Juba is the capital of the world's youngest country. South Sudan became independent from Sudan on 9 July 2011. This city on the White Nile was once a Bari village. British missionaries made it an administrative centre in the 1920s, and it later served as a wartime garrison, a guerrilla headquarters and the makeshift capital of a new state. In barely two decades it grew from a few tens of thousands of people to more than half a million.
Let's start with what matters: right now, travel to South Sudan cannot be recommended. Almost every foreign ministry in the world has the country at its highest alert level, and several are asking their citizens to leave. The 2013-2018 civil war ended with a peace agreement that has still not been fully implemented. Violence between communities keeps coming back, millions of people are displaced, and there is a deep humanitarian crisis. This guide exists to give honest information about what Juba is, the history it carries and what is in it. It is not meant to push anyone onto a plane.
That said, Juba is not an abstraction from a humanitarian report. It is a lively, noisy and surprisingly welcoming city. Konyo Konyo market roars from dawn, the White Nile flows wide and slow along the east side, and open-air bars line the riverbank. John Garang's mausoleum is its symbolic centre of gravity, and the hill of Jebel Kujur stands out to the west. Juba is also the only real gateway to the rest of the country: to the Mundari cattle camps of Terekeka, to the Bandingilo and Boma parks (which in July 2026 became the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site), and to Torit and Kapoeta in the southeast.
What follows is a practical, sober guide: what to see, how the city works, what the verifiable costs are, what has no published price, and the precautions to take if you have a professional reason to be here.
Juba began as a Bari village beside the White Nile, on a stretch of river that 19th-century explorers knew through nearby Gondokoro. That outpost was a stop for ivory and slave traders and a base for European expeditions searching for the source of the Nile. The modern city was founded by the Church Missionary Society in 1920-21 on the site of that village. By around 1927 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was building an administrative centre there. In 1929 traders, many of them Greek, moved in from Rejaf, and in 1930 the governor's office arrived. In 1947 the Juba Conference sealed the decision to govern the south together with the north. That decision planted the seed of a conflict that broke out in 1955 with the Torit mutiny and ran through two civil wars. Juba was a stronghold of the Khartoum army during the second war (1983-2005), the autonomous capital after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and the national capital from independence on 9 July 2011. In December 2013, a clash within the presidential guard in the city itself sparked the South Sudanese civil war.
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.
Long before Juba existed, this stretch of the White Nile — known along its upper course as Bahr el Jebel, "the river of the mountain" — was the land of the Bari people, Nilotic farmers and herders settled on both banks of the river in scattered villages. The Bari are still the original people of the capital's metropolitan area, and you can still hear their language in the city's neighbourhoods and churches.
The place that put this area on European maps was not Juba but Gondokoro, a few kilometres upstream: a trading and mission post that in the 19th century marked the limit of river navigation from Khartoum. Boats came up the Nile loaded with goods and went back down loaded with ivory and enslaved people, in one of the darkest chapters of the region's history. The Austrian Catholic mission set up in Gondokoro in the middle of the century failed because of disease: malaria and fever killed the missionaries almost as fast as they arrived.
Gondokoro was also the essential stop for the great European expeditions searching for the source of the Nile. It was there, in February 1863, that John Hanning Speke and James Grant, heading down from Lake Victoria, met Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass, heading up from the north — the meeting that would let the Bakers continue on to Lake Albert. Decades later, the region came under the control of the governor of Equatoria, Eduard Schnitzer, better known as Emin Pasha, who was cut off by the Mahdist uprising and became the target of a famous "rescue" expedition led by Henry Morton Stanley.
Between 1894 and 1910, a strip of this western bank of the Nile formed the so-called Lado Enclave, leased by the United Kingdom to King Leopold II of Belgium and run from the Congo Free State. When Leopold died, the enclave went back to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. What remains of that period is mostly place names — Lado, Rejaf — and a border drawn according to the logic of European offices, not of the peoples who lived here.
Modern Juba was born of an administrative and missionary decision. Between 1920 and 1921, the British Church Missionary Society settled on a small Bari village called Juba and founded the Nugent Memorial Intermediate School there, a school that gave the site infrastructure and prestige that no other place in the area had. That presence counted when Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was looking for somewhere to put the provincial headquarters of Equatoria.
In the late 1920s, the authorities ordered the Bari residents to be moved so the new administrative centre could be built: by around 1927, construction of the city was under way. In 1929 the traders from nearby Rejaf moved to Juba, and in 1930 the governor's office arrived. Within a decade, a hamlet had become the administrative capital of southern Sudan.
The new city's commerce was built largely by Greek merchants. There were never many of them — their community never went beyond two thousand people — but they built much of the centre and of the neighbourhood still known today as Hai Jalaba, the old Greek Quarter. The shops, hotels, cinemas and workshops of those years gave Juba its first urban look, and traces of it can still be seen among the new buildings.
The British administration ran southern Sudan under the so-called "Southern Policy": closed districts, restrictions on the movement of northern traders, promotion of English and of Christian missions, and deliberately minimal economic development. The south was kept apart from the north and, at the same time, left without institutions of its own. In 1946, the Juba Conference brought together British officials and leading figures from the north and the south and sealed the opposite turn: the south would be administered together with the north, in a single Sudan. The southern delegates were few and poorly prepared to negotiate, and the decision left a wound that would shape the next half century.
