South Sudan

South Sudan is the country of the Sudd, a vast swamp where the White Nile spreads into channels, lagoons and floating papyrus that turned back explorers sent by the emperor Nero. Around it, clay plains flood in the wet season and bake hard in the dry. The Imatong Mountains rise near the southern border to Kinyeti, the highest summit, and on the eastern plains around Boma, white-eared kob and tiang migrate in their hundreds of thousands.

Nilotic peoples settled the Nile plains centuries ago; the Shilluk crowned their kings, the reth, at Fashoda, where British and French forces faced off in 1898. Slave and ivory traders pushed south from Khartoum in the nineteenth century. Under Anglo-Egyptian rule the south was run apart from the north, and when Sudan became independent in 1956 a first civil war had already begun. A second, from 1983, closed with a peace agreement in January 2005, and South Sudan became independent in July 2011.

Cattle stand at the centre of life for the Dinka, Nuer and Mundari: herders sleep beside their animals in dry-season camps, and young men compose songs in praise of a favourite ox, whose name they may take as their own. Most people are Christians or follow older beliefs. Sorghum porridge, fish and milk feed most families. Manute Bol and Luol Deng, both born here, played in the NBA. Oil from fields in the north, piped through Sudan to the Red Sea, dominates exports.