Uganda’s boda bodas: Half a century of getting to places, madly
50-odd years ago, Ali Mayende’s innovation in the border town of Busia sparked a revolution that has become the lifeblood of East African public transport.
Ali Mayende* can no longer remember when exactly he took the first-ever boda boda passenger. In the early 1970s or late 1960s, he tied a white handkerchief to his bicycle handlebars and began ferrying passengers from Busia, a small town on the edges of Eastern Uganda to the border. Half a century later, there are around five million boda bodas across East Africa, where they have in turn been labelled saviours, predators, death traps and the fastest way to get anywhere. Yet almost no one seems to know the man who started it all.
Ali Mayende Omukeshwe hails from Shamutumba, West Busia district. He first used his bicycle to smuggle tobacco across the Ugandan-Kenyan border. In one of the more lucid interviews he gave to researchers, Mzee Ali said that he purchased his first bicycle by selling a cow he had inherited. Seeing Kenyans crossing the border constantly, he decided to start transporting passengers and their luggage across the short No Man’s Land between Busia town and the border post.
Other bicycle owners, who had been moving agricultural goods and smuggling coffee and tobacco, joined in. Bicycle riders would solicit passengers by calling out “Border! Border!” and the hard English Rs would melt away on Samia and Bagisu tongues, leaving us with what we have today – boda bodas.
It wasn’t long before middle-class Ugandans saw buying and renting out – or leasing to sell – bicycles to boda boda riders as a means of extra income. For bagagga – wealthy Ugandans – it is a side-hustle that can act as yet another imperfect flotation device in the stormy Ugandan economy. It also didn’t take long for politicians to see that not only could they enrich themselves through this, but that boda bodas were highly visible and mobile, and that they could move constituents both physically and metaphorically to vote for them.
After the destruction of the 1970s and 80s wars, boda bodas were still mostly confined to Busia and the border areas. In 1986, a visiting New Vision journalist marvelled at the transformation of Busia into a “bicycle town”, and described the system of “border borders”. Within a few years bicycle-taxis were booming across the country as peace arrived in many parts, and there were boda boda associations in most major towns in Uganda. When Bulaimu Muwanga Kibirige (known popularly as BMK) imported used Japanese motorcycles in 1994 and distributed them to boda boda riders, they took off like wildfire. Thus transforming the boda boda industry into what we know today, a mass of motorised cycles that play a key role in Uganda’s economic, political, and social life.
Boda riders are incredibly effective political campaigners, as they are highly visible, mobile, and chat with around a dozen residents a day. Since the late 1990s, a convoy of boda bodas has become an unspoken requirement for campaigning politicians in Uganda. Wearing the candidates colors – yellow for NRM, blue for long-standing opposition FDC, red for the upstarts NUP – while honking horns and performing wheelies, boda bodas make a political rally unmissable.
Boda bodas have come to play every imaginable role in Ugandan society: beyond a ride to work, they are emergency services, security guards, getaway drivers, government spies, school buses, delivery couriers. They move fast, can use nearly any path imaginable, and are highly visible – they represent the entrepreneurial, rule-breaking spirit of Uganda and everything one can do with it.
Their service is irreplaceable and their arrival transformed the country. In rural areas, where residents used to have to wait hours for a minibus or shared car, a couple of motorcycles can be found in every village. Combined with a cellphone, a boda boda is never farther than fifteen minutes away, and in a town or city there is usually one just outside the door.
Today, firms like Watu, Tugende, and Mogo have arrived to offer quick, formalised financing for motorcycles, displacing the middle-class entrepreneurs and politically connected operators that long dominated the supply chain. While they position themselves as “innovators”, in truth they have simply sped up the process for those with no connections to get loans. While riders have flocked to this new class of financiers for their quick turnaround time, the new normal sees interest payments now flow to primarily European and American shareholders, who drape themselves in developmental rhetoric to governments and in venture capital script to their backers.
At the same time, ride-hailing apps in the mould of SafeBoda, and later on Uber and Bolt arrived promising to improve safety and remove negotiations. But the lack of controls over market entry and intense competition has made ordering a boda online slower than simply stepping out of the front door. It’s also difficult to keep helmets on passengers’ heads when the president himself declared them unnecessary and privately told companies it was a waste of time.
