The White Nile enters South Sudan with the force of a mountain river and, shortly afterwards, comes apart. On a plain with almost no slope the water opens into dozens of branches and forms the Sudd, the largest freshwater wetland in the Nile basin. Its average area is around 30.000 km², but in the wet season it can exceed 130.000 km²: about 21 % of the country's territory. It was designated a Ramsar site of international importance in 2006, with a listed area of some 57.000 km².
The name comes from the Arabic sadd, "barrier" or "obstruction", and it describes exactly what the swamp was for millennia. Floating islands of papyrus and reed break loose from the bottom, drift and plug the channels; a boat can be trapped for weeks. The ancient Egyptians never crossed it. In the year 61, according to the accounts of Seneca and Pliny, the soldiers sent by the emperor Nero to find the source of the Nile reached an impassable swamp and turned back: that was the limit of the known world for Rome in equatorial Africa.
That barrier had an enormous historical consequence. While the north of present-day Sudan was becoming Islamized and Arabized from the 7th century onwards, and while the Funj kingdom and later Ottoman Egypt organized states along the middle Nile, the south stayed on the other side of the swamp, with its own languages, religions and ways of organizing itself. It was not total isolation —there was trade, war and movement of peoples— but it was a frontier thick enough for the two halves of the future Sudan to develop along different paths.
Nor is the Sudd an empty space: it is one of the richest ecosystems in Africa. More than 400 bird species have been recorded —including huge populations of shoebill— along with around 70 fish species, and its floodplains support mammal migrations of more than a million animals. For the Dinka and Nuer, the cycle of the Sudd is the calendar itself: in the dry season families move down with their cattle to the floodplain pastures, the toich, and in the rainy season they return to higher ground.
Speakers of proto-Nilotic languages settled in the Upper Nile region some five thousand years ago. For centuries they lived alongside peoples speaking Central Sudanic and Koman languages, until, from the 14th century onwards, Nilotic speakers —Dinka (Jieng), Nuer (Naath), Shilluk and Luo— expanded and became dominant on the Nile plains.
The Dinka and Nuer are today the two largest peoples in the country. Both organize life around cattle, but calling them simply "herders" falls short: cattle are at once food, currency, bridewealth, prestige, poetry and a link with the ancestors. A Dinka man receives an ox name on reaching adulthood and composes songs for his favourite animal. Transhumance between the higher ground of the rainy season and the floodplain pastures of the dry season is not folklore: it is the only strategy that makes it possible to keep large herds on a plain that turns into a sea for months at a time.
Neither the Dinka nor the Nuer built centralized states with kings and armies. They organized themselves into lineages, territorial sections and figures of ritual authority —the "masters of the fishing spear" among the Dinka, the "leopard-skin chiefs" among the Nuer— whose power was above all one of mediation: containing feuds, setting compensation, making rain. For a long time colonial administrators read that decentralized political architecture as "anarchy"; in reality it was a sophisticated system for sharing out risk, water and pasture in an extreme environment.
The same system explains a tension that runs through the country's entire history: competition for pasture, watering points and cattle between neighbouring communities. Cattle raiding was a regulated practice, with rules and compensation. What changed its scale was the massive arrival of automatic weapons during the wars of the 20th century, when Khartoum's armies and the guerrillas armed entire communities and turned a contained conflict into something far more lethal.
Not all of the south was decentralized. On the west bank of the White Nile, the Shilluk (Chollo) built one of the most original states in East Africa. Tradition places its founding around 1490 with Nyikang, a semi-legendary figure credited with power over the rain and a mixed human and crocodile origin. Each reth —the Shilluk king— is considered a reincarnation of Nyikang, and his body is treated as the very body of the nation: for decades the Shilluk kingdom was one of political anthropology's favourite case studies for its model of "divine kingship".
The kingdom reached its height in the 18th century, as the Funj sultanate declined. Reth Tugo (c. 1690-1710) established the capital at Fashoda, on the Nile, and from there the Shilluk controlled the river routes. In the 19th century they numbered some 200.000 people spread across hundreds of permanent villages, with an economy based on grain and fishing and a population density comparable to that of stretches of the Egyptian Nile. Turco-Egyptian expansion from 1821 pushed the kingdom's northern frontier southwards, the first documented slave raid dates from 1826, and by around 1865 the Shilluk had lost their political independence. The institution, however, did not disappear: the Shilluk kingship survives as a traditional chieftaincy, and reth Kwongo Dak Padiet has held the throne since 1993.
At the other end of the country, in the forests of the southwest, the Azande built the largest group of states in the region. They reached present-day South Sudan in the 16th century, and in the 18th the Avongara (Vungara) aristocracy imposed its authority and organized a series of kingdoms with armies, tribute and a system of justice based on oracles and ordeals. Their name is usually translated as "the people who possess much land". They are famous for their metalwork —the shongo, the multi-bladed throwing knife— and for their sanza music. The study Edward Evans-Pritchard published in 1937 on witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande became one of the most influential anthropology books of the 20th century.
The last great independent Azande king, Gbudwe, held out against the Turks, the Mahdists, the Belgians and the British until he was defeated by the latter in 1905. Decades later, between the late 1930s and the 1950s, the British administration tried out the "Zande Scheme" on their land: an agricultural modernization project that resettled some 60.000 people in planned villages to grow cotton. The plan failed for lack of infrastructure and training, and left behind the memory of yet another forced displacement.
In 1821, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali —formally an Ottoman province— invaded Sudan and put an end to the Funj sultanate. The push south was slower: Ali Khurshid Pasha entered Dinka lands in 1827 and, between 1839 and 1842, the river expeditions of Admiral Salim Qabudan managed for the first time to force a way through the Sudd and reach the latitude of present-day Juba. The garrisons founded soon afterwards emptied out through disease and desertion, but the route stayed open, and everything else came in along it.
What followed was an economy of plunder. From the 1850s, Khartoum traders —many of them with European partners— set up a network of fortified camps called zaribas along the rivers, from which they traded weapons for ivory, took hostages to force payment of tribute in tusks and captured people. The most powerful of these "merchant princes" was al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, who built himself a private army, dominated Bahr el Ghazal from his base at Deim Zubeir and in 1874 defeated and killed Ibrahim, the last sultan of Darfur. By the mid-1870s an estimated 30.000 people a year were being captured and sent out of the region.
The impact was devastating and uneven: some communities were decimated, others armed themselves and became middlemen, and in between was left a lasting distrust between the south and northern traders that later policy only deepened. The physical trace can still be seen: Deim Zubeir is on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List as a Slave Route site.
Khedive Ismail Pasha, alarmed by the merchants' power and under pressure from European abolitionist campaigns, created the province of Equatoria in 1869 and put the British explorer Samuel Baker in charge, with a mandate to suppress the slave trade. Baker failed. Charles Gordon, appointed in 1874, defeated al-Zubayr's son and ended the merchants' control, but he himself admitted that he held no real authority beyond his handful of forts. His successor from 1878, Emin Pasha, was left isolated when the Mahdist revolt cut communications with Egypt; he was "rescued" by Henry Morton Stanley's famous and bloody expedition, and in 1889 Equatoria ceased to exist as an Egyptian outpost.
