If South Sudan has one image that has travelled the world, it's this one: at sunset, between columns of white smoke from burning dung, hundreds of cattle with enormous horns rest while men and boys covered in ash move among them. These are the cattle camps of the Mundari people, on the White Nile plain around Terekeka, about 75 kilometres north of the capital.
It's worth clearing up the misunderstanding before going any further. What gets photographed is neither staged nor a ceremony: it's a working day. The smoke keeps mosquitoes and flies away; the ash from burnt dung works as insect repellent, sun protection and antiseptic on the skin of people and animals alike; the cattle are looked after the way you look after your assets, because that's literally what they are. Cows are currency, bridewealth, social insurance and prestige. A Mundari camp is a bank, a home and a workplace all at once.
That's why this guide keeps coming back to one point: the Mundari are people. You don't visit them the way you visit a monument. You go in by invitation, ask permission for every photo, pay what was agreed, don't direct anyone as if they were a model, and accept a no without arguing. An encounter done that way is one of the most intense cultural experiences East Africa has to offer; done the other way, it's a kind of tourism that the people of these camps themselves have described as uncomfortable.
And the bigger picture doesn't change: today practically every foreign ministry has South Sudan at its highest alert level, the roads are dangerous, and this area in particular lives with recurring cattle raids and intercommunal tensions. This is an informative guide to an extraordinary cultural phenomenon, not an invitation to pack your bags.
The Mundari belong to the Karo group of Nilotic peoples —the same family as the Bari, their neighbours to the south— and have lived for centuries on the strip of savannah and floodplain west of the White Nile, with Terekeka at its centre. Their life revolves around long-horned cattle, which reached this region with the Nilotic migrations and which shape the economy, kinship and prestige: bridewealth is paid in cows, disputes are settled in cows and social standing is measured in cows. That same centrality explains the other side: cattle raiding between herding communities is an old practice that the mass circulation of automatic weapons during Sudan's civil wars made far deadlier. Terekeka, the county's administrative centre, grew as a market and a point of contact with the outside world; today it's the natural gateway to the camps and also the place where you can see most clearly the pressure that war, displacement and climate change put on an ancient way of life.
Read the full history ↓The stretch of the White Nile where the capital was born: Bari and Mundari land, the old Gondokoro of the ivory traders, the Jebel Kujur hill and the Bandingilo plains, crossed by the largest mammal migration on the planet.
Read the history of Juba and the White Nile (Central Equatoria) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Mundari are a Nilotic people of between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand who live in the belt of savannah and floodplain west of the White Nile, in what is now Central Equatoria state, with the town of Terekeka as their administrative and commercial centre. Their territory stretches roughly a hundred kilometres from north to south and seventy-five from east to west, with the river as its eastern boundary, about seventy-five kilometres north of Juba.
They belong to the Karo group of Nilotic peoples, the same group as the Bari (their southern neighbours and the original people of the area around the capital), the Kakwa, the Pojulu, the Kuku and the Nyangwara. All of them speak closely related languages of the Bari group, within the Eastern Nilotic branch. That linguistic and cultural closeness is not an academic detail: it explains alliances and marriages, and also disputes over land and grazing that run back for centuries.
The Nilotes reached this part of the upper Nile through a long process of expansion from the north that specialists place over the last millennium, bringing with them the long-horned cattle that are still the basis of their economy. The Mundari combine herding with farming (sorghum is the main crop) and with net and harpoon fishing on the Nile. They are not pure nomads: they have permanent villages and cattle camps that move with the seasons, following grass and water.
Social life revolves around cattle. Bridewealth is paid in cows, compensation for harm is paid in cows, a family's standing is measured in cows, and marriages are arranged between families, with polygyny among those who can afford it. At initiation, young men receive a distinctive scarification pattern, two sets of three parallel lines, one on each side of the forehead, which marks them as adults. Wrestling carries considerable sporting and social prestige, as it does across much of the Nilotic world.
What the world knows as "the Mundari camps" is a production system, not a stage set. As evening falls, the cattle come back from grazing and each animal settles into its place in the camp. Through the night, dozens of fires made from dried dung burn, and the white smoke that blankets them has a specific job: it keeps away the mosquitoes and flies that carry disease to the cattle on a floodplain where insects are a serious problem.
The ash left by those fires is rubbed onto the animals' backs and onto people's skin. It works as insect repellent, sunscreen and antiseptic, helping keep wounds clean and external parasites under control. The same logic explains why cattle are washed with urine, which has antiseptic properties, and why many men wash their hair with it: the uric acid bleaches the hair to reddish, orange or yellow tones that Mundari aesthetics consider beautiful.
The bond with the animals is individual and emotional. Every cow has a name. Herders know each one individually, along with its history and bloodline, and compose songs dedicated to them, a practice shared with other Nilotic herding peoples such as the Dinka and the Nuer. The huge lyre-shaped horns of the Ankole-type cattle are both a breed trait and a source of pride.
