The Dusty Lands of VaCongolaise
I slept like a dead man. Not that I felt dead; I was curved like a handball at the back of the bus, my knees digging into my ribcage – breathing was becoming a luxury I was too crammed in to afford. There was simply not enough space to stretch my legs so I could enjoy my fitful sleep. The soil at the Kasumbalesa Border – which separates the Zambians from the Congolese – is so fine a conman could succeed in selling it off to you as cement. As the buses and gonyetis ooze towards the exit point from the Zambian side, their tyres are actually buried halfway in the quicksand-like clayey-loam; leaving soft ditches and raising enough dust to bleach everything and everybody in the 5km radius of the national boundary. I think I may have told some of my friends that the Beitbridge Border town is the worst pace I have ever been to. But now that I have been here, I can apparently see how so wrong I was – Kasumbalesa will beat them all systems down. Ignorant that their place