After days of hot plain and thorny savannah, Chukudum comes as a surprise: green, sloping, with cool mountain air and homesteads of round, conical-roofed houses dotted across the hillsides. This is Budi County, in the far southeast of South Sudan, at the foot of the Didinga Hills, a massif that stretches to the Ugandan border and peaks at Lotukei, 2,795 metres high, right next to Kidepo Valley National Park.
This is the land of the Didinga people, Surmic speakers related to the Murle, the Tennet, the Boya and Ethiopia's Mursi. They say that some two centuries ago they lived in southwestern Ethiopia and migrated here; that the Didinga, Murle, Tennet and Boya were one community that drifted apart over disputes. They were cattle herders par excellence, and today they are also hillside farmers and a society that puts education at its centre.
Chukudum also holds a place in the country's political history: here, between 2 and 13 April 1994, the New Sudan National Convention was held, the first major assembly of the SPLM/A, with more than five hundred delegates debating how to govern the liberated territory and not just how to wage war. And here too, five years later, one of the movement's most painful internal rifts broke out.
As in the rest of the country, travel cannot be recommended today: the highest alert from almost every foreign ministry, dangerous roads, a remote area with no emergency services. This page explains what Chukudum is, what the Didinga Hills are and why they deserve to be known, and notes down the practical side for the day it becomes possible.
The Didinga say that some two centuries ago they lived in southwestern Ethiopia and reached these mountains migrating from the southeast; the Didinga, Murle, Tennet and Boya were originally a single community that split over internal disputes, something their linguistic kinship within the Surmic family confirms. For generations they were cattle herders in an isolated massif that protected them from raids from the plain. The instability of the 1960s and 1970s pushed many into exile in Uganda, where they found farming and schools, and they came back with different expectations: today livestock, farming and education carry equal weight. The SPLA entered the region in 1985 and Chukudum became a centre of the movement: between 2 and 13 April 1994 it hosted the New Sudan National Convention, with more than five hundred delegates. That presence, however, also left a history of friction with the local population that erupted in 1999, when a Didinga officer rebelled and took to the bush with his supporters. After the 2005 peace and the 2011 independence, Chukudum went back to being what it always was: the gateway to the Didinga Hills.
Read the full history ↓The arid south-east and the Boma plains: the Torit mutiny that sparked the first civil war, the Toposa of Kapoeta, the Didinga of their mountains and the largest land mammal migration on the planet.
Read the history of The east: the great migration and the Toposa →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Didinga Hills are a geographical and climatic anomaly. In a country that is, overwhelmingly, floodplain and hot savannah, this massif in Budi County rises at the far south-eastern edge with green slopes, streams, small woods and nights cool enough to need a jacket. The hills run south to the border with Uganda, and their highest known point is Lotukei, at 2.795 metres, next to Kidepo Valley National Park on the Ugandan side.
Altitude changes everything: more rain, more moisture, soil fit for farming and a natural refuge from raids coming up from the plains. That combination explains why a whole people chose these mountains, and why their culture took the shape it did, halfway between the herding of the lowlands and a hillside farming found nowhere else in the south-east.
The main settlement is Chukudum, at the foot of the mountains, and around it lie other Didinga communities that come up again and again in the literature: Nagishot (one of the highest and coolest), New Kush-Heiman, Lauro and Natinga. There is no town in the usual sense, but a network of hamlets linked by footpaths and tracks that vehicles can only use in the dry season.
Together with the Imatong Mountains to the west, home to Mount Kinyeti (3.187 metres, the highest point in the country), the Didinga form the mountain backbone of south-eastern South Sudan: a world of its own inside a country of plains.
The Didinga speak a language of the Surmic family, the same family as the Boya (Narim), the Tennet, the Murle of Jonglei and the Mursi of south-western Ethiopia. That linguistic kinship supports what their own tradition says: that roughly two centuries ago they lived in south-western Ethiopia and migrated to their present land, and that the Didinga, Murle, Tennet and Boya were once a single community that split apart through a series of disputes. An ethnographic study from 1922 already recorded that they had reached their present home from the south-east.
For generations they were herders first and foremost. Cattle meant wealth, prestige and bride price, and young unmarried men were in charge of guarding large herds. Society is organised into age sets, formed every three to five years, whose members work, compete and socialise together until marriage. They live in scattered hamlets of round houses with conical roofs.
