrupt force.
The machine whose fierce roar had then attracted the attention of the contiguous public screeched to an excruciating halt, before it finally overturned. In a twinkle of an eye, what had been metallic steel lay before us in a formless outline: tyres in the sky, roof against the ground and hurtling pitilessly at the travellers, trapped inside the wreckage.
I watched the atrocious scene in utter mesmerism. The travellers, who shortly must have been cheerful, all along enjoying the ride, abruptly started crying out in agony. Probably, they had been cheering the driver on as he turned the sharp corners and accelerated the motor, hurrying them to their destination. They did not realise that some were possibly destined for cloud nine.
The victims cried out in pain, spontaneously arousing the sympathy of the gathering crowd. This was a combination of both kind-hearted humans eager to save life and property on one hand, and vicious folks looking for something valuable to grab on the other.
The most explicit purpose for all present however was to be humane and secure our fellow humans from the adversity of a hapless road contraption, notwithstanding what menacing objectives a few of us might have harboured. We thus enveloped the former a car and pulled out a man, three women and a child. Some of them were bleeding profusely, and others breathing frighteningly.
The man who happened to have been in charge of the machine was the first to come out, apparently unharmed. He stood beside his previous car and gazed on blankly as his passengers were being towed out likewise. The women who occupied the hind seat had sustained serious injuries and would either die or survive. A police patrol pickup, which arrived promptly, rushed them to the nearby hospital from where their fate would be determined.
The crowd that witnessed the accident was basically made up of women and children, with a man here and there. Those few men would do both the humanitarian job of pulling the victims out of the wreckage whereas again it was some of them who either attempted or actually stole this or that item.
The remarkable majority of mature women, youthful boys and girls, as well as curious children kept a distance, from where they stared on impotently; some of them shedding tears. A number were quite in such a fright as though they thought the wreck could possibly pull and victimise them as well.
Of the five or six men present, I was the only one who played no part either in rescuing the accident victims or snatching something from them. It is not because I am womanish or childish. It is not even that I was utterly horrified by the magnitude of the mishap and the destruction it had caused either. Again it is not because I was a mere visitor in that part of the world – Blantyre, the business capital of the Republic of Malawi.
The exact reason is that I would have died in that very accident! A colleague and I had just left our car; he entered a nearby house, while I strolled along the road, reading a newspaper as I waited for him. Another car that would cause havoc came around the corner, got off the road and followed the precise pattern of my footsteps, overturning a few feet before it hit me.
I continue to imagine what would have happened, had I not taken a few strides farther. I would have been crashed beyond recognition.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen