The R25 outside Bronkhorstspruit is, for the most part, a perfectly honest road. It goes where it says it's going, it doesn't pretend to be a highway, and it asks nothing of you except attention at the one junction where a gravel track joins at an angle clearly chosen by someone who had never once, in his professional life, driven a vehicle. The cattle station sat on the corner like a landmark placed there specifically to reassure you that nothing of consequence could possibly happen at this junction. Visibility in every other direction was magnificent. You could have watched a war break out three farms away. It was only the actual junction — the one place a person might reasonably need to see something — that had been thoughtfully screened off by a stand of thorn trees, as if the Department of Roads had, at some point, decided that surprise was an acceptable substitute for engineering.

I was driving the Cressida.

The Cressida is not a car so much as a position statement. Built in 1989, it had the dignity of a retired rugby prop who still turns up to club dinners in a blazer that no longer fits: slightly wide, slightly slow to get going, but not a vehicle you'd bet against in an argument. It had survived potholes, livestock, and the kind of road maintenance that consists mainly of prayer, and it had done so with the square-jawed confidence of something built before anyone worried unduly about crumple zones. Its brakes, however, had a personality entirely of their own. They did not so much stop the car as enter into a lengthy negotiation with it, and in an emergency the Cressida's preferred approach was to slide thoughtfully toward the problem, in the manner of a man hoping a difficult conversation might resolve itself if he simply kept walking slowly enough. Toyota, in an earlier and more optimistic decade, had run advertisements promising that everything keeps going right, Toyota — a slogan the Cressida appeared to regard less as a guarantee than as a personal challenge. We were making decent time. I will not be more specific than that, on the grounds that speed, like age and salary, is a figure best left to the imagination of the listener.

There were children at the roadside, outside the cattle station that marked the junction — white shirts, black shorts, the girls in white blouses and black dresses, all of them in the sort of Bata Toughees that are bought a size too big in March and grown into by September. They watched the traffic with the total, unblinking attention that children reserve for things that are none of their business. There was a blue Mazda coming the other way, driven with the particular caution of a man who suspects his own brakes. And there was, materialising out of the gravel track with no warning whatsoever, a low-bed furniture van the approximate size and manoeuvrability of a beached whale.

The Cressida's brakes, true to their word, declined to intervene decisively. I turned the wheel, said several things I would not care to repeat in front of the children, and felt several hundred kilograms of dignified Japanese engineering slide, with tremendous unhurriedness, into the flank of the van — a manoeuvre with rather more in common with a diplomatic handshake than a collision, and one that succeeded chiefly in relocating my front bumper by some degrees and my composure by rather more.

Out of the van, once the dust had settled, climbed a gentleman who introduced himself as Dog.

"My name is Dog," he said, in the tone of a man supplying a complete legal defence. "Dog Makwena."

I did not, at the time, know what Makwena meant. I found out later, from a friend with more patience for etymology than I have, that it comes from kwena — crocodile — and that the Makwena are a clan who take the crocodile as their totem: an animal that famously does not announce itself, does not apologise, and is very rarely the one who ends up damaged. Had I known this at the roadside, I would have found the whole encounter considerably less mysterious and a great deal more inevitable.

I want to be fair to Dog. He had not, technically, caused an accident. What he had caused was a situation, into which my own reflexes and the Cressida's front bumper were obliged to intervene, at some cost to the bumper, none whatsoever to the children, and — this seemed important to Dog at the time — absolutely none to his van, which sat there afterwards looking smug in the way that only unscratched furniture vans — and, I gather, crocodiles — can.

Then came the excuses, in the order he apparently felt did him the most credit.

He was going to a funeral. This was offered gravely, as though grief itself had pulled out into the road. Before I could arrange my face into anything appropriately solemn, this was upgraded: his Baas — his employer, and evidently not a relaxed one — was kwaai, Afrikaans for the sort of temper you did not go back and check twice, and had ordered him back immediately, on pain of some unspecified but clearly terrible consequence. Before that could settle either, we discovered he was, in fact, being chased by skabengas — township slang for the sort of young criminals every South African story eventually requires — a claim delivered with the calm of a man reporting the weather, and undermined slightly by the total absence, in any direction, of anyone chasing him. Then it emerged he had been promised a case of beer for early arrival, which sat uneasily next to the funeral, the kwaai Baas, and the skabengas, none of whom, as far as I could tell, had expressed any opinion on beer.

I did not interrupt. There is a kind of story that improves by being allowed to run.

He had sneezed, on account of the dust, and this had briefly and understandably prevented him from seeing the junction. He had not seen the junction. He had not, upon reflection, seen me. He had not, if we were being thorough about it, seen the road. And here Dog reached what I can only describe as the summit of his career: he had not seen, and did not currently see, what precisely I found so upsetting.

Ten explanations, and not one of them had been quietly retired to make room for the next. They were all, simultaneously, still true. He was a man late for a funeral, obedient to a furious employer, fleeing criminals, anticipating beer, sneezing, blind, and unaware of causing offence, all at once, all sincerely, and all while standing next to a van that had not so much as lost its paint.

The blue Mazda driver had stopped to watch, which I understood. This was better than anything on at the bioscope — the cinema, to anyone reading this outside a country that still calls it that. The children at the roadside had abandoned all pretence of disinterest and installed themselves as an unofficial commentary panel, with opinions arriving faster than I could organise my own. One announced, with the flat authority of a coroner, that the Cressida was finished. Another, eyeing Dog's van with something close to reverence, observed that it was strong like crocodile — which, given what I would later learn about the name Makwena, struck me even at the time as an uncomfortably well-informed remark from someone who could not have been more than nine. A third began an energetic debate with a fourth over whose fault the whole thing had been, conducted at a volume that suggested neither had considered the possibility of being wrong. And the smallest of them, having taken in the two adults, the two vehicles, and the general air of unresolved grievance, asked — reasonably enough, from where he was standing — whether we were going to fight.

We were not.

I looked at the Cressida's bumper, hanging at an angle that suggested it, too, had heard enough excuses for one afternoon. I looked at Dog, radiant with the innocence of a man who has just discovered he can be ten things at once and none of them guilty. And I did the only thing available to a person in that position, which was to write the whole business down later, because South Africa hands you material like this for free, and only a fool declines it.

The Mazda driver, to his enormous credit, turned out to be a man of some civic feeling. He gave his account of events unprompted, with the calm precision of someone who had watched the entire performance and taken it personally on my behalf, and then — having established, to Dog's evident disappointment, that a man does not require ten excuses to explain a single junction — he drove me into Bronkhorstspruit himself so I could arrange a recovery vehicle for the Cressida, which by then had the look of something that wished to be left alone for a while.

Dog, I should say, was entirely unbothered by any of it. He got back into his van, still technically en route to a funeral, still fleeing skabengas, still owed his beer, and drove off at a speed which — had he shown a fraction of it three minutes earlier — would have prevented the entire episode. It was, I thought, watching him go, a very good exit for a man named after an animal whose entire hunting strategy is to appear from nowhere, do the damage, and vanish beneath the surface looking like nothing whatsoever had happened.

The Cressida and I drove home more slowly than usual, out of what I can only describe as professional courtesy — and a new, specific respect for anything that comes out of long grass without warning.