Growing up in Zambia, I often travelled by minibus, the main mode of public transportation. I was always amazed and quite ashamed for doing nothing about the way the conductor, ‘call boy’ in common parlance, would collaborate with the driver to terrorise an entire busload of adults. The two villains had the power of a monarch over everybody at bus stations and in the buses.
The situation was worse during the rush hour when workers were either going to or returning from work. With buses in short supply, people struggled to get into whatever moveable assemblage of machine passed for a road vehicle. The historic humiliation suffered by many Zambians at the hands of bus drivers and call boys would make for a good PhD study!
The question that bothered me then, and still does now, is: how does it come to pass that physically fit and mentally sound adults would cower before a young, scruffy call boy simply because of his official role? As for women and girls, the abuse that was heaped upon them by this breed of lower end workers was simply abominable.
Occasionally, a passenger would rant against either the bus driver or the conductor. But these were the exception rather than the rule. Typically, the passengers cowered before these two. The bus driver and his conductor were the lords of the bus.
Today, as an adult, I have, I think, acquired some measure of understanding of why and how many people chose to be abused and intimidated by bus drivers and their conductors. It is the simple fact that each person got onto the bus as an individual – one would never be sure of the solidarity of all the other passengers in the event of a tussle with the bus driver and his conductor.
On the other hand, the conductor was almost always sure of the full support of his bus driver. He knew very well that the bus driver could easily offload any passenger who refused to do his bidding. He knew too that whatever extra money he made by overloading the bus would be split between the two of them, with the bus driver of course getting the lion’s share.
On the other hand, the passengers, who were many and had more money between them than the bus driver and his conductor, precisely because they boarded the bus as individuals and cared not to gang up against the bus driver and his conductor, ended up with no power over the bus driver and his conductor. Thus, it came to pass that those two individuals, the bus driver and his call boy, oppressed and abused the majority, who collectively had more financial and other power than them, precisely because the two acted as a team.
Over time, of course, the bus drivers and their call boys came to regard themselves as being “powerful” over their passengers, and passengers came to accept their lot as individuals pleading for a seat in a bus administered by a callboy and his bus driver. And no one would question this extremely strange, lopsided, and quite false distribution of power, in a bus. In fact, other passengers would support the bus driver and his callboy in the abuse and oppression of fellow passengers by aiding in instructing other passengers to squeeze themselves into horribly uncomfortable positions as the bus was packed beyond legal limits. This usually happened when someone was late and would quite selfishly force other passengers “to move” so that they too could board the overloaded minibus.
In the minibus industry, the real power (money) is in the hands of passengers. If all potential passengers decided not to board minibuses, the minibus industry would collapse. The minibuses move around and make money only because there are people who decide to use them, as a means of transport. Inside the minibus, real social power is in the hands of the passengers as a collective, not as individuals. Passengers in any fully occupied minibus, acting in unison, can easily control the driver and his callboy. They have, when they choose to act as a collective, more physical, mental, and cultural power over the minibus driver and the call boy.
It is the lack of passenger consciousness of their superiority both in monetary and physical terms, and willingness to act as a collective, that produces the false consciousness of superiority and power, in the bus driver and his call boy. The bus driver and his callboy simply suffer from the mental and spiritual disease occasioned by a false sense of power. They have no real power over the passengers. It is the passengers who, unwittingly, have transferred their collective power to these two villains.
It is not too difficult to see how similar laws operate when one considers the situation in many countries today. Let us, for a moment, imagine Zambia as a minibus. Our money would be the vote. The minibus driver would be the president. The call boy would be the political party in power. The passengers are all the citizens of Zambia. When we choose to travel in any minibus, we actually decide at that moment, to be “citizens” of that “bus”, and to “vote” for that bus’s driver, to be our “president”, for the time that we will travel to our destination. The call boy of the bus we choose to travel in becomes the “political party” that organises us inside the bus, as “citizens” or “passengers”.
The call boy and bus driver are at their best persuasive behaviour when they are seeking passengers (votes). As soon as the bus is full, the balance of power shifts. If we choose to act as individuals inside the minibus (our country), the political party in power (call boy) and the president (bus driver) will abuse and oppress us all at will. In fact, if we allow the callboy (political party) to overload (extreme oppression) the bus (country) may crash (conflict or civil war) and many may die, including the driver and his call boy (president and his party)! Inside the bus, just like inside our country, what keeps the majority of people who actually have real power, in their condition of apparent powerlessness, abuse and oppression by a villainous minority is their inability to act as a collective, to be in solidarity with each other.
Thus, the pathology of power is perpetuated – those who actually have no power act and live as if they have power, and those who actually have real power, act and behave all the time as if they are powerless. All oppression and abuse are sustained by this perverse, inverted logic. Of course, vast protective trenches are dug by those who pretend to have power when, in reality, they are the powerless ones: they exploit the media, invoke culture and tradition, call upon the gods, and generally weave a complex false matrix that amounts to a false consciousness of power.
These powerless people create titles and big labels for themselves – Majesties, Excellencies, Lords, Honourable this or that, etc, in their efforts to hoodwink the masses in whom real economic and political power resides into a false sense of obeyance, to them. They manufacture a language and manners which convey to all and sundry, this sense of false power. And precisely because those with real power – the masses – continue to act by and large as individuals, these villains continue to lord it over them. Besides the family, school, church, prisons, and hospitals, there are the police, army, intelligence establishment and all sorts of other institutions to enforce this false power, over those who actually wield the power in society.
To claim the right to use these infrastructures of force in society, these powerless people do need a “Constitution” to clearly spell out why, how, and when they can use force to compel those with real power to behave as the powerless wish. For example, in the minibus, there is a silent unwritten constitution which distributes “power” between the bus driver and his callboy and the passengers. Of course the first Article of this constitution is that you should never enter the bus if you have no money to pay for the ride!
How, then, can the passengers liberate themselves from the abuse and oppression they receive at the hands of the bus driver and his call boy? As in any country, the first step is to understand where actual power resides – in the bus driver and his call boy or the passengers. The obvious answer is in the passengers. The second step is to grow this awareness of power among the passengers and to mobilise solidarity among them, and finally to cast away the fear of the oppressive and abusive villainous minority!
When these three conditions are met – knowledge of where real power lies, mobilisation of solidarity, and casting away the false veil of fear of the oppressors, then, and only then, can the liberation of the oppressed take place. At this point, the abused and oppressed are ready to reclaim their power from the villains.
And of course, at this point, a completely new Constitution can then be written – one which transfers power into the rightful owners – the citizens.
In Zambia today, most of us appear to be quite content to be abused and oppressed by a tiny minority. As long as this situation continues, we are not ready to reclaim our power from the villains.
