The Speed Bump Philosophy

My father used to have a blue car, a Peugeot 404 station wagon. We were all fond of that car in the family because it was the car we grew up knowing. My big brother and I got our first driving lessons in that car while we were still in primary school. It used to be parked in a wall-less shed just next to our house and since those were safe times and we lived in a safe area, it was relatively safe. One day however, a thief came in the night, broke into the car, and stole the battery. When my brother tried to start the car so that we could go to church (it was a Sunday morning), he realised that the battery was missing. He went to ask my father where he had placed the battery and that made my father very angry.

We all became sleuths in trying to unravel the mystery of the stolen battery. I am the one who discovered where the battery had been taken out through the fence by following grease marks left on the barbed wire (I used to watch Derrick on TV and was a really good detective). I even discovered a rungu (club) which we suspected was left behind by the thief since he needed both hands to carry the battery.

Needless to say, we didn’t go to church that Sunday. After all the investigations had been done and my father’s temper mellowed, he declared that he was going to teach the thief a lesson he would never forget. It was unanimously decided by the family that the thief had made a grievous mistake of robbing none other than us. Everybody seemed to agree (for some strange reason) that the thief was going to try and pay us another visit. Well, this time he was not going to catch us by surprise. We would be waiting for him.

My father used to have one of those traps used for catching animals from the time he was a forester and hunter. He decided that he would set it up on the floor of the car just under the steering wheel. We expected the thief to touch it and get caught for us to find him writhing in pain when we came to check our trap the next day. After serious consideration and brainstorming among the family members, we realised that there was a risk of the thief failing to touch the trap thereby managing to steal the new battery and escape without getting caught. My father again came up with another brilliant addition to the already brilliant idea. We would attach the car keys to the spring plate so as to entice the thief to pick them up. On further consideration, we removed the ignition and door keys from the bunch so that the thief didn’t just decide to drive off with the whole car.

My brother and I were tasked with setting up our “clever” booby trap everyday for many months after that but we didn’t catch the thief. Neither did we lose another battery. We did however become quite adept at setting the animal trap in record time and in a very constricted space. The car was stolen a few years later from a parking lot in Nairobi city and was never seen again. I guess we focussed so much on battery thieves and forgot all about car thieves.

When we had all grown up, my brother and I took a lot of road trips and we would have interesting discussions as we drove along. A major difference we always noticed was the big number of speed bumps along our Kenyans roads unlike when we would drive with our father many years before. We observed that you couldn’t drive fast on any road for two reasons. Either it was full of pot holes, or full of speed bumps. We could never agree on which the lesser evil was between the two. One thing my brother once mentioned comes to mind every time I see a speed bump. He said, “A bump in Kenya is like a tribute to a person who must have been knocked down and killed on the spot where that bump is.”

The ‘Speed bump philosophy’ is popular in all the political decisions made in Kenya. It is this same philosophy that has inspired the proposed security bill, the great wall of Kenya, the botched and re-botched police recruitment exercise, the stepping-aside of senior public officers, and the proposed shut down of the Dadaab Refugee camp. I don’t like bumps, political or otherwise. I think they force me to drive slowly on a perfectly good road, beating the purpose of building it in the first place. They also remind me that having good roads as Kenyans does not make us safer drivers. They are a constant reminder of our failure to make fundamental changes in our attitudes to be at par with our infrastructure.

P.S. My younger sister and I did not regret so much the loss of the battery, but for a rain coat that the thief also stole from the car (ostensibly as a cushion for carrying the battery). A few days earlier, we had discovered a bar of chocolate in the coat and had eaten part of it. We had not finished it for fear of being discovered and now we always wish we had eaten all of it.