Half a century of getting to places, madly. All of this started with Mzee Ali and his contemporaries, and eventually spread to South Sudan – where Ugandans touched off an industry until they were chased out in 2013 at the onset of the civil war there – and to Kenya and Tanzania where they are now ubiquitous. Their stories, Mzee Ali’s story, should be known. As Kenda Mutongi rightly pointed out with matatus, boda bodas are an indigenous innovation that developed completely apart from either the national development-industrial complex or the appropriate-technology business of globalisation that recently discovered bodas as a bottom-of-the-pyramid lifeblood.
We know Henry Ford for revolutionising automotive assembly lines and delivering motorised transport into the hands of the masses. Some know BMK, who hastened the transition from bicycle to motorcycle boda boda. We should also know Ali Mayende, who, by yelling “border! border!” changed the transport landscape for an entire region.
*An earlier version of this story had indicated that Ali Mayende had passed on. We have since established that Mzee Mayende is still alive. Our sincere apologies first to to him and his family, and to our readers.
Beautiful history of Boda Bodas and narrative. It is always good to know the history of a thing in order to have good appreciation of the thing. The legacy of Mzee Ali lives on in Uganda through Boda Bodas.
Very nicely written. For me the regular user, it all makes sense now where the word “Boda boda” originated from. The biggest challenge is getting them to drive less madly!
Very nice story.
Its is too accurate about how boda bodas work around the country
Great story and so beautifully written. I didn’t want it to end
Boda bodas are both a headache to other drivers and a saving grace to thousands of people daily who offer have no other means of transportation; from taking patients to hospital in emergencies to carrying farm animals to market, beds to new owners, 200 chickens at a go, other boda bodas to the mechanic, a president or other people stuck in a traffic jam late for an appointment, all types of people with every types of needs!
Both a blessing and occasionally a curse.
Thank God for Boda bodas in Africa!
Loved the article and the details of Mzee Ali’s beginning work in the border town of Busia.
Boda bodas are a menace to both pedestrians and other road users. They have no respect for traffic rules and in fact have no knowledge or understanding of them whatsoever.
In the past few years, very young people in my age group and below lost their lives in an instant at the hands of a ‘rule-breaking’ boda boda. A relative recently dislocated her jaw as her boda promptly threw her against the pavement as they tried to enter into traffic. A friend was thrown in the middle of one of the most dangerous roundabouts even for vehicles and found herself staring at the sky and at the tyres of cars driving towards her, bag flung metres far away. The boda usually runs off. The emergency room of many national hospitals are filled with grotesque views of broken legs, heads and arms limping in having barely escaped yet another bodaboda accident.
Bodabodas are untraceable and have been at the helm of shootings, co-ordinated robberies and mob justice. If there is an accident between a bodaboda and what they consider an expensive car, every Ugandan knows to drive away because they will be mobbed and killed, regardless of who knocked who, if that matters, in a situation of life and death. Usually, suffice to say, it is the bodaboda.
Anyone can ride a bodaboda. You only have to get up, pick one and immediately start transporting passengers. You could be drunk, on drugs or under 18. Nobody cares. Apparently, not even the people at the top since helmets can be done away with without a thought.
Praising this as a pure African innovation is incorrect. Bodabodas, and the recent similarly unregulated and unpoliced tuktuks have been used as some sort of substitute low grade transport for the masses in places like Asia, similar to Africa where the poverty gap between car owners and car-less people is very wide. It is not an African invention. It is a disastrous solution to a disastrous transport system.
Growing up in Kampala, before the bodaboda dump, taxis were the cheapest form of transport. You would walk to the nearest ‘stage’, and it would take you to the central parking place- the Old Taxi Park and from there you would get a taxi going to the location you were going. If you were only getting to town, you had already arrived, since the Old Taxi Park was in the middle of town. After that, you could walk or get into another taxi. Those days, walking was normal. Now we can’t walk to a place more than few metres away, we need a boda. Those days, our biggest concern was the way the taxi drivers drove, which was also terrible, but at least the possibility of a one on one collision- human to machine contact- was reduced.
Just because something is in Africa does not mean that it is African. The wild rule breaking spirit of the bodaboda and the daredevil attitude possessed by many riders has claimed many lives unreasonably, exploited indeed for quick money by the ruling and middleclass as an ‘imperfect flotation device’, but is largely a nuisance and also one of the most complicated, most vexing challenges of the world I live in.
So what could be the solution is creating awareness and massive sensitize the public on the danger .
Personally im a boda boda rider for over 10 yrs and have trained over 20000 riders in safeboda on road safety i would like to go to public and teach people how to use the road safely if i get the support in term of public address system,projector etc.
I also wrote a book on the boda community using my experience on the road.