I stood watching in disbelief as my mother’s car was dragged by a minibus taxi along Cape Town’s Nelson Mandela Boulevard. It was Friday afternoon, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the rain was pouring down.
Seconds earlier, the fully-laden taxi had knocked into my mother’s Toyota Yaris, and somehow hooked her car on to it. I got out of her car as the taxi came to a halt, but as I approached the driver, it sped off once more, dragging my mother’s car behind it.
As the taxi and my mother’s car weaved through gridlocked traffic I was left with no other choice but to run along the road in the hope of catching up with them.
Cars drove by, some hooting but most ignoring me.
A good Samaritan stopped and insisted I get into his car. He was going to take me to the nearest police station but, mercifully, we saw a police van on the N2 and flagged it down. After explaining what had happened, they took me to the radio control room.
I called my mother. By then the taxi had knocked her a second time and her bumper had been torn off as it pulled her car along.
The police dispatched a vehicle to help her.
The irony was that on Friday I wrote an article about how the city was planning to put solid islands along the boulevard to prevent taxis from using slipways to cut back on to the freeway.
JP Smith, the mayoral committee member for safety and security, inspected problem areas on Nelson Mandela Boulevard and Hospital Bend, exactly where the taxi rammed into my mother’s car. - Cape Argus