Nineteenth-century Europe was obsessed with one question: where does the Nile begin? South Sudan was the unavoidable corridor of that obsession, and its gateway was Gondokoro, an anchorage on the Nile in Bari country, a few kilometres from present-day Juba, first visited by Europeans on the 1841-1842 expeditions and quickly turned into a hub for trafficking ivory and people.
It was there that one of the most famous scenes in African exploration took place: on 15 February 1863, John Hanning Speke and James Grant, coming down from Lake Victoria, met Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass, who were heading up from the north. Speke and Grant told Baker there was talk of another great lake to the west; with that information, Baker reached Lake Albert in 1864. The Bari, meanwhile, went from welcoming the outsiders to defending themselves against them: the traffickers built fortified depots near Gondokoro where they held people until shipping them downriver.
The colonial carve-up complicated the map even further. In 1894, Leopold II of Belgium obtained the lease of the so-called Lado Enclave, a strip along the west bank of the Nile that included Lado, Gondokoro and Rejaf, through which he hoped to connect his Congo Free State to the river. The enclave returned to Anglo-Egyptian administration in 1910, a year after the king's death, and its artificial border split peoples such as the Bari and the Ma'di down the middle.
The most famous episode was Fashoda, the old Shilluk capital. The French captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived there on 10 July 1898 with some 120 African riflemen, after fourteen months of marching from the Atlantic coast, and signed a treaty with the Shilluk authorities. On 18 September Herbert Kitchener appeared, fresh from his victory at Omdurman, with some 1.500 men. Not a shot was fired: the two officers toasted each other with whisky and waited for orders from their governments. France withdrew on 3 November 1898, and the Anglo-French convention of March 1899 set out the spheres of influence. Fashoda was renamed Kodok. The crisis, which came close to triggering a European war, ended up pushing London and Paris towards the Entente Cordiale of 1904; for the Shilluk it simply meant that their territory now lay inside the British Empire.
From 1899 Sudan was governed as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, a legal fiction under which real power was British. In the south, the administrators —nicknamed "bog barons"— governed through appointed chiefs who acted as judges and intermediaries, but who were dismissed, exiled, replaced and sometimes reinstated with an ease that eroded their legitimacy. Forced labour for public works was common: when people refused, government forces rounded them up at night.
The conquest was neither peaceful nor quick. Between 1902 and 1926 there were almost continuous revolts: the attack by the Agar Dinka under Myang Mathiang in 1902, the Atuot uprisings of 1907, 1909 and 1917, the Kresh and Binga campaigns between 1908 and 1912, the Anuak resistance of 1912, the Didinga submission only in 1922 after the King's African Rifles campaigns, the Toposa revolts of 1926. In 1919, an attack by the Aliab Dinka that killed eight policemen was answered with British aerial bombing.
At the same time, the government handed education and health care in the south over to Christian missions: a 1905 decree banned missionary activity north of the 10th parallel and divided the south among different denominations. Mission schools were the only education system available —some 700 pupils in 1925— and the south's first secondary school did not open until 1949, in Rumbek.
The key piece came in 1928, when Harold MacMichael formalized the "Southern Policy": promoting English instead of Arabic as the lingua franca, limiting the presence of northern traders and training a local English-speaking administrative cadre. The Closed Districts Ordinances of the 1920s and the Passports and Permits Ordinance of 1922 went as far as requiring permits to travel between north and south. In practice, it was the administration of two different colonies within the same country.
And then it was all undone at a stroke. Under pressure from northern nationalism, Britain reversed the Southern Policy in 1946 and reopened the internal borders in 1947, after twenty-five years of closure. In June of that year, the Juba Conference brought together British and Sudanese delegates and resolved that north and south would form a single state with a common legislative assembly. The southern representatives arrived with very little political training, no parties of their own and no written guarantees. In 1954, during the "Sudanization" of the administration ahead of independence, just six of some 800 senior posts went to southerners. Everything that came afterwards was built on that grievance.
On 18 August 1955, the Equatoria Corps garrison in Torit —made up of southern soldiers— mutinied when ordered to be transferred and replaced by northern troops. The mutiny spread to other towns in Equatoria and was harshly put down. Sudan was not yet independent: there were still just over four months to go until 1 January 1956. In other words, the first Sudanese civil war began before the Sudanese state itself.
The following years were ones of scattered insurgency and exile. In 1962-1963 the various guerrilla groups came together in the Anyanya —the name refers to a poison—, which became the south's largest insurgent movement, while on the political front SANU emerged and later the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement. Gaafar Nimeiry's coup in 1969 and growing international pressure finally opened the way to negotiations.
The talks were held in Addis Ababa under the auspices of Emperor Haile Selassie, with mediation by the World Council of Churches and the All Africa Conference of Churches —the key figure was the Liberian pastor Burgess Carr. Abel Alier led the government delegation and Ezboni Mondiri that of the southern movement, whose military leader was Joseph Lagu. The 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement created the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region, with its own assembly and executive and its capital in Juba, and brought the Anyanya fighters into the army and police.
The war had lasted seventeen years. The most widely cited estimates put the death toll at between 500.000 and a million, more than 100.000 of them combatants; the rest were civilians killed by violence, hunger and disease. Eleven years of relative peace followed, the only ones the south knew in the 20th century.
The Addis Ababa peace came apart where it was weakest. In May 1983, the Sudanese army's 105th battalion, stationed at Malual-Chaat near Bor, refused to be transferred north and rebelled under the command of Alier Nhialmangardit. Khartoum sent a colonel from its own army to negotiate, a son of the region with a doctorate in economics: John Garang de Mabior. Garang went over to the mutineers, and from that merger the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement, SPLA/SPLM, was born.
Garang was born in 1945 in Wangulei, into a poor Dinka family; he studied economics at Grinnell College in Iowa and earned his doctorate at Iowa State University with a thesis on agricultural development —including the Jonglei Canal. His goal was not independence for the south but what he called the "New Sudan": a whole country, secular, democratic and multi-ethnic, in which the marginalized peripheries —the south, the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, Darfur— added together would form the majority. That idea won the SPLM allies all over Sudan and, at the same time, caused permanent internal tensions with those who wanted outright separation.
That same year, President Nimeiry finished off the pact: on 5 June 1983 he abolished the Southern Autonomous Region and split it into three, and in September he declared sharia the law of the whole country, including the non-Muslim regions. The so-called "September laws" introduced amputation and flogging as punishments for Christian citizens and followers of traditional religions. The second Sudanese civil war was already under way, and it would last twenty-two years.
