The hump love affair

I recognise this sounds a bit dodgy for a title, but I can’t find a better way of describing the thing that Ugandans seem to have with road humps. I’ll explain.

A bit of road-related theoretical background first. In my personal classification I would divide the local roads into two basic types. Road Type no.1 – tarmac/paved road. Often (though admittedly not always) full of potholes and crumbled on the sides, all these obstacles naturally slowing down every vehicle (although some drivers still seem to try to fly over a 1m wide and 30 cm deep pothole).

Road Type no. 2 – dirt road. Those can be easily recognized by a dusty cloud hovering above them (and dust grains in between your teeth when you pass through) during dry weather; or as something between an extremely slippery muddy sledge and a freshly ploughed field (proportion of these two ingredients in the final result varying according to the number of vehicles trying to pass - not always successfully) in rainy weather.

(Then there is also a third road type: river. You can obtain it by putting together any road, heavy rain and blocked sewage and drainage systems.)

True, every now and then you also come across the near-surreal experience of a smooth new/repaired road, without holes or cracks (though undoubtedly the lifespan of a smooth dirt road is just until the first heavy downpour, upon which it is promptly converted into a ploughed muddy field).

In any case, however, an essential complement of any road, especially within the proximity of a city/village, is The Hump. Or even better, Many Humps. Let me make this clear: humps are EVERYWHERE. To counterweigh the unexpected and potentially lethal surface smoothness.

And what should a Real Proper Hump be like? The golden rule is simple – the bigger, the better. Because of course – size matters, at least with humps. I have not seen such giant humps in my life before – sometimes they reach up to my knees!

And if you can’t make it big, at least make it steep. If it can rise from the road at a 90 degree-angle, you've done a great job. Quantity matters, too – groups of three or four humps are usually preferred.

I say usually preferred, because once I lived through an infernal bus ride through several KILOMETRES with a hump every 50 metres (no joking). They were repairing the road, and obviously this hump density was deemed optimal for the situation.

And of course you find humps on muddy roads, too.

Besides, humps don’t mushroom only on new or recently repaired roads. New humps also magically appear without any warning from one day to another on just any road of choice, old or new, muddy or paved, with holes or without; which must make it especially hilarious for that part of Ugandan drivers who don’t look more than 1.5m ahead of them when they drive (i.e. nearly all of them).

A freshly-made muddy hump

Needless to say that given the quality of the work, many humps simply droll off to half of their size in matter of weeks, in which case they are replaced by another – normally twice as big and steep as the original – hump.

Hmph. Now it might seem that I’m a very anti-hump person. Errr - no, I'm not. You don't need to spend too much time observing the traffic around to realize that humps are really a life-saving device. They seem to be the only power on earth which can make the Ugandan drivers slow down from their normally breakneck speed (even if it’s only 2 metres before and after the hump).

Perhaps more than a love affair, the Hump Obsession is probably a love-hate relationship born out of necessity, after all.