A blinding lack of trust

By Daniel Knowles

Driving at night is difficult everywhere in the world. As the sun comes down, the light gets in your eyes; as darkness spreads, your peripheral vision shrinks. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, however, being on the roads as night feels more than just testing; it feels positively dangerous. According to data from the World Health Organisation, of the ten countries with the most traffic deaths relative to population, eight are in Africa and Kenya is among them. Given that most Africans still live in the countryside, where hardly anyone owns a car, that is particularly terrifying.

Some problems are simply those of a developing country: the roads are potholed and there isn’t much street lighting, so pedestrians run across the highway in the dark. But the main reason is that as you crawl along, half of the time you cannot see the road ahead of you, because of the blinding dazzle of oncoming cars, all driving with their headlights, foglights and any other lights they might have proudly on full beam. How does any reasonable driver react to this situation? Well if the reasonable driver is anything like me, he puts his headlights on full too.