The Niva of cameras.Ī plain, utilitarian camera, which looks every bit the part of USSR product, in case you missed the writing on the bottom. The mighty Soviet economy, starving for hard currency would sell it competitively priced against any other vehicle.Īnd that brings me to the Zenit B. If sunk too deep which was rare, it was light enough to pull out. Best of all, it would negotiate mud and deep water like a duck, and going over rocks like a mountain goat. Due to its simple build, it could take any part that resembled the original. Repair required a monkey wrench, a cold chisel and a hammer. Powered by a four-cylinder gas engine producing 70 HP, the car could make 0-100. Trim was falling off like leaves in fall, with the parts still hanging to rust. If a feature or a part deemed not imperative for making it move, it was excluded. Made of a bit of Renault, some Fiat and the rest from the Soviet legendary unfortunate motor industry. The Lada Niva, a humble and apologetic four-wheel-drive box, looked like a car, sounded like one, was made of a collection of parts left behind from various experiments in USSR car making ventures. Common to all these vehicles was that parts were scarce and expensive, and due to their heft, they got joyfully stuck in the first mud they met. Other than that one needed a rugged pickup truck to survive such roads. There was indeed beasts like the Range Rover, Range Rover and Land Cruiser. Considering the era, being the ’80s, there were no SUVs as we have them today.
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An all-wheel drive would save the driver from the need to be pushed out of the mud. Where the asphalt road ended, the bush roads were just that. However, all that over the tarred roads network. Spare parts were abounding, unlike imported cars that were dependant on foreign exchange and import permits being available. There were other saloon cars, but none could negotiate the roads as good as the 504. It was locally made, with one configuration to choose from. An exceptionally ugly car, modified for West Africa with a raised suspension. The most popular passenger car at that time was the Peugeot 504. When it rained the roads were so flooded, so a truck or bus passing by your car would create a wake wave that would lift the car and send it sailing.Īll that required a different breed of motorcars. Being mud, cars were slipping to any which direction. Driving in a straight line was out of the question, much contributing to confuse the traffic. The roads were a collection of potholes connected with strips of asphalt. For fairness, Lagos population continuously swelled by rural population moving to town, which lacked the basics to accept them, as well as opportunity. The government had spent enormous fortunes on remedying all that, but once the allotted funds were sieved through all hungry hands on the way to completion, there was nothing left to show for it but a thin veneer of sort of results. All that on an island where the expatriates and the affluent rich lived.
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At home, we relied upon water tanker to fill our reservoir, a generator for power and the swage run along the street in an open gutter. Lagos economy was booming, but hard infrastructure lagged generations behind be it water, electricity, sewage and in this case roads. Driving to office I used to leave my car some two kilometres away and walk the distance, where the driver got to the office an hour later. The ever traffic jams have a term – ‘go-slow’, pronounced ‘goslo’. This is a road in Lagos at any given day save for Sunday. Just imagine shuffling domino bricks on a table, where bricks fall everywhere, facing any direction. One aspect of life in Lagos was traffic and road infrastructure. To emphasise on the gap between the two cultures, we used to fly Swissair (RIP) from Zurich, being the most organized, prim, proper and orderly city on earth, to Lagos which was anything but. Saying West, This place is as remote from the Western world concept as it could be. In 1980 I was posted to Lagos, Nigeria, the chaotic commercial capital of West Africa, perhaps all of Africa.
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KMZ Zenit B / Zenit E KMZ Zenit B / Zenit B Global / Kalimar SR100 – US / Revueflex-B / Prinzflex-500 / Meprozenit Pro
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