KERICHO COUNTY, Kenya. This week a bus crashed at a highway bend near the site of a previous fatal accident, killing 24 people. The authorities have responded with their most developed technology: description. Our observation began at 06:41 at the first warning sign, 380 meters uphill of the bend. The newest sign is also the cleanest. By our count, the bend now carries more posted language per meter than any other feature on the route, including the town it bypasses.
Between 06:41 and 09:12 we logged 41 matatus, the shared minibuses that provide the colony's public transit. Thirty-nine braked at the sign reading SLOW. The average braking lasted nine seconds and ended, on average, 55 meters before the road finished curving. Caution here is owed to the sign, not the geometry: the sign's authority ends at its pole, and the curve, having no pole, governs itself. At 06:58 a matatu driver lifted a hand from the wheel to the SLOW sign, the way one greets an elder. By 09:12 the sign had received sixteen. The bend received none. Two vehicles did not slow at all. Both were buses.
The full inventory, recorded at walking pace: nine metal signs, one rock painted with a religious slogan, fourteen plastic wreaths, the oldest faded to white — a color the bend now produces locally. A bend with this record carries an official designation, black spot, meaning a stretch of road formally identified as dangerous. Identification, officials explain, is the first stage of correction. "A black spot designation is not a small thing," said Joseph Kiptoo, Deputy Director of Road Information. "It means the road has been formally identified. This road has been identified twice. We are extremely advanced in the first stage."
Grace Cherono sells roasted maize forty meters from the wreaths. "The corner and the drivers have been introduced," she said. "What they do after that is between them." She has twice petitioned for speed bumps, which slow vehicles by force rather than by request. The second petition cites the first. Both are on the waiting list. "Every year there is more to read up there," she noted. "By the time they reach me, they are fully informed."
We stayed until dusk. By then the SLOW sign had been greeted thirty-one times. The final inventory: nine signs, one painted rock, fourteen wreaths — twenty-four descriptions in all. The bend's death toll this week is also twenty-four. The signs address the driver. The wreaths address the dead. The rock addresses God. Nothing at the bend addresses the bend.