It was a war of enormous scale and sustained cruelty. The most widely reported estimates speak of around two million dead from fighting, hunger and disease, and some four million displaced. Hunger was used as a weapon by the various sides: the 1988 famine in Bahr el Ghazal, linked to raids by murahileen militias on Dinka communities, claimed some 250.000 lives; the 1998 famine, in the same region, more than 70.000, according to Human Rights Watch.
Two projects conceived in Khartoum and Cairo fed the rupture. In 1978, Chevron struck oil near Bentiu, right in the heart of the autonomous region; the field was named Unity. Almost at the same time, work began on the Jonglei Canal, a 360 km channel meant to bypass the Sudd so that the water evaporating there would reach Egypt and Sudan instead. For people in the south, the reading was simple: the oil and the water of their land were going to end up in the north. The 1983 "redivision", which created a new Unity state around Bentiu, deepened the suspicion that the map was being redrawn to keep hold of the wells.
The SPLA attacked both projects. Work on the canal stopped in 1984, with 240 of the 360 km already dug by a gigantic excavator that is still rusting on the plain, and it never resumed. Chevron suspended its operations that same year after an attack that killed three foreign workers. Oil production restarted in the 1990s with Asian and European consortia, and Human Rights Watch documented in its 2003 report how the forced displacement of civilians went hand in hand with the expansion of the oil fields of Western Upper Nile.
The other wound was internal. On 28 August 1991, Riek Machar, Lam Akol and Gordon Kong Chuol announced from Nasir that Garang had been removed as head of the SPLM. The "Nasir Declaration" cited the lack of internal democracy and an explicit demand for southern independence, but the split quickly became ethnic and military. In November 1991, forces of the Nasir faction and Nuer White Army militias attacked the Bor area: an estimated 2.000 civilians died in the violence and another 25.000 in the famine that followed. Machar's faction ended up receiving support from Khartoum for much of the 1990s.
That war within the war left a line that South Sudanese historians themselves repeat: during the second civil war, more southerners died fighting each other than fighting the north. Machar and Garang formally reconciled in 2002, on the eve of the peace talks, but the trauma of 1991 was never fully worked through, and it resurfaced, under other names, in 2013.
The negotiations that ended the war took place in Kenya, under the umbrella of IGAD and with the backing of the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway and Italy. The Machakos Protocol, in July 2002, set the decisive principle: the south would have the right to a self-determination referendum. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on 9 January 2005 in Nairobi between Omar al-Bashir's government and the SPLM. It restored the south's autonomy, split oil revenue down the middle, kept sharia out of the south and set a date for the referendum: 2011.
On 9 July 2005, John Garang was sworn in as First Vice President of Sudan; it was the first time a Christian southerner had held the country's second-highest office. Hundreds of thousands of people welcomed him in Khartoum. Twenty-one days later, on 30 July, the Ugandan presidential helicopter bringing him back from a meeting with Yoweri Museveni crashed in the mountains of the south. His death sparked riots in Khartoum, Juba and Malakal that left more than a hundred dead, and it nearly derailed the agreement. He was succeeded by his deputy, Salva Kiir Mayardit, far less committed to the idea of a "New Sudan" and closer to the separatist option.
The referendum was held from 9 to 15 January 2011, under international observation. 98,83 % of votes were for independence, with turnout above 97 %. At midnight on 9 July 2011, the Republic of South Sudan was born; on 14 July it was admitted as the 193rd member state of the UN, and on 28 July as the 54th member of the African Union. Juba, the old Anglican mission, was the capital of a new country.
The separation left scores unsettled. South Sudan kept most of the oil fields, but the only export route ran through Sudan's pipelines and port. The dispute over transit fees led Juba to shut down production in January 2012 and, in April, to open conflict: South Sudanese forces seized the Heglig oil field on 10 April and withdrew nine days later in the face of a Sudanese counter-offensive. Only in September 2012 did the two presidents sign eight agreements that restarted exports and created a 10 km demilitarised zone along the border. Abyei and several stretches of the boundary remain unresolved.
Independence arrived without institutions and with an army that was really a collection of factions. Political tension within the SPLM between President Salva Kiir and his vice president Riek Machar, dismissed in July 2013, finally exploded on 15 December 2013, when fighting broke out inside the presidential guard in Juba. Kiir denounced a coup attempt led by Machar; Machar denied it and fled the capital. Within days the violence spread and took on a marked ethnic dimension, above all between Dinka and Nuer communities, although the conflict drew in many other groups and factions, and responsibility for atrocities was documented on both sides.
The worst episodes were recorded by the UN and by human rights organisations: the killing of civilians in Juba in the first days, the capture and recapture of Bor, the Bentiu massacre of April 2014 —in which UN investigators documented hundreds of civilians killed in a mosque, a hospital and a church— and the destruction of Malakal, which by October 2015 had changed hands twelve times. In February 2016, an armed attack inside the UN protection of civilians site in Malakal itself left around twenty dead among the displaced people sheltering there.
The August 2015 peace agreement brought Machar back to Juba as vice president, but it did not last: between 8 and 11 July 2016 fighting returned to the capital and left at least 300 dead, including civilians and two Chinese peacekeepers; Machar escaped on foot to the southwest and ended up leaving the country. Human Rights Watch and the UN documented killings, mass rapes and looting during those days.
The most widely cited figure on the human cost comes from a London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study published in 2018: around 383.000 deaths attributable to the crisis between December 2013 and April 2018, roughly half from direct violence and the rest from the collapse of health services and food insecurity. More than four million people were displaced —about 1,8 million inside the country and some 2,5 million abroad, mostly to Uganda and Sudan— making it Africa's largest refugee crisis.
On 12 September 2018, in Addis Ababa, Kiir, Machar and the other parties signed the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), negotiated under IGAD mediation with a central role for Sudan and Uganda. The text provided for an eight-month pre-transitional phase, a unity government with five vice presidents —one of whom had to be a woman—, the unification of the armed forces of all factions, and elections at the end of a three-year transitional period. The revitalised government was only formed in February 2020, with Machar as First Vice President.
The timetable was never met. Unification of the army stumbled along, the permanent constitution was never written and the elections were postponed twice: first from 2022 to December 2024, and then, through a constitutional amendment approved on 21 September 2024, to December 2026. The violence never fully stopped: intercommunal clashes over cattle, land and revenge —in Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, Central Equatoria— kept causing thousands of deaths and displacements every year, in a pattern that combines old local disputes, easy access to weapons and political manipulation.
In March 2025, fighting in Nasir, in Upper Nile, between government forces and Nuer White Army militias —with at least 250 reported dead— led to the house arrest of Riek Machar and the detention of several SPLM/A-IO leaders. In September 2025 Machar was formally charged with murder, treason and crimes against humanity, a process that many observers consider the most serious blow yet to the 2018 agreement. At the time of writing, elections are still scheduled for December 2026 and whether they will actually take place is in doubt.
