Crash Narratives and Accidental Archives: Rethinking Road Safety in South Africa

This article considers the implications of historicising road safety in contemporary South Africa. It offers a critical interrogation of the ‘epidemiological turn’ evident in recent global road safety campaigns, primarily by ‘refiguring’ or decentring the archive on road safety in South Africa. Using the frame of ‘crash narratives’, this study assembles a diverse range of ‘fragments’ provided through oral testimonies and ethnographic observation of road users including township residents, transport operators, funeral entrepreneurs and their clients, as well as Road Accident Fund (RAF) claimants and associated medico-legal experts. Within this framing, stories of ‘black spots’ and ‘twice deaths’ – fatal road accidents en route to funerals – and the personal testimonies of RAF claimants offer a glimpse into wider historicised and contested dynamics around the nature and meaning of road danger and accidental death in South Africa. They also provide a more intimate window onto the lingering bodily and emotional trauma experienced by road accident victims, their families and caregivers, as well as suggest the contours of emergent domestic fault lines shaped by the politics of compensation engendered by the RAF system. Dwelling on this particular ‘accidental archive’ thus brings into sharper focus the lived experience of the road accident crisis in South Africa and, correspondingly, an appreciation of everyday forms of road safety already at work in township communities.