The instability of the 1960s and 1970s (the first Sudanese civil war, which lasted until 1972) drove many Didinga families into exile in Uganda between 1963 and 1973. There they found two things that would change their outlook: farming and formal schooling. When they came back, they came back with different aspirations, and today working the land and going to school carry as much weight as cattle in community life. It is one of the clearest and least-told social shifts in the country's south-east.
On the religious side, Didinga tradition keeps rain rituals and the veneration of ancestors, who are seen as decisive for the community's wellbeing, alongside the Christianity brought by the missions. These are practices to listen to and respect, not to ask to see as a show.
The SPLA entered the Chukudum area in 1985, in the early years of the second Sudanese civil war. The mountains offered what every guerrilla force looks for: difficult terrain, water, farming to feed the troops and a short distance to the Ugandan border. The area became part of the territory under the movement's control.
That made Chukudum a political stage. From 2 to 13 April 1994 it hosted the National Convention of New Sudan, the first major assembly of the SPLM/A, attended by more than five hundred delegates. What stood out about that meeting was its agenda: it focused on governing the liberated territory (civil structures, administration, representation, relations with communities) rather than on military strategy against Khartoum.
The convention marked an attempt to turn a guerrilla army into an administration, a step that would prove decisive eleven years later, when the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement put the SPLM in charge of an autonomous government. That this debate took place in a mountain village at the far south-eastern edge, and not in a capital, says a lot about the kind of war being fought.
For the Didinga, though, the movement's presence had another side too. Relations between the local population and military authorities who were mostly Dinka were tense from the start, with a history of friction building up since 1985.
In 1999, the tension that had built up in Chukudum between the SPLA military authorities and the Didinga community boiled over. The trigger was a question of command: a Didinga officer, Peter Lorot, was passed over for promotion in favour of a Dinka officer. Lorot and several of his supporters killed that officer and took to the bush, forming a Didinga force based in the Chukudum area, in Budi County.
The episode was the boiling point of years of resentment. The literature on the conflict describes a record of humiliation, harassment and violence from the moment the movement entered the area in 1985: a pattern repeated in several parts of Equatoria that left long-lasting political scars between Equatorian communities and the SPLM/A leadership.
The 1999 rupture did not change the course of the war, but it did complicate the movement's rear in the south-east and fed a distrust that would resurface after independence, in the tensions between Equatoria and the central government in Juba.
Telling this is not about dwelling on the grim side: it is essential to understanding why regional loyalties and grievances weigh so heavily in South Sudan, and why national peace is also decided in mountain villages that no political map singles out.
After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 and independence on 9 July 2011, Chukudum went back to what it had always been: the hub of a region of mountain hamlets, with a market, a mission and schools, and the gateway to the Didinga highlands.
Daily life still rests on three legs: cattle, hillside farming (sorghum, maize, beans, vegetables) and school. It is an unusual combination in south-eastern South Sudan, explained by the history of exile in Uganda in the sixties and seventies. The mountain climate, with more rain and workable soil, makes possible what would be unthinkable on the plains.
The problems are well known too: isolation, tracks cut off in the rainy season, health and education services that depend largely on missions and humanitarian organisations, land and cattle disputes with neighbouring communities, and the impact of a national economic crisis with high inflation and fuel shortages. The 2013-2018 South Sudanese civil war hit Eastern Equatoria less hard than other regions, but the general decline is felt all the same.
In travel terms, Chukudum is today one of the most remote corners of a country under the highest alert level of practically every foreign ministry: Level 4 "Do Not Travel" from the United States (17 May 2026), "advise against all travel" from the United Kingdom (26 May 2026) and «se desaconseja el viaje bajo cualquier circunstancia» (travel is advised against under any circumstances) from Spain (28 March 2025). There are no hotels, no emergency services and no reliable communications, and the tracks are only passable a few months a year.
And yet it is worth putting on record what is there: a green massif with endless views, hamlets of round, cone-roofed houses spread across the slopes, a people with a two-century history of migration and a unique bond with the mountain, and a town that, in April 1994, was for eleven days the political capital of a country that did not yet exist.
