People Walk on the Left

I don’t know how it took me over two years to notice this but when two people meet on a narrow path, they move to the left here. Again, how did I miss this for two years? It’s not as though narrow footpaths haven’t been a constant feature of my life for the past two years or that I’m not sensitive to weird social interactions (I am). Whatever the reason, it was just about two weeks ago that I was doing the funny, ‘which way are you gonna go’ dance that happens when you meet someone on a narrow path when I realized this person really wanted to pass on the left side. It happened again just a few moments later with another person coming down the path and from that point I’ve noticed that it is pretty much universal.

 

Cars drive on the right. Apparently this isn’t true for the whole continent, if you go south of Zimbabwe/Botswana the cars move on the left (I wonder who will win that regulatory battle if it ever comes to a head, I’d say South Africa if the weight of most of the rest of the world wasn’t on the side of RIGHT). Still in village cars meeting each other on the road is still a pretty rare occasion. Many people, children especially, probably don’t see it very often, so the driving convention isn’t terribly prevalent. When I spoke to my boss Philip about this, he laughed. He lives in Bamenda, the city, and there he says people usually go to the right, but in his home village of Ndop (between Oku and Bamenda) he was used to passing on the left when he was younger. So it’s not just Oku.

I’m not going to try to put too fine a point on this or use it as an analogy for other kinds of conventions and technology moving from cities to villages (though I could, and by mentioning them at all I kind of am...). I just thought it was worth mentioning.