Road-rage in the traffic jungle: I have a cunning plan

One of the great sins of the modern era surely is road rage. I haven’t gone beyond venial sin territory yet, never quite having got to the point of hanging out of my car window and waving a sawn-off shotgun at errant drivers who get up my nose far enough to provoke a mortal sin retaliation.

But giving in to venting my automotive spleen with predictable regularity has weighted so heavily on my conscience that I have devoted a considerable amount of time and Irish whiskey to seeking a solution.

My cunning plan is to shift a couple of paradigms.

The first is to accept that South Africa is not a First World traffic environment of well behaved drivers kept in check by rigidly enforced rules and regulations. Our traffic environment is motoring mayhem at its worst. Not quite as chaotic as Cairo, but getting there fast. A situation where rules are there to be broken and the big trick is simply not to get caught.

This is a country in which economic considerations outweigh road death statistics.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I am going to start breaking the rules whenever I can. I am not going to accept that the rules of the road are things that are imposed upon me, but rather instruments I can use to keep myself from being wiped out by other road users. Because, when you think of it, a lot of road rage is caused by watching powerlessly as other drivers blatantly break the rules.

Secondly, every time I get into my car I am going to imagine that I am in the Kruger National Park.

I am going to drive at a pace sedate enough not to run over (or have my paintwork damaged by) all those crazy guinea fowl that always seem to wait for an oncoming vehicle before scurrying across the road—like all those pedestrians who dice with death on a daily basis trying to run across motorways.

To me, there are no buses—only elephants; no big trucks—only rhinos; no combi taxis—only herds and herds of impala, mindlessly springing hither then thither and rushing about desperately looking for somewhere to commit suicide.

There will be no more idiots hogging the fast lane at two miles a fortnight. Only the odd warthog trotting along in the same direction as I am, oblivious to all but its own strange little world.

There will be no more cyclists riding five abreast; only waterbuck with circular white saddlemarks on their bottoms. No more delivery motorbikes; only wild dogs with their strange but fascinating penchant for snapping at car tyres.

I’ve been trying it for a week now and it works a treat. I just go into bush driving mode.

I feel as if I am on my way back to “camp“ after a day of animal spotting and bird watching, and all I want is a cool shower and a whacking great whiskey.

I get into the kind of mood where I couldn’t care less if I never saw another rhino with or without its prehensile lip, nor if I ever spotted another wailing cisticola as long as I lived.

I’ve been in that kind of mood when I’ve come up behind the umpteenth herd of elephant standing in the middle of the road. I don’t lean out of the window and yell: “What are you waiting for, you bunch of morons? Do you think you own the @#*& road or something?”, and then start thumping the steering wheel with such passion I can’t hold a golf club for a week.

No, I simply assume that elephants don’t have the foggiest notion about the concept of motorised road transport.

My lack of road rage in this case has nothing to do with the fact that when you swear at an elephant it tends to stomp on you, because that’s what buses and trucks do as well. But somehow it hasn’t prevented me in the past from letting rip with a string of ripe invective in their direction.

This might all look like giving up and lowering my standards. I don’t believe so. It is simply a compromise in a country where the road traffic authorities harp on endlessly with “Don’t fool yourself, speed kills”, and completely ignore the fact that unlicensed and untrained drivers, unroadworthy vehicles, bald tyres, incorrect following distance, overtaking in the face of oncoming traffic and a million other things also kill people on the roads.

Fact is, it is quite literally a jungle out there. And like any jungle, it has its temptations, not the least of which is an overwhelming desire to move from venial verbal abuse to full-blown, no-holds-barred, murderously mortal stuff.