On top of all this came the impact of the war that broke out in Sudan in April 2023. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the border southwards, both Sudanese refugees and returning South Sudanese. In February 2024 the pipeline carrying South Sudanese crude to the Red Sea ruptured: since oil accounts for around 90 % of the country's exports, the effect was immediate. Exports fell from some 186.000 barrels a day in January 2024 to about 58.000 in December, the economy shrank by 24,5 % in 2024 and inflation ended that year at around 115 %, according to the World Bank. The later recovery of shipments allowed a strong rebound in 2025, but the dependence remains intact.
The humanitarian emergency is among the most serious in the world. For 2026, the UN estimates that more than 10 million people —two thirds of the population— need assistance, and that between April and July of that year more than 7,8 million face crisis-level hunger or worse, with 2,2 million children under five at risk of acute malnutrition and warnings of a credible risk of famine in four counties of Upper Nile and Jonglei. And yet, on 26 July 2026, news of a different kind arrived. UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, meeting at its 48th session in Busan, inscribed the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape on the World Heritage List: South Sudan's first World Heritage site. It covers Boma and Bandingilo national parks plus the corridors that connect them —some 12 million hectares of savannah, wetlands and forest— and the 2024 aerial survey confirmed around six million antelopes there: white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle and reedbuck, the Great Nile Migration. The inscription was made under the emergency procedure and, at the same time, the site was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of spreading commercial poaching and the effects of climate change. That the world's youngest country should win its first World Heritage site and see it arrive already in danger, on the same day, sums up South Sudan pretty well.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Bahr el Ghazal, "the river of gazelles" in Arabic, is the great north-western region, a mosaic of savannah, seasonal rivers and gallery forest inhabited by the Dinka in the east and, in the west, by the group of peoples known as Fertit (Balanda, Kresh, Binga, Ndogo, Jur), as well as the Luo.
In the 19th century it was the epicentre of the upper Nile's plunder economy. From the 1850s, traders from Khartoum set up a network of fortified camps along the rivers, the zaribas, from which they exchanged guns for ivory and captured people. The most powerful was al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, who built a private army, dominated the whole region from his base at Deim Zubeir and in 1874 defeated and killed Ibrahim, the last sultan of Darfur. By the mid-1870s an estimated 30,000 people a year were being captured and taken out of the region.
The Egyptian government, alarmed by al-Zubayr's power, sent Charles Gordon, who defeated his son and ended the merchants' control; shortly afterwards, the Mahdist revolt swept the administration away. The mark remained: Deim Zubeir is on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List as a Slave Route site, and the memory of those raids is still a strong part of regional identity.
That history extended into the 20th century. During the Second Civil War, the murahilin militias of the Baggara of southern Darfur and Kordofan, armed by Khartoum, carried out systematic raids against Dinka communities in Bahr el Ghazal, with abductions and enslavement documented by human rights organisations and by the UN's own special rapporteur in the 1990s.
Wau, on the western bank of the Jur River, about 650 km north-west of Juba, is the country's second city: the 2008 census ranked it third, and 2022 estimates put it at around 320,000 inhabitants.
Its modern founding is a colonial oddity. In late 1897, Captain Marchand's French mission, the same one that would later reach Fashoda, set up a post here that it named Fort Desaix, on a site that had already been a zariba of ivory and slave traders. When the French withdrew after the 1899 settlement, the post went back to being called Wau, just as Fort Dupleix became Deim Zubeir again.
Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Wau became the capital of Bahr el Ghazal province and the largest missionary centre in the western south. Ten Comboni missionaries set out from Khartoum for Wau in 1904, and in 1913 the Apostolic Prefecture of Bahr el Ghazal was established. St Mary's Cathedral, opened in 1956, built of brick with a dome and a rose window, is the largest in the region and remains the city's emblematic building. In 1959-1962 the 445 km branch line linking Babanusa, in Sudan, with Wau was completed, of which some 250 km run through South Sudanese territory: it is the country's only railway and operates intermittently.
That history made Wau the most mixed city in the country: Luo, Fertit, Balanda, Jur, Dinka and traders from the north live side by side in neighbourhoods laid out in colonial times. It also made it especially sensitive to ethnic politics. Between 2016 and 2017 the city suffered serious episodes of violence: the fighting and killings of June 2016 and April 2017 displaced tens of thousands of people, and some 8,500 took refuge inside the grounds of the Catholic cathedral.
Rumbek, capital of Lakes State, lies about 375 km north-west of Juba, in the heart of Agar Dinka country. It is a small town, around 32,000 inhabitants according to 2011 estimates, with enormous symbolic weight in the history of the south.
In 1949, the Anglo-Egyptian administration opened the first secondary school in southern Sudan here. Until then, education in the south was almost entirely missionary and did not go beyond intermediate level, while the north had had secondary schools and Gordon Memorial College since the early part of the century. Rumbek Secondary School educated much of the south's first generation of political leaders, and that educational gap largely explains why in 1954, in the allocation of posts ahead of independence, only six of some 800 senior positions went to southerners.
During the Second Civil War, Rumbek was one of the most contested towns and ended up under SPLA control, which used it as the administrative centre of the liberated areas. After the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement it served as the provisional seat of the Government of Southern Sudan while Juba was being prepared, a brief interlude that nonetheless left the town government buildings, an active airstrip and the University of Rumbek.
Today Rumbek is above all a cattle centre: cattle markets, dry-season camps and a very lively Agar Dinka culture, with traditional wrestling as the social sport par excellence. It also carries a serious problem of intercommunal violence (disputes over cattle, land and family revenge between Dinka sections) that has made it one of the rural areas with the most recorded incidents in the country.
Bahr el Ghazal was one of the regions where the British administration met the most resistance. In 1902, the Agar Dinka attacked government forces under the leadership of Myang Mathiang. There followed the Atuot uprisings of 1907, 1909 and 1917 and the Kresh and Binga campaigns between 1908 and 1912. In 1919, an attack by the Aliab Dinka killed eight policemen; the government's response included aerial bombing, one of the first uses of military aviation against a civilian population on the continent.
That pattern (thin colonial authority, chiefs appointed and deposed at will, forced labour for public works) is what administrators called governing and communities experienced as intrusion. The region also sat right on the border between the Nilotic pastoral world and the Fertit farming societies of the west, a cultural frontier that colonial policy, and later national politics, exploited and deepened.
The Fertit are not one people but a category grouping distinct communities of western Bahr el Ghazal, speaking Central Sudanic and Ubangian languages, traditionally farmers and hunters. They were among the main victims of the 19th-century raids and, during the Second Civil War, some of their militias were armed by Khartoum against the SPLA, which was seen as Dinka-dominated. That rift is still the backdrop to the tensions in Wau.
Traditional wrestling, ox songs, cattle camps and a very dense oral culture are the region's other face: living practices, not relics, that still shape the social life of the Agar, Rek, Malual and Gok today.
