South Sudan
Capital: Juba · East Africa & Horn
The world's youngest nation, home to Nilotic civilizations — Dinka and Nuer cattle cultures, the Shilluk kingdom and the Azande of the southwest forests.
Ethnic communities
- Dinka (Jieng)Cattle-centered culture; songs and ox-names for every person
- Nuer (Naath)Pastoral prophets and age-set society
- Shilluk (Chollo)Divine kingship of the Reth on the White Nile
- AzandeHistoric kingdoms; famed oracle and court traditions
More communities of South Sudan
- Dinka · Cattle-camp nation of the great herds
- Nuer · Prophet-led pastoralists of the Sobat
- Shilluk · Divine Reth kingship on the White Nile
- Bari · Equatoria's river farmers around Juba
- Lotuko · Mountain rain-king villages of the east
- Toposa · Kapoeta's cattle and gold-pan herders
- Murle · Pibor's age-set cattle culture
- Anyuak · River kingdom of demoted kings and beads
- Acholi & Madi · Southern border farming cultures
- Kuku, Kakwa & Pojulu · Equatorian highland cultivators
- Mundari · Ash-cattle herders of photographic fame
- Didinga & Boya · Hill terraces of the southeast
- Moru & Balanda · Western farming communities
- Jur (Luo) · Bahr el Ghazal's ironworking Luo kin
Languages
Major languages: Dinka, Nuer, Zande, Shilluk, Bari, English, Juba Arabic
Language families: Nilo-Saharan (Nilotic); Niger-Congo (Ubangian)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Shilluk Kingdom
- • Azande kingdoms (Avongara)
Heritage sites
- • Sudd wetlands
- • Kidepo landscapes
Cultural highlights
National heroes of South Sudan
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the artsb. 1980
Emmanuel Jal
Music and peace advocacy
Taken as a child soldier at about seven, he escaped and became a rapper and campaigner for the education of children caught in war.
- Politics & liberation1945–2005
John Garang
Liberation
Led the SPLA through 21 years of civil war and signed the peace agreement that opened the path to South Sudanese independence. Died in a helicopter crash weeks later.
- Sportb. 1985
Luol Deng
Basketball
Two-time NBA All-Star who later funded and led South Sudan's national basketball programme to its first Olympic appearance.
- Sport1962–2010
Manute Bol
Basketball
One of the tallest players in NBA history and a prolific shot blocker, who spent most of his earnings on relief and peace work in his homeland.
Deep-dive community profiles
Acholi
The Luo chiefdoms of the Uganda–South Sudan borderland — poets of the royal drum and the larakaraka courtship dance, whose mato oput reconciliation rite taught the world a justice that mends rather than merely punishes.
Open deep profile →Anuak
The river farmers of the Baro and Pibor — a Luo people whose kings and headmen hold power through a system of noble emblems rather than force, and who were massacred at Gambella in 2003 as oil and farmland interests moved into their country.
Open deep profile →Azande
The 'great eaters of the forest edge' — a conquering Avongara-led nation spanning three borders, whose oracle-governed courts, throwing knives and Ture trickster cycles made them the classic study of an African philosophy of causation.
Open deep profile →Balanda Bviri
Farmers and carvers of the woodlands south-west of Wau, one of the Fertit communities that the nineteenth-century slave raids assembled out of survivors, with a Ubangian language, a Zande-influenced court tradition and a history written largely by the people who preyed on them.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Didinga
Herders and terrace farmers of the Didinga hills above Chukudum, close kin of the Murle whose ancestors parted from them centuries ago, whose rainmakers still open the season and whose hills gave the SPLA one of its safest bases.
Open deep profile →Dinka (Jieng)
The cattle-keeping people of the White Nile floodplain — South Sudan's largest nation, whose color-poems for oxen, towering height, cattle-camp youth culture and priest-chiefs of the fishing-spear built a civilization around the herd.
Open deep profile →Jur Chol (Luo of Bahr el Ghazal)
Luo-speaking farmers and ironworkers of Bahr el Ghazal, whose smiths supplied the spears and hoes of the Dinka among whom they live, whose name in Dinka means simply strangers, and whose language links them to communities as far away as Kenya.
Open deep profile →Kakwa
Eastern Nilotic farmers of the tri-border country where Uganda, South Sudan and the DR Congo meet, dispersed across three states, associated in outside memory with Idi Amin and in their own with a rain-chief tradition and with Yumbe's long road back from insurgency.
Open deep profile →Kaliko
Central Sudanic farmers of the Congo-Nile watershed at the South Sudan-DR Congo border, close kin of the Lugbara and Avukaya, whose small population has been displaced by every war in either country for seventy years.
Open deep profile →Ma'di
Central Sudanic farmers of the Nile's west bank at Nimule and Adjumani, whose chiefdoms sit exactly on the Uganda-South Sudan border, whose land now holds one of the largest refugee settlements on earth, and whose rain chiefs still open the hunting season.
Open deep profile →Moru
Central Sudanic farmers of Mundri and Amadi in Western Equatoria, whose mission schools produced a disproportionate share of South Sudan's teachers and nurses, and whose Moru-language hymnody is among the region's most developed.
Open deep profile →Mundari
Cattle keepers of the Nile's east bank above Juba whose enormous white Ankole-Watusi herds, ash-covered and horned, have made them one of the most photographed communities in Africa, and whose camps are a working system of dung, smoke and constant defence.
Open deep profile →Murle
The cattle people of the Pibor — an age-set society of eastern South Sudan whose young men's age regiments, cattle raiding and the abduction of children have made them both a byword in the country's conflicts and among its most misrepresented communities.
Open deep profile →Nuer (Naath)
The pastoral prophets of the Sudd — a fiercely egalitarian Nilotic nation of cattle-keepers whose age-sets, leopard-skin peacemakers and earth-prophets like Ngundeng made them the classic study of order without rulers.
Open deep profile →Nyangatom
Karimojong-cluster herders of the Omo's west bank and the Kibish, the smallest and most heavily raided of the Lower Omo peoples, whose scarification records killings and whose territory the Ethiopian state has been villagising since 2011.
Open deep profile →Otuho (Lotuko)
Farmers and herders of the Imatong mountains and the Torit plain, builders of dense stone-walled hill villages, whose rainmakers held the only authority anyone recognised, and in whose town the Sudanese civil wars began in 1955.
Open deep profile →Shilluk (Chollo)
The kingdom of Nyikang on the White Nile — the Chollo nation whose divine Reth embodies the immortal founder-hero, whose reed-fleet processions and royal installation dramas are the Nile's oldest living monarchy theatre.
Open deep profile →Suri (Surma)
Body-painters of the southwestern highlands — cattle-herders whose chalk, ochre and flower body-art has fascinated the world's photographers, whose saginye stick-duels decide reputation, and whose gold-rich land is now heavily contested.
Open deep profile →Toposa
The cattle herders of the Kapoeta plains — Ateker kin of the Turkana and Karamojong, whose age grades, mountain shrines and gold-panning riverbeds sit at the point where South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia meet.
Open deep profile →