South Sudan

The peoples of the south — Nilotic groups such as the Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk, and many others — long resisted incorporation by powers to the north, and nineteenth-century slave raiding from the Nile deepened the divide. Under British-Egyptian rule Sudan's south was administered separately and left undeveloped. When Sudan became independent in 1956, southern fears of domination by Khartoum triggered the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–72).

A second, longer war began in 1983, led by John Garang's Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army against the northern government, and killed an estimated two million people before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 granted the south autonomy and the promise of a referendum. In January 2011 almost 99 per cent of southern voters chose to secede, and the Republic of South Sudan became independent on 9 July 2011.

Peace did not hold. In December 2013 a political rupture between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and his former deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, spiralled into a civil war marked by ethnic massacres, mass displacement, and localised famine. A 2018 agreement created a fragile unity government, but promised elections have been repeatedly postponed, fighting has flared in several regions, and in 2025 Machar was again placed under house arrest as the deal frayed. The country is also sheltering hundreds of thousands of people who have fled the war in Sudan since 2023.

South Sudan has around sixty ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer the largest. Cattle are at the centre of life for the pastoralist peoples: they are wealth, bride-price, a subject of praise poetry, a source of personal names, and a cause of raids and feuds. Young men live for stretches in cattle camps, decorate themselves with ash and ochre, and compose songs to favourite oxen.

Christianity, brought by missions, is widespread and often blended with traditional belief; there is a Muslim minority, especially in towns. Scarification marking initiation or group identity was once common and is now declining. Community wrestling is a major sport, drawing large crowds for matches between villages or sections in the dry season.

Loyalties to clan, section, and region are strong, kinship obligations are binding, and elders and chiefs retain real authority in local disputes.

Around eleven to twelve million people live in South Sudan, the great majority rural and dependent on cattle, sorghum farming, and fishing along the Nile and its swamps. Oil provides almost all state revenue but little reaches ordinary people; rates of literacy, schooling, electrification, and paved roads are among the lowest anywhere.

Displacement is a constant fact of life: millions are refugees in neighbouring countries or internally displaced, humanitarian aid sustains a large share of the population, and repeated, prolonged flooding has driven people from their land and drowned herds and crops.

Juba, on the White Nile, is the only substantial town — a fast-grown administrative centre of markets, aid compounds, and unpaved streets — and the hub through which almost all movement, goods, and money flow.

The staple is sorghum, and to a lesser extent millet, ground and cooked into a stiff porridge (asida) or the thin fermented flatbread kisra, eaten with stews of okra, beans, groundnut, dried fish, or meat. Fish from the Nile and the Sudd, fresh or sun-dried, is a mainstay in riverine areas.

Milk is important where cattle are kept, but meat is reserved for occasions, since live animals are too valuable to slaughter casually. In the towns, Sudanese and Ethiopian-influenced dishes, ful (stewed beans), and grilled meat are common, along with imported rice and bread.

Strong sweet tea and spiced coffee are drunk throughout the day. Beer, both local brews and bottled, is available in Juba, but alcohol is limited elsewhere.

For ordinary travellers the country is effectively off-limits, but its natural assets are remarkable. The Sudd, formed where the White Nile spreads into one of the world's largest wetlands, is a vast maze of channels, papyrus, and floating islands, rich in birdlife including the shoebill.

Boma and Bandingilo National Parks, on the eastern plains, host one of the largest land-mammal migrations on Earth — aerial surveys have counted many hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of white-eared kob, tiang, and Mongalla gazelle moving with the seasons, a spectacle compared to the Serengeti but almost entirely unvisited.

Nimule National Park near the Ugandan border protects elephants and hippos along the Nile, and the river itself, the town of Juba, and the hills of the Imatong range in the far south round out a list of sights that at present exist mainly on paper, for lack of security and infrastructure.