If there is one word that defines the recent history of Bahr el Ghazal, it is famine. In 1988, a combination of raids by murahilin militias on Dinka communities, mass displacement, blocked aid and a poor harvest triggered a catastrophe that claimed some 250,000 lives, mostly in this region. It was one of the most poorly documented famines of its time, and one of those that did most to establish the idea of "hunger as a weapon of war".
Ten years later the pattern repeated itself. The 1998 famine in Bahr el Ghazal was worsened by an El Niño-related drought, but it was caused above all by attacks on civilians, the destruction and seizure of food, and restrictions on humanitarian access. It caused more than 70,000 deaths according to Human Rights Watch. Images of that crisis went around the world and stepped up the international pressure that, years later, led to the peace negotiations.
After 2005 the region went through an uneven recovery: refugees returned from Sudan and from further afield, the railway reopened on and off, and Wau and Aweil grew. The 2013 war affected it less than Jonglei or Upper Nile in terms of military front lines, but it was hit by urban violence in Wau, chronic rural insecurity and the wider economic collapse.
The impact of the war in Sudan since 2023 is felt especially strongly here, because Bahr el Ghazal borders Darfur and Kordofan. Sudanese refugees and returning South Sudanese come in through the northern crossings, into a region that was already among the poorest in the country. Aweil and Wau have become reception points, with humanitarian aid stretched to the limit.
Before Juba there were Lado, Gondokoro, Mongalla and Rejaf: a string of Bari villages on both banks of the White Nile, at the point where the river stops being navigable to the south. The Bari are an agro-pastoral people with their own language, related to the Mundari, Kakwa, Pojulu and Kuku, who combined sorghum with cattle and fish and recognised a ritual authority in their "rain chiefs".
Gondokoro was first visited by Europeans during the river expeditions of 1841-1842 sent from Egypt, which reached the foot of the rapids. Within a few years it became the main port for the trade in ivory and people on the upper Nile: Khartoum traders built fortified depots where they held captives until shipping them downriver. The Bari's relationship with outsiders quickly went from curiosity to armed resistance.
On 15 February 1863, at that anchorage, John Hanning Speke and James Grant —coming from Lake Victoria— met Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass, who were travelling up from the north. It was one of the most famous encounters in the history of African exploration, and it happened a few kilometres from where the centre of the capital stands today.
In the late 19th century the area fell within the Lado Enclave, the strip that Leopold II of Belgium leased in 1894 to connect his Congo Free State with the Nile. Rejaf was the enclave's capital and, in 1897, the scene of a battle between Free State forces and the Mahdists. The enclave returned to Anglo-Egyptian administration in 1910, and the border drawn at the time split Bari territory in two.
Juba is a young and somewhat unlikely city. It was born in 1920-1921, when the Church Missionary Society set up a mission and the Nugent Memorial Intermediate School on the site of a small Bari village. Towards the end of that decade the Anglo-Egyptian authorities moved the original Bari inhabitants to build an administrative centre, and the town began to grow as the seat of Equatoria province.
An unexpected player was key at that stage: the community of Greek traders who supplied the British army. They never numbered more than 2.000, but they built many of the buildings in the centre and kept up an easy relationship with the Bari population. A few of those houses with verandas and high ceilings are still standing, along with the old Greek cemetery.
In June 1947, Juba hosted the Conference that decided northern and southern Sudan would form a single state. Almost sixty years later, after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, it became the interim capital of the Government of Southern Sudan, and on 9 July 2011, the capital of the Republic of South Sudan.
Growth was dizzying and chaotic: from about 163.000 inhabitants in 2005 to around 525.000 in 2017 estimates, with entire neighbourhoods built on land without services. In September 2011 the government announced it would move the capital to Ramciel, an almost uninhabited spot some 250 km to the north, at the country's geographical centre; the project never materialised. Today Juba concentrates the state apparatus, the formal economy, the international agencies and most of the country's air traffic.
On the western edge of Juba rises Jebel Kujur, a granite hill of about 680 metres that looks like a dusty pile of rock in the dry season and turns green with the rains. Its original Bari name is Korok; "kujur" is the word that in local Arabic means healer or ritual specialist, a nod to the spiritual weight the hill has always had for people in the area.
During the second civil war, between 1983 and 2005, the hill was contested ground. Juba was held by the Sudanese army, and the SPLA used the heights of Jebel Kujur as an observation post over the city until it was discovered and driven out. The surroundings were mined for years, and demining went on long after the war ended.
Today it is the capital's classic hike: two or three hours of climbing among granite boulders to a summit with views over the city's layout, the White Nile and the plain stretching away to the north. Its granite walls are also the only place in the country with bolted climbing routes. Like everything in South Sudan, a visit depends entirely on the security situation at the time, and it is best done with a local guide.
About 75 km north of Juba, on the White Nile, lies Terekeka, the centre of Mundari land. The Mundari are a people of between 70.000 and 100.000, who speak a Karo-group language related to Bari, Kakwa and Kuku, and who combine cattle herding with sorghum farming and fishing in the river.
Their cattle camps are probably the most widely shared image of the country: hundreds of cows with enormous horns —of the Ankole-Watusi type— amid the smoke of burning dung that keeps mosquitoes away, and people covered in white ash, which works as repellent, sunscreen and antiseptic. Young men wash their hair with cow urine, which turns it orange, something they consider beautiful. All of this has a precise practical and aesthetic logic, and it is worth seeing it that way rather than as an exotic postcard: these are professional herders at work.
Cattle are also the backbone of the region's political economy: they shape marriages, alliances and disputes. And this is where the hard side comes in. Cattle raiding between Mundari, Dinka Bor and other neighbouring communities, a practice that once had rules and compensation, became far deadlier with the spread of automatic weapons after decades of war. Terekeka and its surroundings have repeatedly been the scene of these clashes, and also of tensions over herds crossing farmland.
For visitors, Terekeka is today the most common excursion from the capital: it is two or three hours away by road, and the camps are always visited with prior permission and a guide. The basic rule —worth spelling out— is to ask before taking photos and to pay what was agreed.
Bandingilo (or Badingilo) National Park was created in 1992 and covers some 10.000 km² of wooded savannah and floodplains on both sides of the White Nile, between Central Equatoria and Eastern Equatoria. It is the western piece of a much larger system completed by Boma, further east.
This is the route of what is now known as the Great Nile Migration. Between December and March, at the height of the dry season, white-eared kob, tiang and Mongalla gazelles gather on the Bandingilo plains, where the females give birth in the rich grasslands on the eastern bank of the Nile. With the first rains, between April and June, the movement reverses towards the north and east, heading for Boma and Ethiopia's Gambella.
For decades nobody knew how many animals there were. In August 2022, the NGO African Parks signed a renewable ten-year agreement with the government to manage Boma and Bandingilo. Between April 2023 and January 2024 it carried out the largest aerial wildlife survey ever done in the country: they flew over some 120.000 km², took around 60.000 photographs and tracked more than a hundred collared animals. The result stunned the conservation world: around six million antelopes, more than double the famous Serengeti-Maasai Mara migration.
