road safety

Baba waDanai pulls out his Blackberry. On the screen, the red 4 x 4 is crumpled.

"It rolled three times," he says. "I have to keep pinching myself to see if I'm alive."

He was with four colleagues on a business trip, he says. They were on the road to Chimanimani. It was 8 at night, a bad time to travel. These days there are cattle on the roads, cars without lights, broken-down tractors. At the 24-kilometre peg Baba waDanai had only time to scream: "Watch out." The driver saw the dark shape of the stationary lorry, swerved, clipped the side....

"If he hadn't, we'd have gone under it," he says.

Zimbabwe's roads are deadly. This week alone there have been three kombi crashes, leaving more than 60 dead. At the agency, we used to report on road tolls when the number of victims was more than 10: in Zimbabwe, less than 20 and it's no longer news. President Robert Mugabe's health advisor Timothy Stamps told the Herald last month that you're 50 times more likely to die in a road accident in this part of Africa than in the West. Potholes, alcohol, clapped-out vehicles and the simple fact that you can buy your licence (and your way through police roadblocks if you haven't bothered to take even that simple step) might have something to do with it. Poor pay kills too: a kombi driver gets just 180 US per month. The quicker he gets back to base, the sooner he can load more passengers and the bigger his commission.

The video on Baba waDanai's Blackberry rolls on. He shows us a tiny scratch on his wrist. "I got out and thought I must have internal injuries. I thought I was going to die." His wife stands hugely pregnant next to him. "Did he call you?" I ask.

"At 1 in the morning," she says. "From the clinic. You can imagine how I felt."