Togo: Death Does Not Scare Easily

The night before, by local belief, demons of death stalked the village of Sotouboua (pop. 500) in northern Togo. Streets were deserted, and only the throb of a tom-tom broke the still ness. Next day the men of the village sallied forth to perform the ritual that is supposed to frighten demons away. Some wore fluttery feather headdresses and grotesque carved masks; others chewed the bark of a native bush until the drool stained their chins a deep orange color. Several of them gripped snakes and rats between their teeth.

Hundreds of onlookers, including a dozen Peace Corps volunteers, jammed the main street to watch the rites.

Then, around a bend in the road careened a modern-day death demon: a ten-ton truck, thundering along at 60 m.p.h., and towing another truck behind it on a steel cable. Either the brakes had failed or the drivers had lost control. The people shrieked in horror as they realized that the trucks were not stopping. The first truck hit the crowd headon. It surged a full 40 yds., rising like a motorboat over successive waves of humanity until the friction of broken bodies and torn limbs slowed and stopped it. The second truck, veering to one side and running a parallel course, also rammed into a mass of people. The tow cable between the trucks acted as a scythe, severing bodies through the middle. More than 100 dancers and onlookers died immediately, including James Driscoll, 20, a Peace Corps volunteer from Buffalo, N.Y., who had already served 16 months in Togo and had signed up for a second tour of duty. At least 300 people were injured, including four Peace Corps girls. The truck drivers ran away, but were later arrested.

Other Peace Corps workers helped organize a makeshift ambulance service that shuttled moaning survivors 40 miles south to the nearest hospital at Sokode, where a French doctor and Togolese nurses worked all night setting fractures, amputating shattered limbs and stitching wounds. In Sotouboua, stunned villagers buried their dead and feared for the future; nearly all the village’s men had been killed or severely hurt.