On 26 July 2026, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting for its 48th session in Busan, inscribed the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape as South Sudan's first World Heritage site through an emergency procedure. The site covers some 12 million hectares of savannahs, wetlands and forests, with the two parks and the corridors that connect them. At the same time the Committee added it to the List of World Heritage in Danger because of spreading commercial poaching and the effects of climate change. Bandingilo is less than an hour from Juba as the crow flies, and yet it remains one of the world's great unexplored parks.
Juba was not just the seat of power: it was where the two worst crises of the independent country began. On 15 December 2013, fighting inside the presidential guard in the capital started the civil war. In the following days, massacres of civilians were documented in Juba neighbourhoods, mainly against Nuer people. Tens of thousands took refuge in UN bases, which improvised the country's first "protection of civilians sites".
The August 2015 agreement brought Riek Machar back to the city as vice-president, and for a few months two armies were stationed in the same capital. On 8 July 2016, a shootout at the gates of the presidential palace turned into four days of fighting with tanks and helicopters inside the city. At least 300 people were killed, among them civilians and two Chinese peacekeepers. Human Rights Watch and the UN documented killings, mass rapes and widespread looting, including attacks on aid workers at the Terrain compound. Machar escaped on foot to the south-west and ended up crossing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
That period left visible marks on the city and a very recent memory. The John Garang Mausoleum, in the centre, is the national monument par excellence and the setting for official ceremonies. The heroes' memorial and Jebel Kujur itself complete the historical circuit that local guides offer today. Since 2018 the capital has lived in a tense calm, with limited outbreaks of violence. Politics heated up again in 2025 with Machar's house arrest and prosecution.
The Sudd is neither a lake nor a river: it is a system. The White Nile arrives from the south as the Bahr el Jebel, meets a plain with almost no gradient and splits into dozens of branches, lagoons and channels that shift every year. Its average area is around 30,000 km², but in the wet season it can exceed 130,000 km², close to 21 % of the national territory. It was designated a Ramsar site in 2006, with some 57,000 km² listed, making it one of the largest protected wetlands in the world.
The dominant vegetation is papyrus, typha and water hyacinth, which form floating islands that can break away from the bottom and block an entire channel. Hence the name: sadd, "barrier" in Arabic. About half the water that enters the Sudd is lost to evaporation and transpiration before it leaves to the north, a figure at the heart of every debate about Nile water.
The wildlife is extraordinary: more than 400 bird species, including very important populations of shoebill, the bird most sought after by the birdwatchers who come to the country, around 70 fish species, sitatungas, crocodiles, hippos and large concentrations of antelope on the floodplains.
For the river peoples, the Sudd is the calendar. Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk move their herds following the cycle of flood and recession: in the dry season they go down to the toich, the floodplain pastures; with the rains they return to settlements on higher ground. That system, refined over centuries, is also the one that suffers most when floods become extreme: the sustained floods since 2019 left whole stretches of Unity and Jonglei underwater for years on end and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The idea of bypassing the Sudd so that the water evaporating there would reach Sudan and Egypt is an old one: it was studied from the early 20th century and formalised in the Nile water agreements between Cairo and Khartoum. The final project planned a canal of about 360 km between Bor and the mouth of the Sobat, capable of adding several billion cubic metres a year to the flow downstream.
Work began in 1978 with a giant excavator brought from Pakistan. On the South Sudanese side, the reading was political before it was technical: the water would go north and to Egypt, while the local population lost the floodplain pastures on which their herding and fishing depend. Opposition to the canal was one of the triggers of the student protests and the discontent that preceded 1983.
Work stopped in 1984, after 240 of the 360 km had been dug, when the SPLA attacked the installations. It was never resumed. The excavator is still there, rusting on the plain, one of the most telling images in the country. The open, unlined trench altered local drainage and acts as a trap for animals.
The project resurfaces on the agenda every so often (Egypt mentioned it publicly in 2021 and in the years that followed), and each time the same debate returns: how much water would be gained downstream versus how much would be lost in the wetland, in the way of life of its inhabitants and in an ecosystem now protected under the Ramsar Convention. No decision has been made, and the canal remains, above all, a symbol.
Malakal sits on the eastern bank of the White Nile, just north of its confluence with the Sobat, about 650 km from Juba. It is the capital of Upper Nile, the great river port of the country's north and, for a long time, its second or third city by population: the 2008 census and later estimates put it at around 140,000-150,000 people before the war.
A few kilometres upriver lies Kodok, the old Fashoda, capital of the Shilluk kingdom since the late 17th century and the scene of the 1898 incident between Marchand and Kitchener. Malakal is the urban centre of a region shared by Shilluk, Nuer and Dinka, and that mix explains much of its recent history. The city is home to the University of Upper Nile, founded in 1991, and one of the country's two international airports.
The 2013 war destroyed it. Malakal was where the conflict became most intensely urban: by October 2015 it had changed hands twelve times and was practically razed. Tens of thousands of civilians sheltered in the UN protection of civilians site set up on the outskirts, one of the largest in the country. In February 2016, armed men entered the protection site itself: the attack left around twenty displaced people dead and destroyed much of the shelters, an episode that forced the UN to review its own arrangements.
Today Malakal still hosts one of the largest and longest-running displacement camps in the country, and also receives part of the flow of people crossing from Sudan since 2023. It is a city that never finished rebuilding and that foreign ministries advise against visiting.
Bor sits on the eastern bank of the Nile, about 190 km north of Juba, on the southern edge of the Sudd. It is the capital of Jonglei and the heartland of the Dinka Bor. From the 1860s it was a point in the ivory trade along the river; in the 20th century it became an administrative centre and, with the Jonglei Canal, the southern end of the project.
In May 1983, the 105th Battalion garrisoned at Malual-Chaat, near Bor, mutinied under the command of Alier Nhialmangardit rather than accept transfer to the north. From that mutiny, and from the defection of Colonel John Garang, who had been sent to negotiate, the SPLM/A was born. In other words, the Second Sudanese Civil War started here.
Eight years later, Bor was the scene of one of the most painful episodes of that same war. After the Nasir Declaration of August 1991, forces from Riek Machar's faction and Nuer White Army militias attacked the area in November: an estimated 2,000 civilians died in the violence and another 25,000 from the famine and displacement that followed. Machar publicly apologised for those events in 2011. In 2013 and 2014 the town again changed hands several times between the army and opposition forces.
Bor also has another side: it is home to the John Garang Memorial University, its schools regularly rank among the best in the country in national exams, and the paved Juba-Bor road links it to the capital. It lives from farming, herding and fishing, and is the natural gateway to the Sudd and to the plains crossed by the great antelope migration.
