U of T’s Adrian Bradbury and Kieran Hayward spent last Saturday night under Africa’s stars.
They did not have to cross the ocean or take the plane. Embarking from Victoria Park station at 8:30 p.m., and walking 2.5 hours westward on Bloor St. to Queen’s Park for the seventeenth annual AfroFest, the walkers got to spend the night enjoying the diversity of Toronto’s African community.
Bradbury, a sports information coordinator at U of T, and Hayward, a U of T graduate, are walking the streets of Toronto, traveling from Victoria Park station to Nathan Phillips Square every night in July. Known as the ‘Guluwalk,’ the nightly event is a gesture of solidarity with children in Northern Uganda who are forced to walk 12.5 kilometers every night to the nearest urban centre to avoid attacks from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an armed rebel force in their rural home towns.
On Saturday, the Guluwalkers were invited to “sleep in Africa.”
“AfroFest was a tremendous opportunity to give Guluwalk more publicity and get recognized for the effort to stop the 19-year-old civil war in Uganda,” said James Tay, one of the organizers of AfroFest.
Bradbury and Hayward explained that the walk is an exact replica of the route that Ugandan children have to make every night to save their lives. The children leave their homes with the setting of the sun, and return in the morning after spending the night at shelters in nearby towns; Bradbury, Hayward, and volunteer walkers sleep on the streets of Toronto at night and return home in the morning, attempting to follow their regular schedule during the daytime.
“We’re tired but there are a lot of great things that have happened since we started with the walk. It attracted tons of media attention and we have been supported by the Acholi community of Toronto,” said Bradbury, who is also a member of ‘Athletes for Africa,’ the Canadian Physicians for Aids and Relief (CPAR) and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF).
The Acholi tribe, which is resides largely in the northern Ugandan districts of Gulu and Kitgum, is one of the tribes who have suffered mostly from LRA attacks. Since 1998, international NGOs have estimated the number of abducted children from the tribe to have numbered 6000, with young boys turned into soldiers and young girls forced into camp labour and the sex trade.
“They are forced to walk because if they don’t, they will be kidnapped,” said Hayward. “It has prevented them from having even a remotely regular life. 19 years is a long time for war to be going on. Why isn’t peace happening?”
Although peace seems like a far-fetched dream in a country that has witnessed brutal human rights violations for the past two decades, domestic and international actors are proving that, with enough noise, this dream might turn into reality. At the end of July, the cities of Munich, London, Boston, Denver and Glasgow will be planning to organize local Guluwalks to reach awareness on a global level.
“We’re incredibly humbled and excited by the worldwide response to the GuluWalk,” said Bradbury. “Humbled in that we are just two guys out for a walk, and excited that the children of northern Uganda are finally being put into the spotlight. They deserve the attention and need our voice now more than ever.”
