Over a minimal but slick paint job, a matatu is customized through a combination of social icon photographs from American pop-culture performers to Osama Bin Laden, decaled catch phrases, character names or religious messages, and on a select few, fixed ornaments like a basketball hoop.
The interior is—if not more so—as ghetto as the exterior. Pastel ceiling cushions, soul-print seat covers, red and yellow tinted windows, as well as flashing neon and track lighting that culminate around a flat LCD television screen screaming hip-hop and afro-fusion (traditional instrumentation fused with rap or reggae) music videos through a theater-style speaker setup.
“Fifteen hundred?” Tyler scowled at the nearest driver. “The most I ever paid was seven hundred.” He turned to me. “We’ll just take a matatu.”
An earshot taxi driver cut us off. “Where do you want to go?”
“How much is it to Doonholm?” Tyler asked, exhausted and frustrated.
“Eight hundred—because of the time.” Traffic is bumper to bumper; a fifteen minute ride can take upwards an hour depending on the driver.
“Fine,” Tyler yielded and set the tripod and boom pole in the trunk. The driver pointed to my camera backpack.
“No, this stays with me.”
With Tyler at shogun, I slouched on the backseat beside the camera and unwrapped the last of three chocolate bars, revisiting a scene from Kibera earlier in the week.
“How are you?” A young boy asked leaning against the concrete barricade of an overpass. He toyed with rubrics cube and spoke with a high-pitched voice. Children everywhere throughout the Kibera greet and repeat, “How are you?” as if pre-recorded and automated, sometimes screaming from great distances.
“Fine. How are you?” I answered nicely walking past him and only glimpsing him from the corner of my eye.
The child dropped the toy box to his waist and quizzically peeked at me. “Una kula waru?” He asked himself.
Victor chuckled beside me, carrying the camera tripod. “Do you know what he thought you said?”
“No. What?” I swapped hands with the camera.
“He thought you said, ‘Fine. I eat potatoes.’”
“What?”
“'Una kula waru’ sounds like ‘How are you?’ in Swahili and means, ‘I eat potatos.’”
I laughed and the taxi abruptly slammed the brakes, but not before bumping the bus ahead of us. With traffic literally bumper to bumper and side mirror to side mirror, the damage would be minimal.
Our first accident, I thought. It was bound to happen. SLAM.
Our heads whipped forward then back. The camera pack bounced and wedged itself between the driver seat’s back and the rear cushion.
“Are you alright?” Tyler asked immediately.
Surprisingly, the impact didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I was grinning. “I’m good—great actually. How are you?”
“My neck is a little sore, but I’m fine.”
A matatu crushed the passenger-side taillight and collapsed the trunk. I joined the driver outside and forcibly retrieved the stowed gear from the now sunken metal frame. No damage fortunately.
The traffic policeman rushed over, assessed the damage and passed judgment on the matatu driver.
The matatu conductor serves many roles besides retrieving less than 1USD worth of fare from each passenger. He frequently hangs to the roof leaning out from the side sliding door whistling at bystanders and hollering route and destination, banging the van with a fist alerting the driver to stops or danger. During heavy traffic, he spots the driver skimming centimeters from adjacent vehicles forcing his way across imaginary lanes, where one lane can become three.
The driver is a breed of adrenaline junky and arguably an artist helmsman. He makes driving a van cool despite its ghetto appearance, cutting into oncoming traffic, riding over cratered shoulders or pedestrian packed sidewalks while honking a warning to all for the sake of position. The matatu universe is one where any negotiable space is traversable; and where space seemingly does not exist, it is created. There is no regard for traffic law, if there is such a thing.
Like in the wrecked taxi we ditched, I found myself settled on a backseat, this time hugging the camera pack to my chest squeezed between two other passengers inside an over-capacity matatu. The rear tunnel perspective provided an accentuated sensation of movement no different than one experienced from the trailing car on a rollercoaster. An alternating red and blue neon light in conjunction with a deafening beat of 50 Cent further heightened my sense of absurdity over the driver’s power weaving and the van’s rebounding in and out of pot-holes.
Una kula waru?
I smiled and enjoyed the ride. Damn, I’m having fun.
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