Understanding this matters because it changes the visitor's position entirely. A camp is not a show put on to be looked at: it is at once the home, the workplace and the economic wealth of specific families. The photographs that travel around the world (the smoke, the low light, the silhouettes among the horns) document a working day. Whoever arrives there is arriving at someone's home and someone's office.
Terekeka, on the west bank of the White Nile, is the seat of the county of the same name and the historical point of contact between the Mundari world and the successive administrations that ruled this region: the Turco-Egyptian one of the 19th century, with its trade in ivory and enslaved people along the Nile corridor; the Mahdist one; that of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from 1899; that of independent Sudan from 1956; and that of South Sudan since 2011.
The river was always the main route. The steamers heading upriver from Khartoum to Gondokoro passed these banks, and with them came trade, missions and taxes. The British "Southern Policy" kept the south administratively isolated and economically marginal for decades, which preserved traditional ways of life while depriving the region of schools, roads and services. When the 1946 Juba Conference decided to administer the south together with the north, the region came to that union with no institutions of its own.
Terekeka came through both Sudanese civil wars (the one that began with the Torit mutiny in 1955 and the one of 1983-2005) with the vulnerability of the whole rural world: forced recruitment, displacement, disrupted grazing circuits, closed schools and clinics. The flood of automatic weapons those wars left behind turned an old practice, cattle raiding between herding communities, into something far deadlier than it had ever been.
After independence in 2011, and above all after South Sudan's civil war broke out in December 2013, the area found itself in an awkward position: close to the capital and its main road to the north-west, on the border between the lands of different peoples, with pressure on grazing and water. Cattle clashes between the Mundari and the Dinka Bor recur, especially in the dry season, and regularly force camps to move and routes to close.
From the mid-2010s, the Mundari camps became one of the most recognisable photographic images of Africa: the smoke, the six o'clock light, the horns outlined against the sky, the ash-covered figures. Features in international magazines and work by photographers who spent long stretches in the camps put Terekeka in an unlikely spot in the global visual imagination, given that this is one of the least-visited countries on the planet.
That gave rise to a small circuit of photography trips: operators leaving from Juba with permits, guides and 4x4 vehicles to spend one or two nights camping beside a cattle camp. Published prices for 2026 start at around USD 1,750 per person for three days and two nights, and week-long expeditions covering several destinations are offered at between USD 2,890 and USD 3,490 per person depending on group size. These figures don't buy comfort: they buy logistics, permits and security.
The circuit also brought the familiar problems of this kind of tourism: visitors who turn up uninvited, who take photos without asking, who direct people as if they were a film crew, who hand out money or gifts at random and stir up internal conflict, or who post images with captions that exoticise the people in them. The difference between a respectful encounter and a human zoo isn't in the landscape. It's in how the visitor behaves.
The practices that serious operators themselves describe are fairly simple: a local guide with a long-standing relationship with the camp's chiefs; a visit agreed in advance; permission asked of each person before each photo, and a willingness to put the camera away; a contribution negotiated in advance and paid in full, with no haggling on the spot and no swapping it for improvised gifts; and the discipline to pay as much attention to the daily work as to the spectacular moments. On top of that comes the legal requirement: in South Sudan you need an official permit from the Ministry of Information / Interior to use a camera, around USD 50 according to operators and travel guides, and that permit clears you with the state, not with the people.
Today, with the country under the highest alert level from practically every foreign ministry, this circuit has shrunk to a handful of operators and a handful of travellers a year. The camps, on the other hand, are still there: they don't exist to be visited, and they will go on existing when nobody visits them.
Mundari herding is not a frozen relic: it is a living system under strong, well-identified strains. The first is armed violence. Cattle raiding between herding communities existed long before the civil wars, with its own rules and limits. The mass availability of automatic rifles since the 1980s changed the scale of the damage and turned what had been a regulated dispute into a deadly cycle of reprisals.
The second is climatic and hydrological. In recent years the upper Nile basin has seen floods of exceptional size, which submerged grazing plains for entire seasons and displaced hundreds of thousands of people along with their cattle. When the grass disappears under water, herds crowd onto less land, and competition for what remains fuels conflict.
The third is economic and demographic. The nearness of Juba, a capital that grew from tens of thousands to more than half a million people in two decades, puts pressure on land and water, draws young people to the city and shifts the relative value of things. School, paid work and the mobile phone now sit alongside camp life, not always without friction.
The fourth is political. The 2018 revitalised peace agreement is still only half implemented, elections have been postponed several times, and the national tensions of 2025 and 2026 are felt in the countryside before anywhere else, because that is where roads are cut first, militias arm first and aid agencies leave first.
Telling the story of the Mundari camps without telling this would leave only the postcard. The image of smoke at sunset is real and it is extraordinary; so is the context in which that image is made. Both are part of the same place.
