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and Angwa areas in Mbire. The four occupants spend 10 days trying to remove it in a drama-filled incident, where wild animals are on the prowl. Swatting Tse Tse flies, fear, hunger, fatigue and resilience take centre stage but the vehicle could not just get out of the mud, until the 10th day. Isdore Guvamombe caught up with the stranded men on their last day.
NO shops, no human habitat! No communication signals, no drinking water, no gates and no fences. The night is always pitch black only being lit intermittently by fireflies.
This is a perfect theatre of concrete jungle, epitomised by thick woodlands, swamps, wetlands and wild animals. Every minute you spend outside a car is an express invitation for death.
The haulage truck – a hissing and puffing monster – hobbles, dithers and tithers on a rough dirty road past a wedge of hillocks of surprisingly varied vegetation that sustains a wealth of wildlife, nourished by bursting and chattering rivers bolting out of the Zambezi Escarpment and gushing towards the Indian Ocean.
Beaten, clogged, ruptured, tattered and torn, the gravel road is now a shadow of its good self, as its crown has seen better days of being lacerated by heavy rains, year after year and being consequently straddled by heavy wheels.
There are four awe-struck occupants in the horse cabin – the driver and three owners of the consignment – who are determined to get to Kanyemba Border Post in Mbire and cross their goods over the Zambezi River for a yawning market of guzzlers on the Zambian side.
But the 30-tonne truck fully-loaded with crates of beer destined for Luangwa District, struggles to negotiate an array of mud-ruts on a road that has become badly damaged by a combination of heavy-rains induced flooding and non-maintenance over the years.
As the sun buries itself beyond the silhouette western horizon, there is every need to get out of the wildlife-infested 77 km stretch left between Angwa and Kanyemba communal lands, euphemistically referred to as Dande North Safari Area.
The driver realises the odds are against him especially considering the lions, elephants and gnu that he has so far bumped into in broad daylight. Night beckons.
But the driver is still determined to go until he comes to a waterlogged mess, just after the turn-off to Mupedzapasi Hunting Camp at nightfall.
The truck gets stuck in the mud and its huge engine rumbles and roars as the driver tries every trick in his bag, without success.
At the end the huge truck blocks the road as the driver tries every trick again and again until the truck get really stuck.
No other vehicle can pass and there is no alternative route in the highly temperamental wilderness, famed for stories of lions eating human beings.
The next 10 days craft a story of sadness and suffering as tractors and other vehicles fail to pull out the lorry and traffic remains blocked and the road impassible.
The driver and the occupants surrender to their fate, at least for the night.
Hunger, fatigue and frolicking wild animals make life worse.
The spine-chilling cries of stressed leopards, mooing buffalo, roaring lions, wallowing hyenas, howling jackals and strange shrieks and quacks stab the night intermittently spiced by heavy downpours.
Working on the vehicle is equally difficult, some people have to be working on the vehicle while one is a sentinel watching out for wild animals. Hair-raising wild sounds continue!
“This is the third time we got stuck in the mud within a space of 10km. This consignment should have long been delivered, but here we are.
“This has been a bad 10 days in the wilderness. Answering the call of nature had become quite a fuss. You don’t know which animal would attack you.
“Herds of elephant and buffalo constantly turn up in huge numbers. A leopard came two nights in a row, prowling in the shadows looking for an opportunity. We huddled in the cabin.
“One of us had to keep up as sentinel on top of vehicle while we cut logs, put stones and dug our way out,” said a frustrated Alex Mayani.
The four men survived on food, water and drink handouts from travellers who failed to pass through and decided to go back either way.
When they eventually managed to retrieve the vehicle, they sighed relief but they still had another 50km of bad road to cover the haulage truck needed to travel all the way back to Harare, through the same route.
God willing, they made it.
The damage on the roads in Mbire is a footprint of the perennial flooding that takes place in the Zambezi Valley, and has not been countered by road maintenance work.
Most of the places on the roads have developed deep gullies that one could easily mistake for fish-ponds and the driver, who has now removed his shirt, continues to negotiate one swampy place after another.
“Road have become our major challenge. The story you talk about these guys getting stuck is one of many others incidents that happen every time.
We no longer have any roads to talk about in this part of the world.
“We wish Government surrenders the running and maintenance of the roads to us as Mbire district council so that we deal with it. This is a State road in bad shape and you can imagine the volume of business lost because of the incidents.
“As council our hands are tied because it a Ministry of Transport road. There are four such roads in this district which need attention because buses are dropping off people far away from their destinations. Some buses have even abandoned their routes,” said Doro Koni, the chairman of Mbire Rural District Council.
Meanwhile, about 50 km away, villagers in chief Chapoto, that vast swathe of land at the confluence of Zambezi, Mwanzamutanda and Luangwa rivers scamper for cover on high ground having fallen victim to flash floods, as usual.
This is just a tip of the iceberg.
Villagers in the entire Zambezi Valley in the northern most part of Zimbabwe from Mbire to Dande and Muzarabani are susceptible to flooding and year in year out, villagers find themselves facing flooding.
Geographically, the villagers stay in the floodplain of the Zambezi River, where Hunyani, Dande, Kadzi, Mururuzi, Musengezi, Hoya, Kadzi, Nzoumvunda and Mwanzamutanda rivers form major tributaries.
Once the Zambezi bursts its banks, these rivers find it difficult to offload their baggage and are forced to throw back, causing serious flooding.
While Government has acquired early warning satelite equipment, the solution is to encourage the villagers to permanently stay on high ground.
The perennial habit of riverbank cultivation and floodplain occupation is what has caused deaths in the past.
The roads have become a big issue as most of the areas are no longer accessible and until there is an urgent intervention, the villagers’ health, education and other services remain severely compromised.
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