Bakkies

A bakkie is a pick-up truck and South-Africans love them. They carry around anything in them, even people. Not just on dirt roads in the country side, also on the high way where cars do a 150 km/h. The first time I saw that and cried out: "oh no, look at that, it's so dangerous! They can't do that". At that time, I was still used to Dutch standards and the Dutch way of upholding the law. In Holland it would never fly and the driver would have been pulled over by the police in 5 minutes. Now I'm used to this. A lot of it has to do with money. In Holland it's safety first. In South-Africa safety gets compromised because of money, work, labour. I.e. a lot of employers drive around their workers in a bakkie. For them it's too expensive to get safe transportation for their workers and the employees themselves have no money for their own cars. I've seen bakkies with up to 25 people in the back! Of course the people in the back are never white (except a few kids who are fooling around). Sometimes you can even see a white driver with an empty passenger seat next to him and 6 people in the back.