Kudu Shit

This past week I left the confines of Gobabis and went up north to Otjiwarongo for the Ministry of Youth’s Annual Plannery Meeting (as far as I know, ‘plannery’ is not an actual word but the Namibian government seems to think it is). The week-long enlightened me to the politics of working within the Ministry and allowed me to solicit some much needed advice from the four PCVs who have been working in the Ministry for the past year. But the most interesting event of the past week was the car accident I was in.

Last Sunday, I boarded a bus along with four other PCVs and about twenty colleagues from the Ministry. When we were less than an hour outside of Otjiwarongo, the driver of the bus began rapidly breaking. I looked up just in time to see the front window cave in before I braced myself and ducked down. We had hit a kudu. For those who do not know what a kudu is (nearly all of you I would suppose), a kudu is a large deer-like creature that is about the size of an okapi or slightly bigger than an elk. So if you imagine hitting an elk at about 120 km/hr, that’s what it felt like to hit this kudu.

The kudu apparently jumped into the bus from the right-hand side of the road. It hit our front windshield, and then wrapped its body around the right side of the bus hitting the driver’s window and the front safety window which popped out at the impact. When the window popped out, it presented an excellent opportunity for the kudu to release its bowels throughout the bus. So by the time we all got out, we were covered in kudu shit (I’ve never been so happy to have sanitizing wipes with me!). At the time of impact, a small truck was approaching from the right lane. When we hit the kudu, it bounced off our bus and into the right lane where the truck then hit it and dragged it for a few meters. The kudu broke the trucks front axle before it laid to rest along the side of the road.

Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured in this accident. We were extremely lucky. If our driver had reacted differently, the accident surely would have been fatal. If we had veered into the right lane, we would have suffered from a head-on collision with the truck and if we had gravitated even a few more inches to the left, the bus would have rolled down the steep embankment and tumbled to rest a few feet below.

We sent a few people to the hospital in passing cars (a baby who wouldn’t stop fussing and a woman who was six-months pregnant and had gone into shock), dressed the cut on the drivers head, and bandaged the few scrapes a few people had. Considering the fact that it took the ambulance an hour and a half to arrive on the scene, we are tremendously fortunate that none of the injuries were serious.

However, if hitting the kudu weren’t excitement enough, we quickly discovered that the passerby who stopped to witness the scene were more interested in stealing the dead kudu than they were in assisting the injured. People here seem to prize roadkill meats (perhaps because game is so expensive). One van actually pulled up next to the kudu so that its passengers could load it into their car. The Ministry officials rushed over, scolded the people for ‘stealing the evidence,’ and removed the kudu from the van. I believe that the police eventually ‘stole’ the kudu; they likely enjoyed a nice braai (barbeque) that evening.

To make the incident ironic, the Ministry sent down a car from Otjiwarongo to ‘rescue’ us. While attempting to overtake a slower car, that Ministry car was in a head-on collision. So it was not a good day for the Ministry. We sat in a field alongside the road for over two hours before finally loading up into the back of trucks to finish the trek to Otjiwarongo. The sun was setting so all the wildlife were out to enjoy the cool afternoon weather. I saw more kudu on that short ride into Otjiwarongo than I have seen in all my months here in Namibia. Of course, now seeing kudu on the side of the road makes me a bit more nervous than it used to.