The Sudd plains are today the centre of the country's most acute humanitarian emergency. Upper Nile and Unity receive most of the returnees and refugees crossing from Sudan since war broke out there in April 2023, and host the largest and longest-running displacement camps in South Sudan.
In March 2025, fighting in Nasir, on the Sobat, between government forces and Nuer White Army militias, with at least 250 reported dead, triggered the political crisis that ended with Riek Machar under house arrest and the detention of SPLM/A-IO leaders. It is a reminder that this region holds both the country's humanitarian vulnerability and its political knot.
The 2026 figures are harsh and are best given with their source. According to the UN, more than 10 million people across the country need assistance, and between April and July 2026 more than 7.8 million face hunger at crisis level or worse; 73,300 people were classified in catastrophe (IPC Phase 5), a 160 % increase on the previous estimate, and agencies warn of a credible risk of famine in four counties of Upper Nile and Jonglei if the conflict worsens.
On top of that comes the water. The exceptional floods that began in 2019 kept whole areas of Unity, Jonglei and Upper Nile underwater for several consecutive seasons, destroying harvests, drowning cattle and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. In a territory whose economy and culture revolve around the river's cycle, the disruption of that cycle is a crisis in itself. The Sudd remains a global ecological treasure; for those who live in it, it is above all a way of life under pressure.
Boma National Park was established in 1977 and covers some 22.800 km² of grasslands and floodplains in the east of the country, against the Ethiopian border, at the foot of the Boma plateau. It is one of the largest parks in Africa, and for decades it was practically impossible to study: the war prevented any serious survey from the eighties to the 2010s.
Its flagship species is the white-eared kob, an antelope that moves in columns of tens of thousands together with tiang, Mongalla gazelles and reedbuck. The Boma-Bandingilo system connects with Gambella National Park in Ethiopia to form a continuous migration corridor. There are also buffalo, elephants, giraffes, leopards, cheetahs and zebras, along with important populations of Rüppell's vultures.
In August 2022, African Parks signed a renewable ten-year agreement with the government to manage Boma and Bandingilo. The aerial survey carried out between April 2023 and January 2024 covered some 120.000 km², with around 60.000 photographs and more than a hundred collared animals. It estimated around five million white-eared kob, some 300.000 tiang, 350.000 Mongalla gazelles and 160.000 reedbuck: in total, some six million antelopes. It is by far the largest land mammal migration recorded on the planet.
On 26 July 2026, at its 48th session in Busan, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape on the World Heritage List. It is the country's first site and covers some 12 million hectares. The Committee also placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger, noting that commercial poaching had grown to an unprecedented scale and that the coming years will be decisive. In practice, the park remains inaccessible to tourism because of the security situation and the complete lack of infrastructure.
Torit is today the capital of Eastern Equatoria, a mid-sized town some 150 km east of Juba. It sits at 615 metres above sea level at the foot of the south-eastern mountains, in Lotuho (Latuka) land. But its name is etched into the country's history because of a single date.
On 18 August 1955, the Equatoria Corps garrison stationed in Torit, made up of southern soldiers, mutinied when ordered to move north and be replaced by northern troops. The mutiny spread to Juba, Yei and Maridi and was harshly put down, and many of the mutineers took to the bush with their weapons. Sudan's independence on 1 January 1956 was just over four months away: the first civil war began, quite literally, before the country did.
Those men, and the groups that gradually joined them, gave rise in 1962-1963 to the Anyanya, the guerrilla movement that fought until the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement. Torit remained strategic in the second war: the town changed hands several times between the SPLA and the Sudanese army in the nineties and was one of the most contested places in Equatoria.
Today Torit is a road junction on the route from Juba to Lokichogio and Kenya. It is an administrative centre and a natural base for heading up into the Imatong Mountains, the country's highest range, with Mount Kinyeti (3.187 m), and into the Didinga Hills. It was made a municipality in August 2013.
Kapoeta, in the arid south-east near the borders with Kenya and Ethiopia, is the urban centre of Toposa land. The Toposa are a Nilotic people of the Turkana group, related in language and culture to the Karamojong, Turkana, Jiye and Nyangatom. Their tradition says they came from the Losolia mountains, in present-day Uganda, driven by severe droughts, and by around 1830 they were settled in the Kapoeta region. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries they played an active part in the ivory trade towards Ethiopian markets.
Theirs is a herding economy of cattle, sheep and goats. Cattle define wealth, marriage and prestige, and the dry season is the time for camps and big dances. The Toposa are also known for their beadwork, headdresses and scarification, and for an age-set system that structures social life.
Their recent history has been shaped by political manipulation. The SPLA took Kapoeta on 25 February 1988, and some Toposa fighters joined the rebels. But after the SPLM/A split in 1991, the Khartoum government armed Toposa militias, exploiting tensions with the Dinka, who dominated the SPLA leadership. It is estimated to have handed out some 50.000 small arms in the region. Kapoeta fell to the government and its allies in 1992, and the SPLA only took it back in June 2002. That flood of weapons turned traditional cattle raiding, which had rules and compensation, into far deadlier clashes with the Turkana, Didinga and Nyangatom, a problem that persists today.
Today Kapoeta is a cross-border trading hub with cattle markets and a modest urban life, in one of the driest and most isolated parts of the country.
Chukudum is a town at the foot of the Didinga Mountains, in Budi County, a corner of cooler climate and green landscapes in the middle of the arid south-east. It is the heartland of the Didinga people, who speak a Surmic language and are distinct from both the Nilotic peoples of the plains and the Bantu. They live in the valleys, plateaus and slopes of these mountains. The tradition recorded by anthropologist Jack Driberg in 1922 holds that they came from the south-east, skirting the southern end of Lake Turkana, and that some two centuries ago they lived in south-western Ethiopia.
The Didinga resisted British occupation longer than most of their neighbours: they only submitted in 1922, after campaigns by the King's African Rifles. Their economy combines cattle with hillside farming, and their mountains, which rise above 2.000 metres, get much more generous rainfall than the plain.
Chukudum also holds its own place in the country's political history. In 1994 it hosted the First SPLM National Convention, the meeting at which the movement tried to reorganise after the 1991 crisis. The aim was to formally separate the political and military wings and set up civilian government structures in the liberated areas. It was one of the milestones that paved the way towards peace talks.
Relations with the SPLA, however, were tense from the moment the movement's forces entered the area in 1985. Conflict broke out in 1999, when Didinga officer Peter Lorot, passed over for promotion, killed his rival and took up arms with his followers. The fighting displaced some 16.800 people from Chukudum to villages in the highlands. It is an episode little known outside the country and still very present in local memory.
The east of Eastern Equatoria is one of the driest parts of the country and also one of the richest in alluvial gold. Artisanal and small-scale mining expanded strongly after 2005. Various surveys estimate tens of thousands of people working at some eighty sites in the region, among them Nanaknak, Napotpot, Namorunyang and Lauro, in the Didinga Hills. An Enough Project report documented how this activity became entangled with political and military networks, with very little effective regulation.
