People & Culture

Before South Sudan had a name, it had the Sudd, and everything about this country's history bends around that swamp. The White Nile enters the region as a river and comes out the other side having lost itself in a maze of channels, floating islands of papyrus and seasonal floodplain that at its lowest covers something over 30,000 square kilometres and at flood can spread past 130,000, an area larger than England. Steamers choke on the vegetation mats. Channels close overnight and reopen somewhere else. For Egypt, whose civilisation depended on knowing exactly where the Nile went, the Sudd was the point past which the map went blank for millennia. It was not until 1839 to 1841, when the Ottoman-Egyptian officer Selim Bimbashi led three river expeditions south from Khartoum with European geographers aboard, that anyone from the north pushed a boat through the swamp far enough to reach the higher ground near what is now Juba. Everything the region became before that moment, its cattle cultures, its river kingdoms, its own internal politics, developed with the outside world locked out by water rather than by choice. The peoples who filled that sealed-off basin were Nilotic migrants, ancestors of today's Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk and related groups, who moved south and east along the Nile system over the centuries, following grasslands and seasonal swamp margins where cattle could graze in wet season and dry alike. What they built was not a state in the conventional sense but a social technology organised entirely around cattle. The cattle camp is closer to a parallel settlement than a herding stop, occupied for months at a time on the dry-season floodplain, where young men live alongside the herds, sleep in the ash of dung fires to keep off insects, compose songs for individual oxen, and settle disputes and courtships that have nothing to do with the animals at all. Age-sets, cohorts of men initiated together in the same multi-year window and bound for life regardless of clan, did the work a standing army or a bureaucracy might do elsewhere: organising defence, allocating grazing rights, arbitrating between lineages, and giving a stateless, decentralised society the coordination it needed without ever needing a king. Not every Nilotic group stayed stateless. The Shilluk, settled along the west bank of the White Nile around what is now Malakal, built one of the more genuinely centralised kingdoms in the Nilotic world, tracing its founding to the figure of Nyikang in roughly the mid-fifteenth century and ruling from a capital at Fashoda, today's Kodok. The reth, the Shilluk king, was a sacred figure believed to carry Nyikang's own spirit, his physical vigour bound up with the health of the kingdom itself, to the point that a reth who visibly failed could in principle be ritually put to death rather than allowed to preside over a weakening nation. It is a form of divine kingship with real parallels elsewhere on the continent, and it gave the Shilluk a coherence that made them, through much of the nineteenth century, the most organised force the raiders coming up the Nile had to reckon with. Far to the southwest, beyond the Nile system entirely, the Azande built something different again, a series of interlinked kingdoms under ruling dynasties controlling territory now split across South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their best-documented ruler, Gbudwe, held the kingdom together from roughly 1870 until 1905, fielding a disciplined force against Turco-Egyptian and then colonial pressure until he was killed by colonial troops, which effectively ended Zande sovereignty until its ceremonial restoration in 2022. Once the Sudd had been breached, the door did not close again. Egypt had already conquered northern Sudan in the 1820s in search of gold and slaves for a modernising army, and by the 1850s and 1860s the frontier of that trade had pushed south into Bahr el-Ghazal and Equatoria along the same channels Selim Bimbashi had opened. Merchants from Khartoum built fortified trading posts, zaribas, deep in Azande and Dinka country, trading in ivory and increasingly in captives taken from the very societies the Sudd had once protected. The dominant figure of that frontier was al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, a trader who began with a small private army in 1856 and within two decades controlled most of Bahr el-Ghazal as a personal fiefdom, powerful enough that the Egyptian Khedive granted him the province's governorship before growing wary of him and detaining him in Cairo in 1876. The slave and ivory economy he came to personify left a mark that outlasted him by generations, and it remains one of the periods southern oral history and modern political memory most consistently point to as the origin of the region's deep wariness of rule from the north. That order collapsed in turn. Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi, overran Khartoum in 1885 and built an Islamic state that held most of Sudan until 1898, but its writ barely reached the far south. Equatoria, the southernmost Egyptian province, was effectively cut loose, its governor left isolated near Lake Albert with a shrinking garrison, prompting one of the last great Victorian relief expeditions to reach him between 1886 and 1889 before Egyptian administration there folded altogether. For the far south, the Mahdist years were less a change of ruler than a further loosening of any ruler's grip, a period during which central control from the north effectively lapsed until the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of 1898 reasserted it in a different form. That different form was the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, nominally joint but British in practice from 1899, and it made a deliberate choice that shaped everything after it: it administered north and south as two different countries under one flag. The Closed Districts Ordinances of the 1920s barred northern Sudanese traders, administrators and Islamic missionaries from the southern provinces without special permit, formalising a separation the Sudd had once enforced by geography alone. Into the vacuum this left came Christian missionary societies, who ran the only schools most southerners would see for decades and taught them in English. By the time Britain reversed