Bus Stop: A Faithful Icon Finds a Second Life Overseas

Credit: The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Boxy buses that once carted American schoolchildren now haul the Democratic Republic of Congo's impoverished people, young and old, and their loads of preserved fish, powdered milk, beans, and onions. Charging breakneck around Kinshasa, the yellow buses rattle fiercely as they crash through the potholes peppering the capital's roads. The blinking lights that had protected many a child are now often either missing or broken.

While many castoff products from rich Western countries find new use in Africa, most haven't had their original use quite as thoroughly inverted as the yellow school bus: Yellow buses symbolize safety and restraint on American roads. Not here in Congo.

"This bus is all about speed," says Alfonse Musambu, a pastor, as his bus barrels across Kinshasa. "Pedestrians are used to it. They know how to get out of the way."

Speedometers don't work on many of the buses, but they appear to reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, fairly fast given Kinshasa's traffic and the condition of its roads.

An American might be horrified at the sight. With traffic so chaotic and roads so rutted, safety seems beside the point, but Congolese cherish the buses as comfortable and sturdy, particularly since the alternative for most is dodgy taxi vans or walking.

Credit: The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Bruce Kingambo is barely able to move, stuffed with more than a hundred other people and their baggage in a sixty-seat yellow school bus. Squashed between a cane basket of smelly fresh fish and a cardboard carton of milk powder, he's thankful for the ride.

"The yellow buses help regular people get around," says Kingambo.

Total cost around town: thirty cents.

The yellow buses first arrived in the early 1980s in what was then called Zaire, run by the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whose government imported the vehicles from America to ferry civil servants to work.

Those vehicles crumbled under the neglect and corruption that characterized life under Mobutu, who took power in a 1965 coup d'etat and ruled for thirty-two years before fleeing ahead of a rebel advance on Kinshasa and dying in exile in 1997.

Now private entrepreneurs are bringing in the buses.

Most of Congo's new generation of yellow buses come from Virginia or Maryland, according to Jeff Cohen, sales manager at Sonny Merryman, the Rustburg, Virginia, company that sold the yellow buses to Kinshasa-based Nasser Trans. Cohen's company sells used yellow buses to African, Mexican, and Central and South American enterprises, usually after a decade of service to American schools. The buses cost between $2,100 and $2,500 in Congo; a new one would cost forty times that.

Cohen says the buses he ships meet U.S. safety standards when they leave, adding that while school districts in Virginia use the buses for ten or twelve years, others elsewhere in the States keep them running up to thirty.

Congo also imports buses from Europe, but mechanics here say American ones are sturdier.

The buses, which can also be seen in other African countries, including Nigeria, mostly operate in Congo in the capital. The city of about eight million has most of the 1,400 or so miles of paved road in a country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi.

Spare parts for the buses are a problem, but Nasser Trans chief mechanic Jules Biba addresses it in typical Congolese fashion: improvisation.

"Sometimes we lack a brake pad, so we bend some scrap metal and use that," says Biba. "But it's not an ideal solution."