Wau is the most cosmopolitan city in South Sudan, and it got that way through layers of history. It was a fortified base for slave traders in the 19th century, a French fort for six months in 1898, an administrative centre of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, the point where the railway coming down from Sudan ended and, from the early 20th century, the seat of the most important Catholic mission in the west of the country. Each of those layers left behind people, buildings and languages.
The result is a city unlike the rest: Luo, Fertit, Balanda, Kresh, Ndogo, Dinka and traders from the north and the Horn of Africa living side by side in an urban layout with colonial brick architecture, a railway station that no longer receives trains and a Catholic cathedral that ranks among the largest in the region. It stands on the west bank of the Jur River, some 650 kilometres northwest of Juba, in the heart of Bahr el Ghazal.
That same mix, however, made it vulnerable. Between June 2016 and January 2019, Wau went through cycles of urban armed violence that displaced tens of thousands of people and left a UN Protection of Civilians site with more than thirty thousand residents in place for years. This guide tells the history and heritage of Wau accurately, and warns from the very first line that every relevant foreign ministry advises against travel to this country.
Wau began as a zariba —a fortified base— of ivory and slave traders in the 19th century, in the Bahr el Ghazal dominated by Zubayr Rahma Mansur. In January and February 1898, the French captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, on his march towards Fashoda, built Fort Desaix here, one of the stations of the Congo-Nile expedition; the French held it for just over six months, between December 1897 and June 1898, and when they withdrew the place went back to being called Wau. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1956) it became established as the provincial capital of Bahr el Ghazal and as the great Catholic missionary centre of the west: the Comboni missionaries arrived from Khartoum in 1904, and in 1913 the Apostolic Prefecture of Bahr el-Ghazal was established. Between 1959 and 1962 the railway linking it with Babanusa, in Sudan, was built, making it the terminus of the Sudanese rail network. It came through both Sudanese civil wars as a government stronghold and, after independence in 2011, remained one of the main cities of the new country, before going through its own cycle of urban violence between 2016 and 2019.
Read the full history ↓The "river of gazelles": the region of al-Zubayr's zaribas and the 19th-century slave trade, with Wau and its cathedral and railway, and Rumbek, where the south's first secondary school opened.
Read the history of Bahr el Ghazal (the north-west) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Wau you have to understand the Bahr el Ghazal, the vast region in the northwest of today's South Sudan. Its name means “river of the gazelles”, and it drains into a river system that ends up feeding the Sudd. It is a land of savannah and seasonal rivers, with an unusually wide range of peoples: Luo (Jur Chol), Balanda, Kresh, Ndogo, Shatt and other groups gathered under the umbrella term Fertit, along with Dinka in the eastern strip.
In the 19th century, this region became one of the main theatres of the ivory and slave trade in northeast Africa. Traders from the north (Khartoumers, Egyptians, Europeans and Levantines) set up zaribas: fortified camps with thorn stockades that served as military base, warehouse and centre of operations. From there they organised expeditions that captured people and ivory and shipped them downriver.
The man who came to dominate the system was Zubayr Rahma Mansur. From the 1860s onwards this trader built an autonomous power base in the Bahr el Ghazal with his own army. He became the region's strongman and was eventually recognised as governor by Khedivial Egypt. His name stayed on the map: Deim Zubeir, several hours west of Wau, is named after him.
The site where Wau stands today, on the west bank of the Jur River, was one of those zaribas. There is no clean founding date because there was no founding in the European sense. There was a strategic spot by a river that was occupied, fortified and used. That is the city's first layer, and it is a hard one, which recent South Sudanese historians have begun to study seriously.
In 1897, France launched one of the boldest operations of the colonial Scramble for Africa: the Congo–Nile expedition, led by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Its task was to cross the continent from French Congo to the White Nile, plant the flag and force a negotiation with the United Kingdom over control of the river.
On his march east, Marchand set up a series of fortified stations in the Bahr el Ghazal in late 1897 and early 1898. One of them, built between January and February 1898 with fortifications, buildings and huts, was called Fort Desaix and stood on the site of Wau. Another, Fort Dupleix, was at Deim Zubeir.
The French presence was very short: just over six months, between December 1897 and June 1898. Marchand moved on and reached Fashoda, on the White Nile, in July 1898. There, in September, he came face to face with Herbert Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian force in the famous Fashoda Incident, which brought France and the United Kingdom to the brink of war. It ended in November with the French withdrawal.
When the French left, Fort Desaix became Wau again and Fort Dupleix went back to being Deim Zubeir. Even so, the city owes much of its early physical growth to those six months, because the buildings put up by the expedition were the first built-up core of the place. It is one of those ironies that abound in African history: a South Sudanese city whose first urban layout was drawn by a French column passing through.
When Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was established in 1899, Wau became the administrative centre of Bahr el Ghazal province. The Condominium gave the city what can still be seen today: an orderly layout, brick buildings, government offices, officials' houses and tree-lined streets. It is the most coherent colonial architecture left in South Sudan.
The other major institution that shaped Wau was the Catholic Church. In 1904, ten Comboni missionaries set out from Khartoum for this remote settlement, and there are records of parish activity from 1905. On 30 May 1913 the Apostolic Prefecture of Bahr el-Ghazal was established under Father Antonio Stoppani. On 13 June 1917 it was raised to an apostolic vicariate, on 26 May 1961 it was renamed the Apostolic Vicariate of Wau, and on 12 December 1974 it became a diocese. This timeline is worth keeping in mind because 1913 is sometimes given as the date of the cathedral, when it actually marks the creation of the church jurisdiction.
