Bor is a town of plains, cattle and river. The capital of Jonglei State sits on the east bank of the White Nile about 190 kilometres north of Juba, at the exact point where the navigable Nile ends and the Sudd begins. Upstream the river is a river; downstream it breaks apart into the largest papyrus maze in Africa. In that sense, Bor is the southern gateway to the great wetland.
It is also the heartland of the Dinka Bor, one of the largest sections of the Dinka people, whose whole way of life is organised around cattle and the calendar of the water. In the dry season, the camps move down to the floodplain grasslands the river leaves behind as it recedes; when the flood comes, they move back up to higher ground. And to the east stretch the Jonglei plains, the setting for one of the largest mammal migrations on the planet.
Above all, though, Bor is a place with a historical weight the whole country recognises. Here, on 16 May 1983, a mutinous battalion fired the first shots of the war that thirty years later would end up creating South Sudan. Here, in November 1991, one of the bloodiest episodes of that war took place. And here some of the worst fighting of the civil war that broke out in December 2013 was fought. This guide tells all of that with the restraint it calls for, and warns from the very first line that every relevant foreign ministry advises against travel to this country.
In the 1860s Bor was an ivory trading post on the Nile. It had already been reached in November 1839 by the first of the river expeditions that the Ottoman officer Salim Qapudan led on behalf of Muhammad Ali of Egypt to force a way through the Sudd. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium it became established as an administrative centre for the eastern Upper Nile. Its place in modern history, however, was defined on 16 May 1983, when Battalion 105 mutinied against the Khartoum government at the Malual-Chaat barracks. That uprising, followed by others in Ayod, Pochalla and Pibor, gave rise to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which John Garang joined in June that year, and it sparked the Second Sudanese Civil War. In November 1991, after the SPLA split, the town and its county were the scene of the Bor massacre. With independence in 2011, Bor became the capital of Jonglei and home to Dr. John Garang Memorial University; the civil war that began in December 2013 turned it into a battlefield once again.
Read the full history ↓The largest wetland in the Nile basin and the river towns around it: the unfinished Jonglei Canal, Malakal and the Shilluk kingdom, and Bor, where the second war began.
Read the history of The Sudd and the northern Nile →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Bor is where it is for a hydrological reason: it is the last point on the White Nile where the river is still a river. Upstream it flows from Juba along a defined channel; downstream it breaks apart into the Sudd, the maze of papyrus, channels and floating islands that makes up Africa's largest wetland. Long before it was a town, being on that threshold made Bor a place to board boats, to trade and to meet.
The people of the area are Dinka Bor, one of the major sections of the Dinka people, who call themselves Jieng. They are Nilotic herders and fishers whose society is organised entirely around cattle and the calendar of the water. In the rainy season, from April or May to November, families withdraw with their herds to higher ground and grow sorghum and millet. When the water recedes, they come down to the fresh grazing meadows the flood leaves exposed, the toic, and set up the cattle camps that are the centre of social life. Cattle are wealth, bridewealth, prestige and identity, and they are slaughtered mainly on ceremonial occasions.
Contact with the outside world came by river, in the 19th century. In November 1839, the first of three river expeditions that the Ottoman naval officer Salim Qapudan led for Muhammad Ali of Egypt set off from Khartoum. Their goal was to force a way through the Sudd and find the sources of the Nile, and this first one reached Bor. The second, in January 1841, got as far as Gondokoro, near present-day Juba. None of them found the sources, but they opened the river to navigation from Khartoum to the deep south.
The consequences were immediate and brutal: Ottoman-Egyptian officials and foreign merchants expanded the ivory trade, and with it the slave trade. By the 1860s, Bor was working as an ivory trading centre on the Nile. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium established in 1899, the settlement became an administrative post for the eastern Upper Nile. Anglican missionaries also put down deep roots in Dinka Bor country, leaving a Christian tradition that would last through every war of the following century.
There are few places in the world where you can say, down to the exact date, that a country was born there. Bor is one of them.
The background: the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement had ended the first Sudanese civil war and given the south autonomy. Through the 1970s that autonomy was gradually stripped of substance. In the early 1980s, Jaafar Nimeiry's government moved to divide the southern region and to impose Islamic law on the whole country, including a south that was mostly Christian or followed traditional religions. It had also ordered military units made up of southern soldiers to move north.
On 16 May 1983, Battalion 105 mutinied against that government at the Malual-Chaat barracks in Bor. Tradition credits Major Kerubino Kuanyin Bol with the first shot, with William Nyuon Bany at his side. The mutiny spread fast: within days and weeks, the garrisons at Ayod, Pochalla and Pibor followed suit.
Khartoum sent a southern officer to put down the uprising: Colonel John Garang de Mabior, who held a doctorate in agricultural economics from the United States. Garang arrived in June 1983 and joined the mutiny. Kerubino proposed him as commander-in-chief of the movement that was taking shape. Kerubino himself became second in command, Nyuon third and Salva Kiir fourth. That is how the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and its political wing, the SPLM, were formed.
The second Sudanese civil war that began that day would last twenty-two years, until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005. It led to the 2011 referendum and to South Sudan's independence. Of the four names in that first chain of command, Salva Kiir would become the new country's first president. All of it began in a barracks in Bor.
In August 1991, the SPLA split. Riek Machar, Lam Akol and other commanders broke away from John Garang's leadership and formed the faction known as SPLA-Nasir. They pointed to two disagreements: what the movement's goal should be (independence for the south, or transforming the whole of Sudan) and Garang's style of leadership. The split took on an ethnic dimension right away: the new faction drew its support mainly from the Nuer people, while the core of Garang's leadership was Dinka.
