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Enjoying her job as a trailer driver
Sumaya Mbabazi loves being behind the wheel
As I hurriedly walk through the car park of a restaurant where I am to meet Sumaya Mbabazi, I passively notice a beautiful brown motherly woman spotting leggings and a brownish top walking casually in the same direction. Later, it turns out she's the trailer driver I am there to see.
Given the kind of job she does, I had expected brushes of roughness-cum-masculinity here and there. Like jeans and sneakers, or short hair (dreads at least) for lack of time to attend to it while on the road. Not Mbabazi. She has neat ‘pencil’ cornrows and is wearing heels and gold jewelry. Needless to ask is if she spends any time pampering herself because her clear supple skin speaks of the volumes of care and effort she puts to keep it glowing. She blends in perfectly with the street crowd with no give-away whatsoever regarding what she does for a living.
However, whatever Mbabazi lacks on the surface to depict any masculine tendencies that come with trailer drivers, she makes up for in her persona. She’s neither excited nor uninterested in the interview. She answers every question, but her responses are straight-forward and you have to dig to get any details. She’s totally at ease and non-plussed about being a female trailer driver and probably the only Ugandan woman doing so. For her, it’s no big deal and it’s clear she’s not playing games at being ‘easy’ and laid back about it; a very masculine quality indeed.
I try to excite her. Have you seen any other female trailer drivers? I ask, to make her feel special, to understand that she’s doing something incredible.
Indifferently, she answers, “just one, a Kenyan, whom we occasionally met when with my husband. So I told him I wanted to be like her.”
About her challenges and high-points as a trailer driver, she looks at me as if wondering how someone can ask such trivial questions, but decides to answer.
“It took me a while to drive at an appreciable speed, but I am now fine. Not that I am reckless. I simply drive at a good speed so my colleagues do not leave me behind.”
It started with her partner
Mbabazi didn’t dream she would be a trailer driver one day. She started out escorting her husband, a fuel tanker driver, on long trips to neighbouring countries of Rwanda, Congo, Kenya and Tanzania. He was, and is still, working with Fuelex, a fuel company with a chain of petrol stations in Uganda.
“I loved his job and enjoyed seeing him drive,” she recollects.
When she expressed interest, the two lovebirds would occasionally stop at a field and he would teach her. One day, his boss saw her driving the fuel tanker and was surprised and impressed at the same time.
“He asked if he could give me a job. I went to driving school, got a permit and he gave me the job. I am greatly indebted to my husband for teaching me and to his boss for having the faith in me, a woman, and entrusting me with a trailer worth millions of shillings when there are so many men who request for this job and are denied.” She says with some form of feeling creeping into her speech.
Life on the Road
Mbabazi works at Kibungo Transporters (a company contracted to transport Hima Cement) for four months now, drives trailers with cement from Kasese to Kampala. To Mbabazi who says she drives wearing shorts, it’s very normal and if she gets a mechanical problem, she wears overalls and corrects it. If it’s too complicated, “we have telephone numbers of mechanics at every point all along the way.”
I try to scare her, what if it’s late at night and you’re in the middle of a forest?
We have telephone numbers of all traffic policemen along the way, so I will just ring up one to come and protect the goods, she answers. And luckily, she has never had any such trouble. Hima company policy does not allow for turn boys, but even then, she has never used one.
Rwandese roots
Her deceased father was Rwandese while her mother Hellen Kyomugisha is a Munyankole from Mbarara. “I spent my childhood in Rwanda with my father and I studied there till Senior Two. When my mother heard that I had dropped out of school, she came for me, but even then I never went to school again. That was in 1993,” Mbabazi says.
Marriage and family
She says she is happily married. “We catch up with each other when both of us are around,” she says. In fact, since her trailer is at a garage for service at the time of the interview, she’s travelling with her husband to Fort Portal the next morning and they will come back together. “I don’t want him to be bored,” she says.
She thinks her family does not find it strange that she drives a trailer. They are just happy that she is doing well for herself. She has a 12-year-old son in boarding school and during holidays, he stays with his paternal aunties or grandmother since Mbabazi is usually traversing the country on duty. She has no plans of getting another child soon.
The future
Mbabazi is very happy and comfortable with her earnings from which she has built a house for her mother. She enjoys her job alot, but admits it is riddled with danger because the only female trailer driver she knew who was a Kenyan died in an accident. “You can’t spend your entire life like this, you’ve got to plan for your future,” is how she winds up
What her boss says
first saw Sumaya while she was with Horizon Coaches and I was impressed. I asked their manager about her and I was told that she’s actually a trailer driver. So I talked to her and she told me she didn’t actually like buses because of the pressure by passengers to increase speed.
I told her to come and see me if she was interested in driving a trailer again. One day, she surfaced at my office for a job and one of my drivers who is a Kenyan greeted her heartily. I also contacted Fuelex to verify her working experience and I was told she’d actually worked there.
She even had a driving permit, so I took her on.
Being a lady, she drives a bit slower compared to her colleagues. Kibungo Transporters has both coaches and trailers and at the moment we have a tender with Hima Cement so her first assignment was to Goma, Congo to take cement. The men came back after seven days but she turned up on the morning of the ninth day.
However, I have realised that her cautiousness is to my advantage because her vehicle is always in good condition; I rarely have to repair it. With the men, I have to service all the time and replace things like springs but not with Mbabazi’s vehicle.
