South Africa has a phenomenon called “yellow line driving”. To get this, the first thing you need to know that in South Africa, roads — or at least those that are tarred and line-painted — are marked differently than US roads. SA roads have a yellow line down outside of the outermost travel lane in each direction, along the shoulder. The double line down the middle of the road, separating northbound traffic from southbound (or whatever), is white.

The second thing you need to know is that the vast majority of South Africa’s roads, even of the long-haul limited-access highways, are two lanes wide. And SA has a lot of open space, so one an drive for a long, long, long time on a two-lane highway.

The third thing you need to know is that on highways, the speed limit depends on vehicle type. It’s generally 120 km/h for cars, 100 km/h for “combis” (minivans, typically overstuffed, serving as privately-owned mass transit), and 80 km/h for lorries (the big trucks). Not that everyone obeys the limit, of course, but SA’s traffic police have devilishly effective speed traps. They’ll sit under a tree by the side of the road with a combination radar gun/camera on a tripod. As you zip by faster than you should, they’ll clock you and take a picture that shows both your license plate number and your speed. Some time later, that picture, along with a citation and a fine to be paid, arrives at the mailing address of the car’s registered owner. And at present, local police get to keep the money they collect via traffic fines, so there’s a certain motivation for them to be, shall we say, zealous in their enforcement of the law.

This means that if you drive any distance here, you’re virtually certain to get stuck behind a slow truck on a two-lane highway. Frequently. Possibly for a very long time.

The solution that has evolved is called “yellow line driving”. Many truck drivers will cheat over onto the shoulder, spanning the yellow line, to make room for faster traffic to pass. Some trucks do this as needed; others just hang out on the yellow line for kilometer after kilometer. Take it from someone who’s always in somewhat of a hurry: yellow line driving is a very welcome thing indeed.

Yellow line driving isn’t just for trucks, either. The driver of vehicle is likely to slide over into the shoulder to give you passing room. When you start to pass, an oncoming vehicle will slide outward as well, temporarily redefining the two-lane road as a three-lane one. (It takes a certain amount of faith to drive down the middle of a two-lane highway on the assumption that the oncoming car will in fact notice you and adjust. And that when she does, nobody behind her will suddenly do exactly what you’re doing. I know enough physics to calculate how much kinetic energy is converted to heat, noise, and “internal degrees of freedom” — e.g., rearranging your anatomy — when two tons of metal collide at a relative speed of over 240 km/h…)

I have a photograph of a truck being passed by another truck being passed by a car being passed by another car, while a third truck comes the other way from over a hill. I took the picture through the windshield of a car that was directly behind the four-vehicle phalanx. Fortunately, this particular section of highway had four lanes, so the only casualty was my composure. (Sorry I can’t post that photo here; it’s a 35mm slide on the other side of the globe at the moment.)

The informal custom of sliding over to make room for a passer, whether from behind or oncoming, isn’t limited to South Africa. I’ve encountered it in other southern African countries, in Jamaica, in Costa Rica, in Argentina and Chile, and elsewhere. And that’s what taught me something about my home culture. Specifically, about American drivers.

Americans are hung up on their rights in many ways, and this is beautifully manifest in their driving habits. If I’m stuck behind a slower vehicle on a no-passing road in most countries I’ve visited, chances are good the driver will be helpful and try to let me by. In the US, it’s virtually certain he’ll ignore me, and I’ll be sucking exhaust until a passing zone appears. “It’s my right to drive in this lane at this speed. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”

And if I do (ahem) pass someone in the US by cheating into the oncoming lane, and a car comes towards me in that lane, that car won’t coolly slide over and give me room. Instead, the driver will freak, lean on the horn, flash the headlights, and generally communicate “Oh my God, you idiot, you’re trying to kill me!” (I know. I’ve tried it. Please don’t tell my mom.)

As a generalization, I’d suggest that American drivers are preoccupied with their rights. Foreign drivers, at least in the developing world, are just trying to make it work for everyone. With much less umbrage.

Not, mind you, that I’m objecting to the having or valuing of rights. Quite the contrary. But there’s a difference between having a right and aggressively, unnecessarily exercising it at the expense of kindness and consideration.