On 15 November 1991, Nuer fighters of the SPLA-Nasir under Machar's command attacked Bor County, together with the so-called White Army, a set of Nuer youth militias. What followed went down in history as the Bor massacre.
The figures need to be given with their source, because they are disputed and because the episode is still the subject of investigation and of calls for justice. Amnesty International documented at least 5.000 Dinka killed; published estimates range from 5.000 to 20.000. Beyond the direct killings, an estimated 25.000 more people died afterwards in the famine that followed. It was caused by the destruction of the cattle and by people abandoning their crops and land as they fled.
Machar initially dismissed the accounts of the killings as propaganda and myth. In 2012, by then vice-president of an independent South Sudan, he publicly apologised for his role in the events.
The Bor massacre left a wound that never closed. The Dinka-Nuer rift that opened in 1991 would flare up again in December 2013, under the same labels and largely with the same names. You cannot understand what came later without this background: it was not a new conflict but an old one reopening.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in January 2005 ended the second civil war and opened six years of autonomy. John Garang, the architect of the agreement, became vice-president of Sudan in July 2005. Three weeks later he died in a helicopter crash, and Salva Kiir succeeded him as head of the SPLM.
On 9 July 2011, after a referendum with an overwhelming result, South Sudan became independent. Bor became the capital of Jonglei, the country's largest state, and one of its most significant towns. It was a port on the Nile and the gateway to the region of the great antelope migration to the east. It was also an administrative seat and a political symbol because of its founding role.
In those years the John Garang Memorial University of Science and Technology was built, named after the movement's historic leader. The town also took in returnees coming home after decades away. The Juba–Bor road improved the link with the national capital. People talked about reconstruction, about investment, about a country still to be built.
Jonglei, however, never stopped being a difficult state. Dinka, Nuer and Murle groups fought one another over cattle raiding, child abduction and competition for grazing and water. Decades of militarisation and the lack of effective justice made it worse. This intercommunal violence produced serious episodes as early as 2011 and 2012, before the national war broke out.
On 15 December 2013, a clash inside the presidential guard in Juba set off a political crisis that turned into civil war within days. And Bor, because of its history, its make-up and its strategic position on the Nile, was once again at the centre.
Bor was one of the first targets of the South Sudanese civil war. In the early months of the conflict, control of the town changed hands several times between government and opposition forces, with street fighting, burning and looting. Thousands of civilians fled: across the river, into the bush, or into the base of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). As in Malakal and other towns, the base ended up as a Protection of Civilians site, something almost unheard of in the history of peacekeeping.
On 17 April 2014, one of the worst events of the whole war took place. An armed group, described in the coverage at the time as a pro-government militia, came to the UN base in Bor claiming to be a peaceful demonstration. It ignored the peacekeepers' warning shots, broke through the perimeter and opened fire on the civilians sheltering inside, about 5.000 at the time. According to the count published by the United Nations, 53 people were killed: 47 civilians, three attackers and three whose identity could not be established. The victims ranged from an eight-month-old baby to a woman in her sixties. The UN described the attack as a possible war crime.
The revitalised peace agreement signed in September 2018 halted most of the fighting. The Protection of Civilians sites began to pass to state management and protection and became ordinary camps for internally displaced people. The process ended in February 2026, when the last of them, the Malakal site, was handed over.
That did not mean the end of violence in Jonglei. Intercommunal clashes and armed youth mobilisations went on, and from 2019 a disaster of a different kind was added to them.
Since 2019, Jonglei has been living under water. Researchers link the exceptional rainfall and inflows to a combination of an anomalous Indian Ocean Dipole, El Niño and climate change, made worse by releases from Ugandan dams on the Nile. Together they pushed the Sudd to levels beyond anything in memory. Between 2020 and 2022, around 2,6 million people across the country were displaced by conflict and flooding combined. In 2021 alone, floods affected about 1,2 million people, displaced more than 300.000 and caused damage estimated at 671 million dollars. Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile accounted for three quarters of those affected.
What sets this apart from earlier floods is that, in many areas, the water never receded. Some villages have been protected for years by earth dykes built by hand. Some researchers suggest this may be the first case of a population permanently displaced by climate change. For a society organised around the yearly cycle of flood and retreat and the seasonal movement of cattle, water that won't drop is not a nuisance. It is the collapse of the calendar that gives life its shape.
The political situation doesn't help either. The revitalised 2018 agreement was never fully implemented. In March 2025 First Vice-President Riek Machar was placed under house arrest, and the agreement's own monitors said the process was at its most fragile point since it was signed. Foreign ministries responded with their highest level of warning, and Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs specifically names Jonglei among the country's highest-risk states.
And yet, on the other side of the scale, there is extraordinary news. In 2023, South Sudan carried out the first comprehensive aerial wildlife survey in its history. African Parks ran it with the government between 28 April and 15 May, using two planes that captured more than 330.000 images. It recorded a migration of almost six million antelopes in the Boma and Bandingilo parks, east of Bor: around five million white-eared kob, just under 300.000 tiang, 350.000 Mongalla gazelles and 160.000 reedbuck. It is by far the largest land mammal migration on the planet, and almost no one outside the region knew it existed.
That is Bor. A war was born here that ended up creating a country. The Nile turns into swamp here, cattle give the world its order, and the water stopped going away. And a few dozen kilometres away, six million antelopes still cross the plain every year as if none of the rest had happened.
