Vigilante Justice in the Streets of Juba

JUBA, Sudan—It was just another Thursday in the Southern Sudanese capital when, as my friend and I dug into some hummus and fresh pita at our beloved Juba hang-out, Central Pub, minor chaos broke out. As some of the female waitresses began darting in different directions, some heading out of the parking lot and others toward a gate separating the restaurant from one of Juba’s main thoroughfares, it became apparent that my friend’s motorcycle was in the process of being stolen. The thief had sped out of the parking lot on his stolen booty and was being hotly pursued not only by some men hanging around the parking lot, but also by a bevy of waitresses, some of whom jumped over the metal gate in an attempt to cut the offender off at the pass on the main road.

Once my friend and I registered what was happening, we too darted in different directions, attempting to understand what was happening, but in a less proactive and more hapless way than the Central Pub staff in hot pursuit of the man who had committed thievery on their premises.

Perhaps out of fear that his plan was going awry, the motorbike thief immediately crashed his new ride into a car at an intersection just outside the restaurant. He took off on foot down a side road but he was no match for the wait staff tailing him. He was, after all, a young boy who could not have been more than fifteen. By the time he was dragged back to the site of the crash, I had found a perch to watch the scene from a far, squinting to see what would happen next as I joined other onlookers who had mounted Central Pub’s fence. In total, we onlookers reached into the dozens, as more and more Juba residents emerged out of the woodwork to participate in this exciting event. (This was not the first time I found myself swept up as an unfortunate even unfolded in Southern Sudan, becoming an active participant in a macabre circus of curiosity mixed with voyeurism. I recently had the distinct displeasure of coming across a horrific traffic accident, where six or so bus passengers traveling from Juba to the Ugandan border had died on impact when their bus ran at high speed into a pick-up truck. As the 4×4 I was in approached the accident, my fellow passengers were keen to stop and investigate the wreckage. I hung back in the car, but was later regaled with details of the chunks of human flesh found amid the smashed glass).

When my friend recovered his slightly damaged bike and realized how young the boy who had attempted to steal it was, his temper softened, even more so when the boy extended his hand out and whispered “malesh [“sorry” in Arabic].” I could tell even from my perch that my friend had no interest in pressing charges against the would-have-been boy criminal. But by that point, the gathered crowd included, in typical Juba fashion, a collection of security forces with unclear authority and no semblance of a chain of command. Blue camouflage uniformed officers toting black rubber sticks mixed with the white-collared, navy-bereted traffic police, then a retro-styled police car rolled up, causing a traffic jam and more confusion.

The crowd and the rescuers of the bike/apprehenders of its thief showed him little mercy. “If this was Kenya, we’d burn him!” a Kenyan man next to me on the fence exclaimed, a response that seemed rather unfitting for the gravity of the crime. “Can you imagine!” remarked a Ugandan waitress as she and her coworkers headed back down the alley to get back to their day jobs at Central Pub, after their brief entrée into law enforcement.

From my vantage on the fence, I wasn’t able to tell for sure what happened to the young boy. He had seemed resigned to facing his fate and I figured that he had been tucked into the back of the patrol car, but the crowd was blocking my view when the boy disappeared from sight. A few minutes later, a hip newspaper seller visited the table where my friend and I had resumed our lunch. He seemed think the police had let the boy go. “That’s crazy, man,” he said, expressing his chagrin to my friend that the thief had been let off without a more solid walloping.

In my experience as a Juba resident for the past year and a half, vigilante justice and citizen’s arrests, confused and often abusive and arbitrary policing, and a general lack of rule of law are par for the course in what will soon be the world’s newest capital. While yesterday’s incident was nothing more than a mild dust-up that ended quickly, it was another illustration for me of the dangers for everyday citizens of Southern Sudan, who are frequently denied their basic rights. These dangers extend to residents of Juba from neighboring East African nations, and hardly affect the “khawaja” (white/Western) residents.