The history of South Sudan

South Sudan, the world's youngest widely recognised state, lies in the basin of the upper White Nile, a land of grassland, forest and the vast Sudd swamps. For most of its history it was home to cattle-keeping Nilotic peoples such as the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk, and to the farming peoples of Equatoria, organised in kingdoms, chiefdoms and stateless societies largely beyond the reach of the Nile valley empires. From the 1840s Egyptian and then British rule opened the region to slave raiding, conquest and missionary education, and governed it apart from the Muslim, Arabic-speaking north. Two long civil wars against Khartoum, from 1955 to 1972 and from 1983 to 2005, ended in independence in 2011, but within two and a half years the new country fell into a civil war of its own, and peace has remained fragile since.

The south has far less archaeological record than the middle Nile, but sites in the Sudd region suggest that people herding cattle seasonally between river and higher ground were present by about 3000 BCE. Linguistic evidence indicates that much of the region was once occupied by speakers of Central Sudanic languages, whose descendants include the Moru and Madi of Equatoria. Over roughly the last thousand years Nilotic speakers expanded from the Sudd: the Dinka and Nuer across the plains of Bahr el Ghazal and the upper Nile, the Shilluk and Anuak along the rivers to the north and east, and the Bari, Lotuko and Toposa in the south-east.

These societies were built around cattle, which provided milk, marriage payments and wealth, and around a seasonal movement between permanent villages and dry-season camps by the rivers. Most Dinka and Nuer communities had no kings; authority lay with lineage elders, age sets of young men and religious figures such as the Dinka masters of the fishing spear, believed to hold power over rain and war. In the nineteenth century the Nuer expanded eastwards at the expense of Dinka and Anuak neighbours, and prophets such as Ngundeng Bong became powerful leaders. Many of these groups had little contact with the kingdoms to the north, the Christian Nubian states and the later Funj sultanate, though the Nile carried some trade southwards. The Kingdom of Kush and its successors never ruled this far south.

Two peoples built kingdoms. According to Shilluk tradition, the hero Nyikang led them to the west bank of the White Nile around 1500 and founded the line of kings, the reth, whose sacred authority was later centred at Fashoda. By the seventeenth century the Shilluk controlled the river as far north as modern Kosti, and their war canoes raided far downstream. Under King Odak Ocollo, around 1630, they fought a long war with the Funj sultanate of Sennar over the White Nile trade, allied at times with Darfur.

In the south-west, in the wooded country along the border with the Congo basin, the Azande, speakers of an Ubangian language, were united from the eighteenth century under an aristocratic clan, the Avungara. Avungara princes conquered and absorbed neighbouring peoples, building several kingdoms that stretched into what are now the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each king governed through sons and kin placed over provinces, and conscripted young men into regiments that also farmed the royal fields.

The Sudd long blocked travel up the Nile. After Muhammad Ali's Egypt conquered northern Sudan in 1821, his officers sent river expeditions south, and in 1841 one reached Gondokoro, near modern Juba. Merchants from Khartoum, Egypt and Europe followed, first for ivory, then for slaves. They built fortified camps called zariba, armed local allies, and raided villages for captives and cattle, with catastrophic losses for the Dinka, the peoples of Bahr el Ghazal and others. The most powerful trader, al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, ruled Bahr el Ghazal as a private empire before conquering the Sultanate of Darfur in 1874.

The Khedive Ismail, wanting to extend his empire to the great lakes and to answer European criticism of the slave trade, created the province of Equatoria, governed by the British explorer Samuel Baker from 1869 and then by Charles Gordon. Their campaigns against slavers were often as violent as the raids they replaced. When the Mahdist revolt overthrew Egyptian rule in Khartoum in 1885, Equatoria's governor, the German-born Emin Pasha, was cut off and held out until he was evacuated in 1889. The Mahdist state kept garrisons on the Nile at places such as Rejaf, but much of the south escaped its control. In the Scramble for Africa, King Leopold's Congo state occupied the Lado Enclave on the west bank of the Nile from the 1890s until 1910, and in 1898 a French expedition reached Fashoda before withdrawing in the face of Kitchener's army.

The south became part of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of 1899, in practice a province of the British Empire, but British control was established only slowly and by force. The Azande king Gbudwe was killed resisting a British column in 1905. Punitive expeditions burned villages and seized cattle among the Dinka in the 1900s and 1910s, and in the late 1920s aircraft bombed the Nuer, whose prophet Gwek Wonding was killed in 1929. Taxation and indirect rule through appointed chiefs followed.

The British treated the south as a separate world. From the 1920s it was closed to northern traders without permits, and the Southern Policy declared in 1930 discouraged Arabic and Islam, removed northern officials and left education to Catholic and Protestant missions, which taught in English and local languages. Christianity spread, slowly at first, among an educated minority. The policy may have been intended to prepare the south for union with British East Africa, but it left the region with almost no economic development. In 1946 Britain reversed course, and at the Juba Conference of 1947 southern representatives agreed to remain part of a united Sudan, though many later said they had been given little choice.