On 18 August 1955, months before Sudan's independence, No. 2 Company of the Equatoria Corps mutinied in Torit after being ordered to move north. The mutiny spread to Juba, Yei, Yambio and Maridi; it was crushed with troops flown in, but many mutineers took to the bush with their weapons. That episode is seen as the start of the First Sudanese Civil War and of the Anyanya movement, which would be formally organised in the 1960s.
The war ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, which created the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region with Juba as its capital. It was the first period of self-government in the south's history and the one that laid the city's institutional foundations: regional ministries, a university, services. It lasted eleven years.
In 1983 President Jaafar Nimeiry dissolved the autonomy, split the south into three regions and imposed sharia across the country. The response was the birth of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), led by John Garang de Mabior, and the start of a second civil war that would drag on for twenty-two years and become one of the deadliest in 20th-century Africa, with millions dead from fighting, hunger and disease, and mass displacement.
During that war, Juba was a stronghold of the Khartoum army in the middle of territory largely controlled by the guerrillas. The city was practically under siege for years, supplied by air and by convoy, with civilians trapped between hunger, repression and fighting. The SPLA attacked it in several offensives — the one in 1992 got closest to the centre — without ever taking it. That status as a besieged city explains much of its current shape: it grew inwards, with dense, unplanned neighbourhoods and infrastructure that never kept up.
On 9 January 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the government of Sudan and the SPLM/A was signed in Naivasha, Kenya. The agreement ended the second civil war, gave the south wide autonomy with Juba as its capital and set a self-determination referendum for six years later. On 9 July 2005, John Garang took office as First Vice President of Sudan and President of the autonomous government of the south.
Twenty-one days later, on 30 July 2005, Garang died when the helicopter bringing him back from Uganda crashed. His death sparked riots and a huge political shock: he was the figure who held up the idea of a unified, democratic "New Sudan". He was succeeded by Salva Kiir Mayardit, whose project aimed more directly at separation. Garang was buried in Juba, and his mausoleum, on the square that bears his name, became the country's main symbolic space.
Between 2005 and 2011 Juba went through a dizzying transformation. Hundreds of thousands of people returned from refugee camps in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia and from the north; UN agencies, NGOs, contractors and traders from all over East Africa arrived. The city filled up with white vehicles, container camps, makeshift hotels and prices in dollars. It was a chaotic boom, with no urban plan, that multiplied the population in just a few years.
In January 2011 the referendum set out in the CPA was held: independence won around 98.8% of the vote. On 9 July 2011, on the John Garang square, the flag of the Republic of South Sudan was raised for the first time in front of dozens of heads of state. Juba became the capital of the 193rd member state of the United Nations. Almost immediately there was talk of moving the capital to a new city, Ramciel, in a more central part of the country; the project never got off the ground and, as of 2026, the move had not happened.
The euphoria didn't last. On 15 December 2013, a clash within the presidential guard in Juba itself set off the South Sudanese Civil War, which pitted forces loyal to President Salva Kiir against those of former Vice President Riek Machar and quickly took on an ethnic dimension. There were massacres in the capital in the first few days, and tens of thousands of civilians took refuge in UN bases, which improvised the so-called "protection of civilians sites". The war spread to Jonglei, Upper Nile and Unity, and left hundreds of thousands dead — the most widely cited estimates come from independent academic studies, not an official count — and millions displaced and made refugees.
A first peace agreement in 2015 brought Machar back to Juba as Vice President, but in July 2016 fighting broke out in and around the J1 presidential compound, in the city centre, and the agreement collapsed. It was not until September 2018 that the Revitalised Agreement (R-ARCSS) was signed in Khartoum, and in February 2020 a government of national unity was formed with Kiir as President and Machar as First Vice President.
Implementation of that agreement has been slow, and elections have been postponed several times. In February 2023, Pope Francis visited Juba on an "ecumenical pilgrimage of peace" together with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, a gesture that drew huge crowds to the John Garang mausoleum. In March 2025, after the clashes in Nasir, Riek Machar was placed under house arrest; in September of that year he was suspended and brought before a special court charged with, among other things, treason and murder, a trial that analysts and human rights organisations described as a direct threat to the survival of the peace agreement. The current electoral timetable points to December 2026.
Meanwhile, the city kept on building. On 19 May 2022 the Freedom Bridge opened: a 560-metre steel arch over the Nile funded by Japan through JICA, the first bridge of its kind in the country and the second fixed crossing of the river in Juba after the old Bailey bridge from 1976. And on 26 July 2026, at its 48th session held in Busan, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape as South Sudan's first World Heritage site, under the emergency procedure and at the same time on the List of World Heritage in Danger: international recognition of the largest known land mammal migration on the planet and, at the same time, a reminder of how fragile everything is here.
Juba today is a capital of more than half a million people that concentrates the power, the money and the hopes of an entire country, with all the inequality and tension that brings. It is noisy, hot, uncomfortable and remarkably hospitable; it has a young music and poetry scene, packed churches, markets that never stop and a huge river flowing right past. And it is still, for better and for worse, the place where the fate of the world's youngest country is decided.
