StapleSouth Sudan
Kisra
Thin fermented sorghum flatbread spread on a hot plate and peeled off in sheets, the base of every meal in the north of the country.
Serves Makes 12 · 30 minutes, plus 2 days fermenting
Bari
Farmers and cattle keepers of the Nile at Juba, whose rain chiefs governed by ritual rather than force, whose land the Egyptian, Turkish and British administrations each chose as their base, and on which South Sudan's capital now stands.
Identity
Population: Estimated 500,000 to 700,000
Location: Central Equatoria along the White Nile around Juba, from Terekeka to Kajo-Keji, South Sudan
Language: Bari
Language family: Nilo-Saharan → Eastern Nilotic → Bari group
Traditional governance: Rain chiefs (matat lo kak) heading territorial communities, with lineage elders beneath; South Sudanese state and county administration today.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (4)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Bari of Juba and Rejaf
The riverine communities of the capital area.
Bari of Terekeka (Mundari-adjacent)
Northern communities on the Nile's east bank.
Bari of Kajo-Keji
Southern communities toward the Ugandan border.
Nyangwara and Pojulu
Closely related Bari-speaking communities, often counted with them.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; the chief's leopard skin and iron regalia; beadwork and ostrich-feather headdresses in dance.
Food: Sorghum and cassava bread, groundnuts, sim sim, Nile fish, milk in cattle-keeping households, and the sorghum beer central to negotiation and ritual.
Ceremonies: The rain chief's opening of the season; ancestral offerings at homestead shrines; funeral dances; the great communal hunts that follow the harvest.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous with bridewealth in cattle; the negotiation runs through both lineages and takes an extended period.
Initiation rites: The removal of lower incisors was general and has largely lapsed; adulthood is marked by cattle, household and participation in the hunt.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for South Sudan, at national rather than community level — 9 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
StapleSouth Sudan
Mulukhiyah
also Jute leaf stew, Khudra
Jute mallow leaves cooked to a thick green sauce with garlic and dried fish, poured over asida. Simple, cheap and eaten across the whole of South Sudan.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
National dishSouth Sudan
Asida with Kudra
Sorghum porridge with a green sauce of okra or greens, the everyday meal across South Sudan. Turned out as a dome and eaten from the shared dish.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishSouth Sudan
Combo
also Okra and greens stew
Fresh okra and wild greens cooked down with sesame paste into a thick, deliberately slippery stew, eaten with asida. The South Sudanese household dish.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodSouth Sudan
Kajaik
Dried Nile fish stewed with onion and groundnut into a thick sauce, eaten with asida. The Nile's fish is dried in quantity and traded far inland.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Festival & feastSouth Sudan
Roast Goat for a Feast
A goat or bull killed and roasted whole for a wedding, a homecoming or the settlement of a dispute. In cattle-keeping societies the animal is the message.
Serves 12 or more · 4 hours
Festival & feastSouth Sudan
Fatta
also Bread and meat platter
Torn flatbread layered with meat broth, yoghurt and fried onion, assembled in a great tray at Eid and at weddings and eaten communally.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Regional specialitySouth Sudan
Wala Wala
Sorghum or maize porridge with a simple bean or greens relish, eaten in the Equatorias. Plain food, and what most of the country eats most days.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Drink & sweetSouth Sudan
Merissa
Sorghum beer brewed and sold by women, drunk from calabashes at markets and gatherings. It is thick, sour and cloudy, and doubles as food.
Serves Makes about 5 litres · 4 days
Stories & Oral Literature
The Rain ChiefPolitical and ritual tradition
Bari authority rested with the matat lo kak, the man of the rain, who held rainstones and the responsibility for the season. He commanded no army and levied no tax; his power lay in the fact that nothing could be planted and no hunt begun without his rite. A chief whose rains failed could be deposed or killed. European administrators looking for a king found instead an office whose whole basis was ritual, and the misunderstanding shaped a century of administration in Equatoria.
Everyone Came to GondokoroColonial history
Gondokoro, on the Nile just north of present-day Juba, was where the river became unnavigable and therefore where every nineteenth-century expedition stopped: Egyptian and Khartoum ivory and slave traders from the 1840s, Speke and Baker in 1863, the Egyptian province of Equatoria under Baker and then Gordon and then Emin Pasha. The Bari were the people on that ground throughout, and their experience of the century was of successive administrations, each armed, each demanding provisions, and each convinced it was the first.
A Capital on Bari LandContemporary history
Juba was established by the British in the 1920s on Bari land and became the capital of South Sudan in 2011. Its growth from a town of a few tens of thousands to a city of several hundred thousand happened on customary Bari land, without a settled framework for compensation or title. Land grievance in Juba — who owns what, who authorised its sale, and what the community was promised — has been a persistent and sometimes violent issue since independence, and it runs through the politics of Central Equatoria.
Proverbs
“The rain chief has no spear and everyone waits for him.”
On ritual rather than coercive authority.
“The river brought them and the river took most of them away.”
On a century of arrivals at Gondokoro.
“A town built on a field still stands on a field.”
The Juba land question.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Ngun as the high god of the Bari-speaking peoples, associated with rain and the sky; ancestral spirits at homestead shrines; named rocks and river reaches carrying prohibitions.
Beliefs: Rainstones and the chief's rites; ancestral offerings; divination; Catholic and Anglican Christianity now general, missions having been established from the mid-nineteenth century.
Ancestors: The dead are buried within the compound and addressed at a small shrine; chiefly ancestors underwrite the rain authority and are named at installation.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Ngun
The high god, of rain and sky
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at homestead shrines in illness and dispute
Rainstones
The chief's inherited instruments for opening the season
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Compact homesteads of round thatched houses with granaries, on the rises above the Nile flood plain, with the chief's compound distinguished by its shrine.
Building techniques: Wattle and daub with conical grass thatch; woven granaries plastered with mud; iron working for hoes and spears; dugout canoes on the Nile.
Village layout: Houses around a swept yard, granaries behind, the ancestral shrine at a fixed point, and the assembly ground under a named tree.
Artifacts
Rainstones
Regalia
Inherited stones through which the Bari rain chief opens the season.
Gondokoro site
Heritage site
The Nile head of navigation, base of nineteenth-century expeditions and administrations.
Woven granary
Craft
Wicker store plastered with mud and raised against damp and rodents.
Bari hunting spears
Warfare
Iron-headed spears made locally and used in the communal hunts.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Bari-speaking communities occupy the Nile banks in what is now Central Equatoria, under rain-chief authority.
1840s–1880s
Khartoum traders, Egyptian administration and European expeditions converge on Gondokoro.
1899–1956
Anglo-Egyptian administration; Juba is established in the 1920s; missions expand.
1955–2005
Sudan's civil wars devastate Equatoria; Bari communities are displaced repeatedly.
2011–present
Juba becomes the capital of South Sudan; land grievance and the 2013 and 2016 conflicts reshape Central Equatoria.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic SudanWorldCat
- Rift Valley Institute — South Sudan customary authority researchRift Valley Institute
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: BariSIL International