As independence approached, southerners feared domination by the north. When the Sudanisation of the civil service in 1954 gave only six of some eight hundred senior posts to southerners, resentment grew, and on 18 August 1955 soldiers of the Equatoria Corps mutinied at Torit, killing northern officials and traders. Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956, in the early years of the decolonisation of Africa, and the government in Khartoum, especially under General Ibrahim Abboud from 1958, tried to unify the country through Arabic and Islam, expelling foreign missionaries in 1964.

Scattered resistance became an armed movement, the Anyanya, from 1963, and the conflict became the First Sudanese Civil War. In 1971 Joseph Lagu united the guerrillas as the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement, and in 1972 the government of Jaafar Nimeiri signed the Addis Ababa Agreement, brokered by the World Council of Churches and the emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa. The south became a self-governing region with its own assembly and government at Juba, the first time it had run its own affairs.

Autonomy unravelled after oil was discovered in the south by Chevron in 1978, near Bentiu, and Khartoum moved to control it. Nimeiri divided the southern region in 1983 and imposed sharia law across Sudan that September. Southern troops mutinied at Bor, and an army colonel with an American doctorate, John Garang, founded the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army, which called for a united, secular, democratic Sudan rather than secession. The SPLA was backed by the Marxist government of Ethiopia, part of the regional rivalries of the Cold War.

The war that followed lasted 22 years and was one of the deadliest since the Second World War. Khartoum armed Arab militias from Darfur and Kordofan who raided Dinka areas and took captives, reviving slavery, and bombed villages from the air; famine, used as a weapon by both sides, killed around a quarter of a million people in Bahr el Ghazal in 1988 alone. Thousands of displaced boys, the Lost Boys of Sudan, walked to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1991, after the fall of Ethiopia's regime cost the SPLA its bases, Riek Machar and Lam Akol broke away in the Nasir faction, and in November its forces, with armed Nuer civilians, killed around 2,000 Dinka civilians at Bor. Fighting between southern factions, often along Dinka and Nuer lines, killed more southerners than the war with the north in some years. Machar rejoined the SPLA in 2002. By the end, about two million people had died and four million had been displaced.

International pressure, mediation by the regional body IGAD and the oil boom brought the two sides together, and on 9 January 2005 they signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Nairobi. It created an autonomous Government of Southern Sudan, shared oil revenues, and promised a referendum on independence after six years. Garang was sworn in as first vice-president of Sudan in July 2005, but on 30 July he died when a Ugandan presidential helicopter crashed, and his deputy Salva Kiir Mayardit, a Dinka like Garang, succeeded him. Riots followed in Khartoum and Juba.

In the referendum of January 2011, 98.83 per cent of voters chose independence, and on 9 July 2011 the Republic of South Sudan was proclaimed in Juba, with Kiir as president and Machar as vice-president. Sudan became the first country to recognise it. The new state took about three-quarters of the oil of the former Sudan, but its only export route was the pipeline to Port Sudan. Disputes over transit fees led South Sudan to shut down production in January 2012, and in April its troops briefly seized the Heglig oilfield before withdrawing under international pressure. The status of the border region of Abyei, claimed by both countries, remains unresolved.

Rivalries within the ruling SPLM came to a head in July 2013, when Kiir dismissed Machar and the entire cabinet. On 15 December fighting broke out between units of the presidential guard in Juba; Kiir accused Machar of attempting a coup, which Machar denied, and government forces killed hundreds of Nuer civilians in the capital. Machar fled to lead the SPLM-in-Opposition, and the war spread to Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile, with towns such as Bor, Bentiu and Malakal changing hands several times. Troops from Uganda intervened on the government's side. Both sides massacred civilians along ethnic lines, including the killing of hundreds at Bentiu in April 2014, and tens of thousands sheltered in United Nations bases.

A peace agreement signed in August 2015 brought Machar back to Juba as first vice-president in April 2016, but heavy fighting in the capital in July drove him to flee on foot into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war spread to the previously calmer Equatoria region. A study published in 2018 estimated that about 400,000 people had died as a result of the war, about half of them violently, and more than four million had fled their homes, around two and a half million of them to neighbouring countries including Kenya. A revitalised peace agreement was signed in September 2018, and in February 2020 a transitional government of national unity took office, with Machar again first vice-president.

The unity government struggled to unify the rival armies, write a new constitution or prepare elections, which were postponed in 2022 and again in September 2024, to December 2026. The war in Sudan from April 2023 sent more than a million refugees and returnees across the border and disrupted the oil pipeline. In March 2025 the Nuer White Army overran an army base at Nasir; Machar, accused of backing the attack, was placed under house arrest in Juba on 26 March, and Ugandan troops returned to support the government. The United Nations secretary-general warned that the country stood on the edge of renewed civil war. In September 2025 Machar was charged with murder, treason and crimes against humanity over the Nasir attack; his party denied any links with the White Army.

Fighting between the army and opposition-aligned forces continued in Jonglei, Upper Nile and Unity through 2025 and 2026, alongside floods, cholera and severe hunger; in 2026 about two-thirds of the population needed humanitarian aid. On 24 September 2026 Kiir dissolved the transitional government, keeping caretaker ministers in place ahead of general elections scheduled for 22 December 2026.