Two wheels, eight legs

Building materials are notoriously awkward to move around: they’re so heavy and bulky that transport is often a real problem, especially for the small builder.

Kinshasa has solved this problem with the environmentally friendly solution of hand carts. These typically have two large car wheels, and a metal box body into, and onto, which the materials are placed. At the back and the front are large handles to push and pull the load.

One can’t help feeling sorry for the operators of these vehicles. There are two problems. One is that the cart, having two wheels, needs to be kept level. With a heavy load there’s often a tendency for it to overbalance and for one end to be stuck on the road. You’ll see a little man (they all seem to be little, the hand-cart pushers) trying to bring down his end of the cart, his feet dangling uselessly in the air.

The more serious problem is that they might have a load of a ton or more, and find themselves stuck in a pothole, or have a hill to negotiate. For heavy loads there is often a crew of four, but even so they sometimes have to enlist the power of passers-by to negotiate the obstacle.

From the employment generation point of view, this is clearly a wonderful solution. It’s also obviously a very green solution: no carbon emissions here.

But from the traffic point of view it’s disastrous. There’s a six lane highway to the airport, and often there’ll be huge jams caused by nothing more than one such hand cart. And when one hand cart, laboriously overtakes another, there’s an even bigger jam.

You would expect motorists to be furious about this, but no: I have never seen a menacing hand being shaken out of a car window, nor heard an angry horn. They take these blockages as they come – part of the day-to-day reality of life on the roads of Kinshasa.

In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that they’re slow and can carry only a limited amount of goods, the system works. Materials are delivered to all corners of the city, to houses in tiny lanes and streets that are nothing more than rural tracks. A door-to-door service for loads big and small. One can’t help thinking that this 18^th century technology still has value today.