The most beautiful part of yellow line driving, as practiced in South Africa, is what I call the “South African salute”. As I pass someone who drove the line for me, I flash my hazard lights once or twice, which means “thank you”. The other driver flashes her headlights briefly, signifying “you’re welcome”. Civilized, no?

In the US, if I blazed by someone in a no-passing zone and then flashed my hazards like that, they’d probably think I was cussing them out. In Los Angeles, I’d probably get shot.

The sad part about this is that yellow line driving is dying out in SA. Many trucks now have signs something to the effect of “This vehicle is not allowed to travel in the yellow line”, though the drivers don’t always comply. (I’ve even seen “No, I won’t drive on the f***ing yellow line!”, though I failed to get my camera out in time.) It seems there have been several horrific accidents in which trucks hit bridge abutments, slipped off an eroded shoulder and overturned, or ran over children when they suddenly needed to get back into the travel lane and couldn’t, trapped by a passing car. I’d suggest that driving full-time down the line, over blind hills and around curves, is probably unwise. The backlash, however, seems to be inhibiting all yellow-line driving.

Also, I’ve noticed a general decline in the average courtesy level of SA fourteen years I’ve been visiting. During and shortly after apartheid, drivers were a small, elite, and congenial fraternity. Traffic congestion was rarely a problem. Since then, vehicle ownership has skyrocketed. The influx of new drivers alone would probably disrupt the propagation of any existing road culture, and nightmare stop-and-go commuting in the greater Jo’burg-Pretoria area could sour anyone’s sense of camaraderie.

Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to popularize the South African Salute in the US. If you happen to squeeze over so a green Subaru Outback can pass you, and the driver blinks his hazard lights a time or two, please don’t shoot.

My most scarce commodity, by far, is time. Given my goals, resources, and lifestyle, I’m neither cash-limited nor opportunity-limited nor knowledge-limited. I’m time-limited. There just isn’t enough time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do. And so I maximize efficiency, trying to make every minute count. Call it temporal frugality, if you will.

I really, really hate wasting time. If I’ve got a ten minute wait before my ride home is leaving, I’ll find something productive to do. (“Productive” can be defined fairly broadly; poking about the web counts, if I’m informing myself about something I’d like to know more about.) I arrive 30 seconds to three minutes late for almost every meeting and appointment, since I aim to arrive exactly on time and I usually overlook some speed bump or another; arriving early would mean (gasp) waiting. And even my recreational outings and vacations are planned and executed with brutal efficiency, for optimal satisfaction per unit time.

I may be a little more hyper this way than most of my associates — okay, significantly more hyper — but in my social context, a concern with temporal frugality seems rather normal. Most of my friends and colleagues are similarly time-limited. Even the retired ones are busy with all kinds of travels and entertainments and worthy projects. Heck, I’ve seen people get busier when they retire.

So when I travel about southern Africa, as I am this semester, I am truly nonplussed by the multitude of people I see waiting. Just waiting. Sitting by the road, or under a tree, or on the step of a shop. Some are waiting for a bus. Some are waiting for a friend. Some are waiting for a random passer-by to stop and buy a mango. Some, such as security guards, are getting paid to just be there. And some, as far as I can determine, are just killing time. (Ouch.) I’m pretty sure that many of these waiters are in it for the long haul… hours, probably.

It would absolutely rend me to wait like that. I’d probably need trauma counseling. So how do people here stand a life so full of waiting, of doing nothing? As I suggested in my last post: for them, it’s just normal.

And I wonder what my pace of life would look like to them. Equally intolerable, perhaps?

Saying South Africa has a crime problem is a bit of an understatement. The World’s Most Dangerous Places (5th edition, 2003) gives SA a danger rating of three stars out of five for having the highest per capita crime rate in the world. Murder, rape, mugging, and car-jacking are rampant. Leaving something in plain sight in your car or yard here is pretty much equivalent to placing it by the road with a big “help yourself” sign, or so I’ve been told.

I’m not a sociologist, but the general causes of this crime epidemic seem obvious enough.