Gold is a real source of income for Toposa and Didinga families in an area with almost no other way to earn cash. But it has also brought disputes over access to sites, damage to waterways and armed middlemen. The logic resembles that of oil at the national level: a valuable resource in a territory with weak institutions.
The other structural factor is climate. The region depends on a single short rainy season and suffers recurring droughts that push herds out of their usual grazing areas, leading to clashes with neighbours. Recent years of extreme droughts and floods in the Horn of Africa have made this cycle worse, and the food crisis hits the south-east especially hard.
Geographically, this is also where South Sudan meets Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. The road from Juba to Torit, Kapoeta and Nadapal, towards Lokichogio and Kenya, is one of the country's main import routes. In the far north-east, the Boma plateau and the Pibor basin, home to the Murle and the Anuak, carry one of the country's most severe histories of intercommunal violence. Since 2012, cycles of cattle raids, child abductions and reprisals in Greater Pibor have prompted specific warnings from international bodies.
The far south of the country, in Magwi County, is Ma'di land. The Ma'di are a farming people living in settled villages who speak a Central Sudanic language, not a Nilotic one. Their territory stretches from Nimule south to the Ugandan districts of Adjumani and Moyo, and north to the Nyolo river, where it blends with Acholi, Bari and Lulubo lands.
That continuity was split by a border drawn in Europe. In 1894, Leopold II of Belgium leased the Lado Enclave, on the west bank of the Nile, to connect his Congo Free State with the river. When the king died in 1910, the enclave passed to Anglo-Egyptian administration, and the boundary between Sudan and the Uganda Protectorate was fixed along the line we know today. The Ma'di, like the Bari and the Acholi, were divided between two colonies and later between two countries.
That border later became an escape route and a lifeline. During both civil wars, hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese crossed into Uganda. In the other direction, in the eighties and nineties, northern Ugandans fled into southern Sudan. The refugee camps of Adjumani, in Uganda, still house tens of thousands of people from this region.
The landscape changes here too: the Nile comes down from Uganda through a narrow channel full of rapids, flanked by wooded hills and vegetation far denser than on the northern plains. This is the country's green gateway.
Nimule National Park was established in 1954, two years before Sudan's independence. At 410 km² it is one of the country's smallest parks and also one of the most accessible. It protects the stretch of the Nile just after the river enters from Uganda, with dry forest hills, gallery forest along the banks and the islands in the riverbed.
Its flagship wildlife includes elephants (one of the most viable populations left in South Sudan), hippos, Nile crocodiles, Uganda kob, buffalo and a rich range of riverside birds. The classic way to explore it is by boat on the river, which also gives the best view of the hills on the Ugandan bank.
The park did not come through the war unscathed. Its wildlife was hunted for food and trade during decades of conflict, and its management was interrupted for long periods. The nearby border town of Nimule, which keeps growing, also puts pressure on the protected area's boundaries.
The town of Nimule is the country's main land crossing. Most imports arriving from Mombasa and Kampala come in this way, along the Juba-Nimule road, which was paved and reopened in 2012 at a reported cost of some 225 million dollars. It was the first long-distance paved road in independent South Sudan and is still its most important artery.
Some 6,5 km north of Nimule, inside the park, the Nile narrows between rock walls and plunges down the Fola (or Fula) Rapids. It is not a spectacular vertical drop like Victoria Falls. It is a stretch of several kilometres of rapids and cascades where the entire flow of the White Nile is squeezed together and roars, one of the most impressive river landscapes in the country.
This stretch of the river has its own name: the Bahr el Jebel, "the mountain river", the Arabic name for the White Nile between Nimule and the Sudd. Downstream of Fola the river widens again, and some 200 km further north, past Juba, it begins to break up into the great swamp. Fola is the reason the Nile never worked as a continuous waterway between Uganda and Egypt. It was the southern limit for steamers coming up from Khartoum, which is why Gondokoro and Rejaf were the end of the line throughout the 19th century.
That same drop is the country's great energy asset. Plans to build South Sudan's main hydroelectric plant at Fola, with capacities studied in the range of several hundred megawatts, date from before independence. They were frozen by the insecurity that followed 2013 and by a lack of funding. Today South Sudan is still one of the countries with the lowest access to electricity in the world, and most of its power comes from diesel.
The project also raises a legitimate debate: a dam at Fola would affect a protected stretch inside Nimule National Park and change the river's flow downstream. No decision has been made yet.
During the Second Civil War, Nimule was a key stronghold for the SPLA: holding it meant keeping the supply line from northern Uganda open. That importance made it a target. From the mid-1990s, Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which according to numerous reports received support from the Khartoum government from 1993 onwards as a proxy force against the SPLA and against Kampala, established itself in parts of Magwi and Juba counties and subjected the area to ambushes, looting and abductions.
The consequences for the Ma'di and Acholi population were severe: entire villages emptied out and regrouped around Nimule, which came to shelter displaced people from across the county. LRA attacks on the road to Juba continued intermittently even after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, until the group withdrew towards the Central African Republic and north-eastern Congo.
With the 2005 peace, the flow reversed. UNHCR organised the voluntary repatriation of hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese from Uganda, and Nimule became the main entry point for those returning: a transit town of markets and lorries that grew much faster than its services.
The 2013 war reversed the flow once again: Uganda became the country that took in the most South Sudanese refugees, more than a million in total, and many of them left through this very crossing. It was also through here that Ugandan troops entered in December 2013 to deploy in support of Salva Kiir's government, an intervention that proved decisive in the first months of the war and was hotly debated across the region.
Of all the regions of South Sudan, this is the one that most resembles a working place. The combination of a paved road, an active border and a humid climate has made Magwi and the Nimule-Juba corridor one of the most productive farming areas in the country: maize, sorghum, cassava, beans, sesame. Much of the food that reaches the capital's markets comes from here or enters through here from Uganda.
That doesn't make it peaceful. The Juba-Nimule road suffered ambushes during the hardest years of the conflict, and tensions between Ma'di and Acholi farming communities and Dinka cattle herders displaced by the war, over access to land and grazing on crops, led to serious episodes of violence, especially between 2014 and 2018. The return of refugees from Uganda also reopened disputes over land occupied while its owners were away.
For travellers, this is the most accessible corner of the country: the Nimule parks and the Fola Falls are about five hours by paved road from Juba and are among the few natural attractions visited with any regularity. Even so, practically every foreign ministry advises against travel to South Sudan, and any trip is arranged with a local operator, permits and an up-to-date reading of the situation.
The region's future is tied to two things: that the road stays open, and whether or not the Fola hydroelectric project goes ahead. In a country where almost everything depends on oil from the north and on a pipeline that runs through a Sudan at war, this green southern corridor is the most tangible economic alternative there is.
Hardly anything that happened to South Sudan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
