South Africa’s grim death toll that won’t slow down

Just before Easter a paramedic told me the toughest part of his job was trying to comfort children who had been hurt — sometimes badly — in car crashes and were screaming for their mothers.

“Every hurt kid wants its mother,” he said, and trailed off.

Hard for a stranger to comfort a crying, frightened, hurt child while its parents are trapped, unconscious, bleeding, dead in what used to be the family car.

So another bloody, wreckage-strewn “holiday” weekend draws to an end.

Two children killed in a rolled SUV.

Two more — and their mother — thrown from the back of a rolling bakkie and into eternity.

And 45 pilgrims crushed or burnt to death in a bus plummeting 50m off a bridge.

Crushed metal. Snapped bones. Broken glass. Pools of oil and coolant and blood. Fire-scorched tar. Battered crash barriers. Crying children. Screaming adults. Black smoke in the sky. Red lights. Blue lights. Sad paramedics. Grim-faced cops. Foil sheets covering the dead, gleaming in the flashing lights.

Then the phone calls, sometimes in the small hours of the night, after which life will never be the same.

The bus crash made international headlines. “South Africa has one of the continent’s best road networks … and one of its highest death tolls,” said one correspondent.

“Everybody’s angry on the roads,” said a taxi driver to me. “They leave home looking for road rage.”

“They are all in a hurry,” said a man who trains truck drivers. “And for what? To save 10 minutes? Five minutes?”

When the first railways came to Britain, some people were afraid to travel on them. They were afraid of the sheer velocity of these works of the devil. They feared being asphyxiated by the rushing train.

Speed kills, they said.

Then came the motor car. And they were proved right, over and over again.