Mmamatlakala – mother nature’s silent witness to tragic loss of life

On my way from photographing the scene in which 45 passengers travelling from Botswana to the Easter pilgrimage in Moria I stopped here to calm down and reflect. Mmamatlaka Hill is about 5km from the scene where the bus plunged down a bridge and then burst into flames.

I had spent almost an hour at the scene taking pictures and talking to bystanders and emergency workers who had concluded their work of searching and retrieving bodies just before I got there. The sight of the burnt-out wreckage lying in a ravine, the scattered pieces of clothing hanging on trees, and the blood spots on the bridge gave one an inkling as to just how terribly the lives of those people had ended.

I did not see any of the dead bodies some of which we were told were burnt beyond recognition. The rescue and emergency workers did. They would not speak about what they witnessed. But the deep, distant look in the eyes of some told the horrors of the unspeakable things they had witnessed in the many hours they had worked on the scene.

I managed to get as close to the wreckage as possible with the assistance of one of the emergency workers on the scene, climbing rocks, clutching onto trees branches to avoid falling down there where the wreckage lay. This is where the rescue workers had walked up from the wreckage, carrying bodies…

As a writer one tends to have a graphic imagination. Where some only see a wrecked bus and blood spots and pieces of clothing, a writer imagines many things, tries to reconstruct or visualise the events beyond the physical evidence, harrowing screams of people trapped in a burning bus, broken limbs, crushed bodies stuck in a wreckage, desperate men, women, children, fighting for their lives. I often stop to admire Mmamatlakala Hill each time I travel along the R518.

Apart from its spectacular beauty, I consider the area around it one of the quietest places I know, eerie, and haunting. It’s as if you can hear the earth breathe and sometimes when you are standing staring at the hill, it seems it is slowly gravitating towards you.

That afternoon after working at the accident scene it seemed even the hill was in tears. Perhaps it was just my imagination because honestly, hills don’t weep, but it looked and felt completely different that afternoon. Usually, stopping to admire the great hill of Mmamatlakala leaves me with a calm feeling of relief.

But that very late afternoon when I thought I had seen the great hill weeping, I was suddenly overcome by a deep feeling of sorrow and dejection. I drove away feeling depressed, and thinking perhaps, the great hill too was hurt by the loss of life just a short distance from where she has stood majestically since the beginning of time. I wondered also, if perhaps, Mother Nature also feels our pain?