Sept-Places

A red sept-places

Sept-places. French for seven-seater.

At some point a decade or two ago, France must have shipped over several boatloads of Peugeot 504 station wagons to West Africa. Maybe they made too many and couldn’t sell them. Maybe the Africans bought them at a volume discount.

Whatever the how of how they got here, the point is that they’re here. By the thousands. Cars so old and beat up you wonder how they could have survived such abuse, and are even more shocked when they not only properly start but actually sputter away after a grinding of gears. 200,000 miles in the desert? 400,000 and still kicking? It’d be a great commercial for the Peugeot car company, if these beat-up relics didn’t look so incredibly ugly.

They are called sept-places because, apart from the driver, they can carry seven passengers. One in the passenger seat, three cramped in the middle row, and three even more cramped in the last row. The counting of seven does not include young children or miscellaneous personal effects, nor does it account for women of unusual girth. When one practically sat on me the other day to fit inside the car, I seriously contemplated whether I’d be better off walking to the town 30 miles away. Someone had to shove the door closed from outside.

But they work. Despite having the appearance of rolling scrap-heaps (and the one pictured above is by no means a sorry example–it looks in much better condition than many others I’ve seen), these short and mid-distance shared taxis dutifully ply the roads of West Africa, braving elements and conditions that would put most cars out of service within a week.

And on the plus side, I’ve learned quite a bit about the anatomy of cars. I now know, for instance, how a door handle works, having seen its entire mechanism crudely and blatantly exposed to the light of day. I also know that cars really don’t require all their parts to function. Just enough seems to work just fine.

Oh, and while they’re called sept-places and in the Senegal this is widely respected, in Mali they’ll shake their heads and laugh. It’s really a nine-places, they say with a grin. Two more for the road.