South Sudan

From the cattle camps of the Nile to the world's newest nation

South Sudan is built on the Nilotic pastoral societies of the upper White Nile and the vast Sudd wetland, peoples such as the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk and Azande whose cattle camps, divine kingships and segmentary clans long predate any state. Nineteenth-century slave raiding, Turco-Egyptian conquest and the Mahdist wars devastated the region, after which British rule under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium administered the largely Christian and traditionalist south apart from the Arab-Muslim north. Marginalised at Sudan's 1956 independence, the south fought two long civil wars (1955-1972 and 1983-2005) before the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and a 2011 referendum delivered statehood on 9 July 2011. Independence was quickly followed by a ruinous civil war from 2013 and a fragile, repeatedly tested peace.