This piece is a personal observation about some motorcyclists (boda boda) in Juba who use to grab handbags and other valuable items from the pedestrians. The public later named them “awlad Toronto or Toronto boys” because they suspect them to have been coming from the Toronto Hotel parking yard in ATlabara.
By Deng Kiir Akok
By Deng Kiir Akok
Awlad is an Arabic word for boys while Toronto is a provincial capital of Ontario in Canada.
The author will later, in this piece, educate his audiences on how the Juba residents came to name some Juba boys with the above name.
But before everything else, let’s revisit those years that have brought the change in Sudan.
In 2005, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Sudan government signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to end the Africa’s longest civil war, which has killed 2.5 million people and displaced four million others.
The deal granted a southern region a six-year semi-autonomous. The period set the region to go to Referendum to decide whether it would vote for the separation or the unity of the Sudan.
A sweet dream - a dream for separation as this author refers it to, was in the minds of many southerners. And this came true in 2011 when the southerners voted for separation with 99.9%. The percentage whom voted for the separation was unquestionable that led to the birth of a new nation in the African continent.
As a new nation with new investment opportunities and a new hope for the entire world, the foreign investors saw a promising future in it. They come in different nationalities and invest in what they think would benefit them.
The Eritreans took the lead in Hotels industry and in water tankers. To name these hotels, the Juba residents have seen the names that exist in the world named in the capital Juba and other towns across the country. Those names were in remembrance of the countries where those investors hail from.
Though some hotels bear overseas names, those are the foreign countries that they once stayed and slept well or having gained their nationalities. Literally the foreign countries they once lost to as our lost boys and girls of the Sudan who lost to foreign countries during the civil wars.
One Eritrean-Canadian has built a property in ATlabara on a busy street of Shar-Facebook (Facebook Street) and named it ‘Toronto Hotel’. The hotel is located at the strategic street famous for Shisha smoking. Every addicted smoker in Juba had to visit this place at least three times a day.
In the front yard of this hotel, the boda-boda (motorcyclist), mostly young boys, whose majority of them ride numberless Senke motorcycles used to park there as they wait for passengers.
In 2015, when the South Sudan economy began to shrink, the unidentifiable motorcyclists developed grabbing handbags and other valuable things from the pedestrians on their ways to and from the market.
The grabbers come in two numbers and on one motorcycle, mostly riding in Senke which some people believe have their gears altered, and that no other motorcycle would try to chase and cash them due to its mechanical capacity except for YAHAMA.
The duo has different functions: one is to ride a motorcycle, and the other is to grab items from their victims’ hands. As the cases of grabbing were on the rise, the people were trying to find out where exactly did these boys come from.
It’s not that long ago that the public grew a suspicion on the Toronto Hotel parking yard motorcyclists that they are the ones responsible for the grabbing activities across the city.
The rumors were already flying around in the capital. One rumor and of which the boys got their name had it that these boys were from Toronto hotel while the other maintained that they were from hell.
Since then, the boys have grabbed hundreds of handbags and other worthy items from the pedestrians and the passengers in the open vehicles.
For your safety, be careful with these boys whenever you are in the streets. There are many of them out there. All the Juba streets are full of them and have eagle eyes that they see anything you are carrying in your hands in the distance.
However, the funny thing they are making in their little heads is that, exceeding a certain distance from home is their right to check whether what you are carrying would benefit them.
The non-Toronto cannot understand the distance the Toronto boys subjected their victims to. But the good thing is that they don’t include in their list the breaking into peoples’ houses. It would have been a hard time for the Juba residents, this one was in the Toronto boys’ list.
The residents are enjoying the little rest they have while at homes. Although there are rare reports of robberies at night times, we should isolate those from the Toronto boys’ activities.
The Toronto boys don’t go peoples’ houses because they think if they do so, they would lose their motorcycles to the house owners. Some of them are weak and cannot face house owners with strong muscles. Their victim sometimes overpowered them and confiscated their motorcycles or let them meet their days.
But if your days are still long, there is nothing that will let you call them Toronto boys when they are at peace with you and other road walkers.
Your bad day begins only when you call them Toronto boys while having no proof that shows they are Toronto boys. This is because the name applies once you saw them grabbing anything from you or anyone.
Sometimes, someone would trouble himself or herself by rushing and used the name on the wrong guys whom he or she suspects. For some reasons, the guys you are suspicious may lack connections with Toronto boys.
And the worse thing is that someone may be forty percent sure of the someone relation to Toronto boys and still use the name. Your idea would be a suicide.
The guys you see to be resembling Toronto boys may be hardworking ones somewhere who give themselves hard times to feed on what they do with their own hands and they believe in it. They are not making their living out of the loots from pedestrians or passengers in the open vehicles belonging.
In such a way, these boys are not real. They are fake ones who only survive on shoppers’ and pedestrians’ belongings. If they are not, then they should find other ways of survival than to feed on other people’s materials.
Despite all the above, there is still one hope for the Juba residents. The hope is that the Toronto boys do not come up to the people’s houses looking for handbags or backpack to grab. They wait for their victims to come out of their houses about a few meters away from the buildings.
Even though there are night robberies that sometimes happen to some people’s houses at night, we should not treat those as Toronto boys’ responsibility.
Despite that, the only little hope left, Juba residents and the ladies have another latest bad news. The bad news is the Toronto boys have added into their long list of items they termed as wanted items from the pedestrians that any lady seen wearing a wig made of human hair, a type wig imported from India should voluntarily surrender it to them or faces the violence.
The Toronto boys have just recently learned that some wigs are more expensive than some electronic devices. Some wigs cost up to five hundred United States Dollars according to one shopper in Konyokonyo who was familiar with the modern wigs prices in the town.
There is one moment I enjoy from these boys. This was when the two Toronto boys missed a handbag they were trying to grab from one young lady one evening in Hai Cinema and said to the lady: next time. The young lady was walking by the roadside when the bad luck was about to strike her.
The Toronto boys hoped that they would get her next time. The author guesses they said to themselves that the lady was not going anywhere and will still get her next time.
As of now, the pedestrians from shopping centers live in fear of losing their belongings since the grabbing of anything in possession of them began in 2015 up to date.
Even a friend of mine, a Chinese man, has seen his laptop and the mobile phone being carried away by these boys in broad daylight. According to him, they took his laptop on way home from the workplace.
He also lost his mobile phone to them on the different day, a day he termed as the worst day of the days he lived in Juba. Until now, Mr Jackie - that’s his name, didn't believe his electronics were gone.
To encounter this phenomenon, the pedestrians had to reverse the producers’ intended position of a backpack to front-pack. They do this because they do not know the direction in which the Toronto boys would launch grabbing on them.
They may come from behind when their victim is focusing in front. They maximize the moment the victims do not seen them. One would be wrong if he or she thinks it’s only pedestrians that are Toronto boys’ target. It also includes passengers in open vehicles.
But so sadly, the death involves with these types of victims. Many people have lost their dear lives in such kind of grabbing. The death occurs when the Toronto boys used too much force to take off a handbag or backpack from their victims.
Their victims in return would make a resistance to defend his or her property. During this pulling, the victim may fall off from a motorcycle or a pickup and lands on the ground with his or her head that could cause his or her neck to break.
In conclusion, last but not the least, the author would like to thank God for restricting Toronto boys to Jubek State and the capital Juba in particular. Thus, the other states are Toronto boys free.
God bless South Sudan
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