The present building of St Mary's Cathedral went up between 1951 and 1956. It is an imposing brick structure with a dome and a rose window, described as the largest of the five Catholic cathedrals of the former Sudan and as the Church's great place of worship in the Bahr el Ghazal. It is, without question, the building that defines Wau's skyline.
The mission network was not only religious. Schools, dispensaries, workshops and seminaries trained several generations of southern Sudan's intellectual and political elite, in a region where the colonial state invested very little. That role goes a long way to explaining why the Catholic Church has had, and still has, such social and institutional weight in the country.
The third piece came in the 1950s and 1960s: the railway. Between 1959 and 1962 a 1,067-millimetre gauge branch line was built linking Babanusa, in Sudan, with Wau. The line is usually given as 248 kilometres long, and it made the city the southern terminus of the Sudanese rail network. Goods, officials and soldiers came down the line, and farm produce went up it. For decades, Wau station was the country's gateway.
The mutiny of the Torit garrison in August 1955, months before Sudan's independence, sparked the First Sudanese Civil War, which lasted until the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972. On 16 May 1983, the mutiny of the 105th Battalion in Bor started the second one, which would last until 2005. Between the two, southern Sudan had just eleven years of peace in half a century.
In that context, Wau held a particular position. For much of the second war it was a stronghold held by the Khartoum government, a garrison town and the end of the railway line, which meant it could be supplied. For the same reason it became a refuge for rural people fleeing the countryside. The city filled up with displaced people and its population became even more mixed.
Being a government enclave in a mostly insurgent region left tensions that would outlast the war. The relationship between the Fertit communities, which at various times formed militias aligned with Khartoum, and the surrounding Dinka communities, linked to the SPLA, is one of the oldest fault lines in western South Sudan, and it would flare up again decades later.
The railway, meanwhile, was an early casualty. The Babanusa–Wau line was cut, mined and sabotaged, and the service became sporadic at first and then stopped altogether. The station was left as it is today: a group of sheds, tracks overgrown with vegetation and abandoned rolling stock, one of the most melancholy industrial landscapes in East Africa.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 ended the war, and on 9 July 2011 South Sudan became independent. Wau became the capital of Western Bahr el Ghazal and home to the University of Bahr el-Ghazal. A university and trading city, it is one of the new country's main urban centres and holds the largest concentration of built heritage anywhere in the territory.
The South Sudanese Civil War broke out in December 2013 in Juba and spread first through the east of the country. Wau stayed relatively on the sidelines for two and a half years. That ended in June 2016.
That month, fighting broke out in the city and its surroundings between government forces and Fertit-based militias aligned with the opposition. The available records place the cycle of sustained clashes between June 2016 and January 2019. Hundreds were killed, infrastructure in the surrounding villages was destroyed and large numbers of people were displaced.
The figures show the scale. After the violence of June 2016, between 62,000 and 77,000 people were displaced within Wau County, and a second episode in April 2017 displaced another 22,000 to 25,000. As of November 2017, around 100,000 people were still displaced within Western Bahr el Ghazal state, and many more had fled to Sudan or to Northern Bahr el Ghazal. The UN Protection of Civilians site in Wau sheltered more than 32,000 people at its peak.
Hunger came on top of the violence. Insecurity forced a temporary suspension of general food distributions outside the UN compound, and the suspension lasted from April to July 2017.
The revitalised peace agreement signed in September 2018 set off the end of this cycle, and the last significant clashes were recorded in January 2019. As in the rest of the country, the Protection of Civilians site was later handed over to state management. This was part of a process that culminated in February 2026 with the handover of the last one, in Malakal.
Wau reaches the present with around 320,000 inhabitants according to 2022 data, and with something no other South Sudanese city has: visible layers of built history. There is the 1950s brick cathedral, the railway station without trains, the colonial layout of the Condominium, the university, and the market at the crossroads of the routes to Darfur, Bahr el Ghazal and Equatoria. If South Sudan ever develops cultural tourism, this is where it will begin.
The national picture, however, is bleak. The 2018 revitalised agreement was never fully implemented. In March 2025, the house arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar left the process, in the words of the agreement's own monitors, at its most fragile point since it was signed. Foreign ministries responded with their highest alert levels. The US State Department issued a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory, and the British FCDO advised against all travel in its guidance of 26 May 2026. Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said «se desaconseja el viaje bajo cualquier circunstancia» (travel is advised against under any circumstances), and it also stresses that all roads in the country are extremely dangerous.
On top of that came the war in Sudan from April 2023, which completely upended movement across the northern border and pushed hundreds of thousands of people south. Wau's economy always depended on trade with Darfur and Kordofan and on the railway that came down from Babanusa, so the collapse of the north is a direct blow to the city.
And yet the city keeps going. The university holds classes, the market opens, the cathedral says Mass and the boda-bodas cross the bridge over the Jur. Wau is Luo, Fertit, Balanda, Kresh, Ndogo, Dinka and Sudanese all at once. It has been a zariba, a French fort, a British provincial capital, a railway terminus and an episcopal see. South Sudan's story is usually told only through its wars, and Wau shows that there are many more stories to tell.
