The ideology of our zebra crossings

This column is written by Tom Phillips

It’s not especially romantic, I grant you, but on one of our first dates, I took my future wife to a zebra crossing and we lay down in the road to stop the traffic. 

We weren’t alone. It was the early 1980s, so this wasn’t a flash mob thing. It was politics. We were demonstrating against nuclear weapons or in support of the miners’ strike or in solidarity with the ANC. I can’t remember exactly. I do remember that lying down in the road was the protest method of choice and that we’d presumably chosen a zebra crossing in the hopes that any enraged bourgeois reactionary drivers would be less likely to run us over if we were sprawled out between Belisha beacons. 

One of the other protesters even speculated that the police might not be permitted to drag us away because we could argue that we were crossing the road in a legal fashion, albeit very slowly and on our backs. 

Pseudo-legal failure

Well, they did until the police actually started dragging us away and they discovered that pedantic pseudo-legal argument is never a good way to respond to a beefy bloke in uniform carrying a truncheon. 

Almost exactly 30 years later, I found myself sitting on a zebra crossing in the middle of another political protest. This one was in Bulgaria and several thousand people were out on the streets demonstrating against government corruption. 

After walking along a stretch of famous Yellow Pavements in central Sofia, banging drums and blowing whistles, we reached the National Assembly building. Here an abrupt silence fell and everyone sat down. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I did the same – on one of the distinctive red-and-yellow zebra crossings that striate the Bulgarian capital’s main boulevard. 

The silence, it turned out, was to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Georgi Markov – the dissident journalist killed with the poisoned tip of an umbrella on Westminster Bridge in 1978. It ended when someone sat down at a white piano that’d been placed on the plinth of the statue of the Tsar Liberator and played the first chord of the Bulgarian national anthem. 

New culture

Almost exactly one year later, I was back in Sofia and the government had resigned. Something had happened to the status of zebra crossings, too. At the one on Dondukov Street, not far from the Yellow Pavements, drivers pulled up respectfully and didn’t even do that patronising thing of waving me across the road as if I was doddering 90-year-old for whom special provision had to be made. 

Rather than having to run headlong across the street like a soldier going into battle on the Somme, I could saunter from one pavement to another, casually dispensing cheery acknowledgements to the waiting motorists. 

“Oh yes,” said our Bulgarian friend when I told her. “This has started happening since the protests.”

It was, she went on, a sign of a small but significant shift in perspective brought about by the months of demonstrations against the government. It reflected a new confidence, a new solidarity, the beginnings of a civil society which wasn’t based on the rigid distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ maintained beyond the ‘official’, i.e. defined-by-the-West, end of the communist era by the cabal of neo-Stalinist oligarchs who’d been running the country for the last 25 years. 

Sensible, consensual

In the past, in other words, drivers had considered zebra crossings to be yet another totalitarian imposition and a symptom of their powerlessness in the face of a series of governments which – despite assertions from the likes of Reagan and Thatcher about the ‘liberation’ of eastern Europe back in 1989 – differed little in their methods from the communist regime. Now, though, zebra crossings could emerge as quite sensible, consensual arrangements. 

Next time some Bristol driver roars through one when I’m waiting on the kerb, yelling “fascist!” will seem all the more justified – although “retrograde, almost certainly UKIP-supporting misinterpreter of post-Cold War political realities” would probably be more accurate, but just ever so slightly more unwieldy.

Picture: Shutterstock