The peoples of the Nile marshes
The lands of South Sudan were home to cattle-herding and farming peoples — the Dinka and Nuer of the Nile floodplains, the Shilluk kingdom, the Azande in the southwest and many others — living largely beyond the reach of the Islamic states to the north. The vast Sudd, one of the world's largest wetlands, formed a natural barrier that blocked river navigation and helped keep the south apart.
In the 19th century that isolation was shattered by slave raiders and ivory traders pushing up the Nile from the north and from Egypt. The scars of that trade, and the north–south divide it deepened, ran straight into the colonial and post-colonial era.
Two long wars with the north
Britain ruled Sudan jointly with Egypt and administered the mostly Christian and animist south separately from the Muslim, Arabic-speaking north. When Sudan became independent in 1956, southerners feared — with reason — domination from Khartoum. The first civil war had in fact already begun in 1955 and ran until 1972.
A fragile peace collapsed in 1983 when Khartoum imposed sharia law and John Garang founded the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. The second civil war lasted until 2005 and was catastrophic: some two million dead, mostly from war-induced famine and disease, and millions displaced. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 finally ended it and promised the south a referendum on independence.
Independence, then implosion
In January 2011 southerners voted almost unanimously to secede, and on 9 July 2011 the Republic of South Sudan was born, with Salva Kiir as president and Riek Machar as his deputy. The celebration was genuine and brief. The new state controlled most of the former Sudan's oil but had to pipe it through the north, and disputes over that, and over the contested Abyei region, simmered.
In December 2013 a political rupture between Kiir, a Dinka, and Machar, a Nuer, turned into war. Fighting spread along ethnic lines, with massacres on both sides; an estimated 400,000 people died and a third of the population fled their homes. A 2018 peace deal and a unity government have held uneasily since, repeatedly delaying the elections meant to legitimise the state.
Oil, floods and fragility
South Sudan runs almost entirely on oil revenue, which funds the government but has fed corruption and done little for ordinary people. Basic services are thin, literacy is low and much of the country is reachable only by air or river. Recurrent, worsening floods across the Nile plains have displaced hundreds of thousands and destroyed harvests.
The war in neighbouring Sudan since 2023 has cut oil exports and sent refugees flooding back across the border, straining a state that can barely support itself. The hopes of 2011 have not died, but a decade and a half on, the country remains, in the most literal sense, unfinished.