US buses find life in DRC
2006-09-09 11:29
Kinshasa - Ever wonder where America's yellow school buses go to die? Well, some don't: They find a second life on central Africa's rutted, traffic-choked roads.
Boxy buses that once carted American children now hauled the Democratic Republic of Congo's impoverished people, young and old - and their loads of preserved fish, powdered milk , beans, onions and cassava.
Charging breakneck around the capital, the yellow buses rattle fiercely as they crashed through the potholes peppering Kinshasa's roads.
The blinking tail lights that had protected many children were now either missing or broken.
While many castoffs products from rich Western countries found new use in Africa, the ripped T-shirts, faintly treaded shoes and old computers hadn't had their original use quite as thoroughly inverted as the yellow school bus: Yellow buses symbolised safety and restraint on American roads. Not here in the DRC.
'Congolese cherished the buses'
Alfonse Musambu, a 39-year-old pastor of a Kinshasa church called The Chandeliers of Gold, said: "This bus is all about speed. Pedestrians are used to it. They know how to get out of the way."
An American might be horrified at the sight, but the Congolese cherished the buses for their pace and durability.
Bruce Kingambo was barely able to move, stuffed with more than 100 people and their baggage in a 60-seater yellow school bus. Squashed between a cane basket of smelly fresh fish and a cardboard carton of milk powder, he was thankful for the ride.
"Transport is a big problem in the city. The yellow buses help regular people get around," said A 25-year-old Kingambo, who had taken the bus to Kinshasa's main market, where he hawked used clothes, everyday for the past two years.
The yellow buses first arrived in the early 1980s in what was then called Zaire, ran by the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whose government imported the vehicles from America to ferry civil servants to work.
Those vehicles crumbled under the neglect and corruption that characterised life under Sese Seko, who took power in a 1965 coup d'etat and ruled for 32 years before fleeing ahead of a rebel advance on Kinshasa.
US sell buses for $2 000
Now, private entrepreneurs were bringing in the buses.
According to Jeff Cohen, sales manager at Sonny Merryman Inc, the Rustburg, Virginia company that sold the yellow buses to Kinshasa-based Nasser Trans, said most of the DRC's new generation of yellow buses came from Virginia or Maryland.
Cohen's company sold used yellow buses to African and South American enterprises, usually after a decade of service to American schools. The buses cost about $2 000 in the DRC; a new one would cost 40 times that.
The DRC also imported buses from Europe, but mechanics here said the Americans were sturdier.
Nasser Trans owned 200 yellow buses, but only shipped 40 of them to the DRC. John Tokandji, director of finance and administration at the company's Kinshasa office, said the rest were waiting in North Carolina.
He said: "There are political problems in our country. Maybe we will bring them after the elections, if things calm down."
A presidential runoff was scheduled in October after a first round ended with gunfights between the top two vote-getters that illustrated the volatility of a nation that had never known democratic rule.
The buses, which could also be seen in other African countries like Nigeria, mostly operated in the DRC's capital. The city of about eight million had most of the 500km of paved road in a country the size of America's east of the Mississippi.
Spare parts for the buses were a problem, but Nasser Trans chief mechanic Jules Biba addressed it in typical Congolese fashion: improvisation.
Biba said: "Sometimes we lack a brake pad so we bend some scrap metal and use that. But, it's not an ideal solution."
- AP