Skip to main content

Donkey cart accident

Donkey carts are ubiquitous in village life. They're like the jalopies of South Africa. Nearly everyone's got one (or three), they're rickety, and the kids beat the everlovin tar out of the things. Some of the donkeys in the traces are treated with relative kindness (usually by older men who seem to know how to train animals), but far too often I see people, usually younger boys, literally flaying the hide off their beasts. They seem to get the idea that if one is driving a cart, one must be constantly flogging: standing up, brandishing the whip in a sweeping circle, leaning into each stroke. I've seen boys drive their carts into the ditch, forcing their friends to get out and lead the donkeys backwards, still maintaining the constant whipping.

The other day walking across the bridge I saw one such boy coasting down the hill to the bridge at a good clip. One of his donkeys—on the right in the picture—either stumbled or came out of the harness and was run over by the cart. The axle passed over its hips, pinning it to the ground.  I went over to help, and found the cart much heavier than I was expecting.  Many carts are made of the removed bed of a bakkie (pickup truck), usually stripped down and half rusted through, and are therefore relatively light.  You can see in the picture this one is made out of welded plate steel.  It was incredibly heavy.  I'm pretty strong (for a PCV anyway), and it was nearly all I (with the help of some Grade 4s) could do to lift the thing and shift it enough to allow the donkey to squirm out.

Luckily the donkey's legs didn't seem to be broken, and so the boy just strapped it back in and, with a few blows of the whip, they were back on their way.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...