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"Super Fly" hurtled along two-lane Waiyaki Way at about 60 m.p.h., pumping out thick black smoke and listing like a troubled ship on the high seas.
The vehicle, a tiny pickup with a camperlike compartment for passengers, swayed dangerously, first to the right and then to the left, as the driver skirted yawning potholes. The bald rear tires were splayed by the weight of maize meal and firewood strapped to the roof.
Behind the driver, 14 passengers sat on facing benches. On their laps were more passengers. In the narrow aisle were still more passengers, standing hunched beneath the low ceiling.
"Super Fly" is one of the thousands of privately owned vehicles that speed along Kenya's ragged roads, ferrying people to work, to market and then home again. They are called matatus, and they are the backbone of the country's public transportation system.
Sometimes Deadly
Fast, plentiful and inexpensive, they are the free-market answer to the lack of buses and the high cost of taxicabs in this East African country. But they are also poorly maintained, usually overloaded-and sometimes deadly.
On a recent weekend, the "Omosaria Express," a matatu van carrying nearly twice its legal limit of 30 passengers, ran off a road in western Kenya and overturned, killing eight persons. A survivor, Joel Okongoo Mwebi, said the driver lost control as he and others were discussing a matatu accident on the road a few days earlier in which two persons had been killed.
An hour later in the same area, a matatu struck and injured a pedestrian. It was chased by a crowd of angry witnesses, and as the driver tried to speed away he lost control and his matatu overturned, killing a passenger.
Every week there are...