Juba Marketplace

Lately, I’ve been trying to get away from the compound to walk around Juba. Yesterday, I managed to find my way to the Juba marketplace, which was only about a 15 or 20-minute walk away. I really miss the throng and frenzied activity of markets in Cambodia and Malaysia. The one in Juba is a bit smaller, but certainly does not disappoint.

The market itself is divided into ethnic enclaves—Sudanese, Kenyan, Ugandan, and others. Over the random music blaring from many of the stalls, you can hear a chattering of Swahili, Juba Arabic, and many other local languages.

Along the main road that cuts through the market separating the upper third from the rest, there are kiosks hawking sodas, fruit, and used clothing called Mutambo. There were a lot of people stopping into small stalls, “saloons,” to have their hair cut or braided. If you duck off of the main road and into the narrow maze of stalls, you have to push your way through a bustling vegetable market where you can buy leafy greens, several types of bananas, as well as relatively fresh meat. A loaf of bread costs about 10 Sudanese pounds (about 5 dollars). Juba really is one of the most expensive cities in Africa with a rapidly growing civil service and heavy NGO presence that causes the demand for most goods to skyrocket. Given the Southern Sudanese economy’s post-conflict lack of industry and poor infrastructure, a lot of the goods, and particularly produce must be imported from Uganda.

Pushing deeper into the market, there are larger buildings where old gas powered machines crush grains and seeds into a fine powder. There were also several shops where five or six men stripped were sitting and stripping old used tires and sewing them into black rubber sandals.

People of all types were crowding the narrow passageways between stalls, although Westerners were conspicuously absent. Juba, in general does not have much of a visible military presence. However, at the market, there were Toyota trucks with the backs filled with heavily armed SPLA soldiers patrolling the main street. In greater number however, were the soldiers perusing through stalls, buying goods, and chatting with women who eagerly tried to hawk them whatever it was that they had to sell.

I didn’t take any pictures so as to avoid being a jerk to everyone there, but I did enjoy just walking around and chatting with people. Juba Arabic is not so similar to Egyptian. Combined with a lack of English, communication is quite a challenge.

I did manage to take a short video from inside the vegetable market, but given that the shared satellite Internet is usually far slower than dail-up, I doubt that I can get it uploaded anytime soon.