Tale of the Biker Boys

“Everyone tries to one-up each other. Like my friend Dahar, he’s got three goat skins on his bike; he’s such a show off,” he adds, stroking his bike’s polished fuel tank.

 

Yemen’s capital obviously doesn’t have the boy-rider culture of its richer Arab neighbours. In Beirut, pimped-out BMWs cruise up and down the sea front for hours, parading their tinted windows, UV lights and massively supped up engines. Yemen – undoubtedly the poorest country in our region – hardly features any expensive cars at all, never mind novelty headlights; but some moto-taxi drivers are now trying to keep up with the trend by decorating their bikes lavishly, creating a Yemeni-style boy-rider culture with its own unwritten rules and customs. 

 

Not that these decorations make riding the bikes any less dangerous. “Every single motorcycle driver needs to crash at least once, and then they’ll become a real biker. You can only feel like a true biker once you’ve crashed,” reaffirms Hassan. “We feel like brothers, us moto-taxi drivers.” For the brave or foolhardy, the fastest way to get around the old city of Sana’a, with its narrow streets meandering among ancient mud-brick high-rises, is on the back of a moto-taxi. They are much cheaper and more manoeuvrable than normal cabs, and rule the city streets built for horses, camels and donkeys. And it’s affordable: A bike ride from one end of the old city 

to the other costs around 300 riyals, or $1.50.

 

The bikes rarely have number plates and children start riding them as soon as they are tall enough to jump on. The authorities have tried in the past to ban moto-taxis on safety grounds, but Yemen is a place where drivers make their own road rules. Overwhelmed by cocky bikers, the traffic police have little in the way of authority, however hard they try to bring some order to Sana’a’s buzzing roads. At large intersections, bikers creep forward slowly, wait for the traffic cop to turn his head for a second, accelerate away and cheekily look back, straight into the eyes of the policeman, with a roguish laugh of accomplishment.  

 

But life is not as easy for the Sana’ani bikers as Abdullah implies. War, drought and unemployment have brought thousands of immigrants from the surrounding countryside into the capital. Many of them will rent a motorbike for a few months and try to earn some money during their stay to take back to their families. For a tiny fee they will sleep with their bikes in small shops in Sana’a. The rented bikes are not decorated like the Sana’ani’s, and outsiders find it hard to get customers, especially in the Old City where everyone knows everyone, and customer loyalty is unyielding.

 

Moto-taxi drivers also feel that the sense of brotherhood is being destroyed by the influx of outsiders and the biker boom in the capital. Petty crime in Yemen is almost unheard of but it is growing. Some old hands attribute such petty theft to the loss of cohesion among moto-taxi drivers as their numbers continue to grow.

 

“Some motorcyclists snatch bags off people at night; they also sell alcohol. These guys are ruining the reputation of the real motorcyclists,” said Abdul Ahmed al-Matari, a moto-taxi driver from Old Sana’a. “Nobody likes these people.”

 

For a full version of this article, see NOX42.