course in the 1940s and pushed the south toward union with the north ahead of independence, it had already produced something it could not undo: a southern elite educated in English and in mission Christianity, culturally and linguistically estranged from the Arabic-speaking, Muslim north it was now expected to share a state with. That mismatch broke into open war before Sudan itself was even independent. On 18 August 1955, soldiers of the Equatoria Corps at Torit mutinied rather than accept transfer to the north, the spark for a rebellion built on years of grievance over northern favouritism in jobs and administration and over the shape of the coming state. Sudan became independent that January without resolving any of it. Surviving mutineers took to the bush with their weapons, and out of that scattered resistance grew the Anya-Nya guerrilla movement of the early 1960s, fighting a war that ground on until the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 finally granted the south regional self-government, a peace that held for eleven years. It broke down in 1983 when Khartoum abrogated southern autonomy and moved to impose Islamic law nationwide. Out of that reversal, John Garang, a Sudanese army officer with a doctorate from Iowa State, built the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army. Garang's movement fought officially for a restructured, secular new Sudan rather than for outright secession, a position that put it at odds with rival southern factions as much as with Khartoum, most bitterly in the Nuer and Dinka violence that followed the movement's own split in 1991. The war that followed, fed by famine, mass displacement and post-Cold War proxy politics, is among the deadliest of the late twentieth century. Estimates converge loosely around two million dead by the time it ended in 2005, though the true figure is genuinely uncertain, since most of the dead were killed by starvation and disease rather than by combat, and separating war deaths from a famine the war itself caused is a problem historians have not resolved and likely never fully will. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed on 9 January 2005, ended that war on paper, with wealth-sharing, power-sharing, a six-year interim period and a promised referendum on southern independence at the end of it. Garang had barely three weeks as First Vice President of a united Sudan before he was killed in a helicopter crash on 30 July 2005, a death South Sudanese politics has never entirely stopped murmuring about even as the official finding of pilot error in poor weather has stood. Salva Kiir, his deputy, inherited both the movement and the interim government, and it was under Kiir that the referendum finally happened in January 2011, with a result of 98.83 percent for separation, too lopsided to leave room for the usual post-referendum argument. South Sudan declared independence on 9 July 2011, the newest country in the world. Independence did not end the argument over what kind of state had been built. In December 2013, a political rupture between President Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar, and the communal fault line between their respective bases that the rupture exposed, tipped into fighting within the army itself before spreading into some of the worst documented atrocities of the decade. By the time a revitalised agreement brought Kiir and Machar back into a shared and uneasy government in 2018, independent mortality research put the death toll near 400,000, a figure that, like the estimate from the war before it, carries real uncertainty and is disputed in its particulars even where the scale of the catastrophe is not. The peace has held only unevenly since, with government formation delayed repeatedly and elections postponed more than once. None of that is this guide's argument to settle. It is simply the ground a visitor stands on. What a visitor actually finds today has to be stated plainly. South Sudan is not, at the time of writing, a country that receives ordinary tourism, and travel advisories rate most of it as unsafe to visit under any circumstances. That is a real constraint rather than a formality, and it should be weighed as such. But it does not erase what is here. The Sudd itself, that original barrier, is still one of the largest wetlands on the planet, a Ramsar-listed sanctuary for shoebill storks, sitatunga and the same seasonal rhythms that kept the region apart for three thousand years. Boma and Badingilo national parks, in the country's east and south, host what researchers increasingly describe as the largest land mammal migration left on earth, with more white-eared kob, tiang and Mongalla gazelle moving across the landscape each year than the wildebeest of the Serengeti, a migration only recently surveyed properly from the air and one most of the world has still never heard of. The Nile at Juba runs wide and working, boats and fishermen and the ordinary traffic of a river that has outlasted every government built beside it. And out on the floodplains beyond the towns, the cattle camps that organised Nilotic society a thousand years before any of these wars still stand, grey with dung smoke at dusk, doing the same job they have always done. Anyone who does travel here, with the permits, security arrangements and local guidance that any movement outside Juba genuinely requires, should carry a few things in mind. The war that began in 2013 ran substantially along ethnic lines, chiefly but not only Dinka and Nuer, and the wounds are recent and close enough that casual questions about someone's community or their place in it are not small talk and should not be asked. A cattle camp is a working home rather than a staged attraction, and entering one, photographing it, or approaching the herds requires an invitation and a guide rather than a lens raised on your own initiative. Photographing anything with a military, police or government character, whether checkpoints, uniforms or official buildings, is prohibited by law and enforced without much patience for the excuse of not knowing. Move through this country, if you move through it at all, the way its own history suggests: carefully, with someone who already has standing here, and with the humility due a place that has spent most of its recorded history being underestimated by people looking at it from outside.