1. Start with years of apartheid, resulting in two distinct but symbiotic societies: one affluent and first-world, the other deeply impoverished and third-world. The underclass has been systematically brutalized, marginalized, relocated, and disenfranchised.
2. Suddenly change the political system, give political power to the underclass, and dissolve long-standing economic sanctions and boycotts. This results in an explosion of economic growth and consumerism and a new middle class, but with high unemployment and a still-impoverished underclass.
3. Open the borders to even more impoverished, desperate people from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Then try to shut down the massive inflow, mostly unsuccessfully, resulting in hordes of impoverished, desperate, and now illegal people.
4. Mix in an HIV/AIDS epidemic that devastates family structures and creates entire subcultures of orphans raising orphans.

Is it any wonder the social contract breaks down?

(If you read this, Mom, remember that I’m spending most of my time in a small town in the boondocks. Crime, especially the violent types, is much less prevalent here than in the cities. Jo’burg and Cape Town vie for the title of murder capital of the world, and little Alice isn’t even close. However, what what I’m about to say applies here as well.)

One consequence of rampant crime is a proliferation of locks, keys, gates, fences, razor wire, alarms, unfriendly dogs, private guards, and signs that say “24 hour armed response” (usually with a silhouette of a gun, just to make sure you get the point even if you don’t read English so well). I wouldn’t be surprised if a secondary consequence is lower back pain and a tertiary one is boom times for chiropractors, since most people carry around several tangled gobs of keys big enough to anchor an offshore oil rig. The locks in doors and gates tend to be the old-fashioned type (with keyholes that go all the way through, with that stereotypical “keyhole” shape), meaning that many of keys are long, thick, and heavy.

What both amuses and disturbs me is that most doors and gates lock from both sides. A key is required to enter or to exit. Most locks are kept locked all of the time. As a visitor, even a long-term one, I have few keys. (Probably a good thing, from an orthopedic perspective.) All of which, taken together, means that my ability to get out of any building I find myself in is questionable.

The only way out of the university building in which I have my temporary office is to travel the length of a hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a flight, along a short hallway, dog-leg left, along a much longer hallway, through a gate into a kind of entrance hall, and through a final set of doors and gates to the great outdoors. There are several closer doors I could exit through, except that all are locked full-time. From both sides, of course. The closest door to my office is never locked, but the security gate over it is actually welded shut.

I’ve been told this cuts down on theft. I believe it: I couldn’t carry a computer that far, much less do it without being noticed.

The first-floor windows are all barred. My only way out is locked at some unspecified and unpredictable time during the evening, so if I work late, I must telephone the main guard office and request release. And if a fire starts somewhere between my office and that gate, well… Let’s not go there.

So what is “normal”? In the US, it is normal to have egress from any place, any time, unless you’ve had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of the justice system. In South Africa, it is normal to massively restrict movement to minimize theft. We optimize on convenience and fire safety, they optimize on physical and material security. Each is rational in its context.

More interesting, perhaps, is my reaction to finding my sense of normalcy violated. When I want to exit someplace and am thwarted by a locked door, indignation surges. How dare it! Somewhere, deep in the freedom-loving recesses of a brain raised on the Bill of Rights and the unbridled pursuit of personal convenience, I feel I have an inalienable right to go outside. (Sounds more dignified to call it “freedom of movement”, eh?) Rational or not, it boggles my mind that people voluntarily live like this. The difference between a fortress and a prison, as has oft been observed, is mighty slim.

How many other unconscious expectations, not shared by others on this planet, do I hold? How do people’s unspoken and conflicting models of “the normal” impede communication and understanding? It’s easy for me to learn how someone lives differently than I do, but it’s a whole lot harder to learn how they think differently. You know that old saw about “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”? I may learn a lot about their shoes, but it’s still me doing the walking. How do I walk a mile with someone else’s feet?

I’ve met people who live in conditions of poverty and deprivation that I would find absolutely unbearable. If I were forced to live that way permanently, without hope of escape, I suspect I’d be depressed and bitter until the day I died. And yet these people are not only not depressed, but often quite upbeat. Why?

For them, it’s just normal.