Ngundeng Bong, the most famous of the Nuer prophets, lived between c.1830 and 1906. His father, Bong Can, was a kuar muon ('earth-master' or 'leopard-skin chief'), originally from the Bul Nuer in the west of the Nuer area, who came to live among the Gaajok in the east, near the Ethiopian border. His mother, Nyayiel, was from the Lou Nuer. Ngundeng was initiated into the Thut age-set…

I was in Juba two weeks ago participating in the Rift Valley Institute’s annual series of lectures at Juba University, whose theme this year was historic peace negotiations. Three sets of negotiations were examined: the 1972 negotiations thatled to the Addis Ababa Agreement, the 1999 Wunlit people-to-people peaceconference, and the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The discussionsfocused as…

Abyei has proved to be the hardest part of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to implement, harder, even, than the determination of the rest of the North-South boundary, or the division of oil revenues. In this personal commentary Douglas Johnson argues that this is the result of a long-term aim of annexation by successive national governments in Khartoum. The recent interventions of…

RVI Fellow Douglas Johnson discussed the implications of South Sudan’s independence for the new nation’s history, historiography, and sense of identity in his keynote lecture to the 9th International South Sudan and Sudan Studies Conference in Bonn in July 2012. Describing South Sudan as ‘a missing piece in the jigsaw of Africa’s past’, he offered a robust critique of the various outside…

ركز النقاش الدائر حول السودَانيْن، الشمالي والجنوبي، على مسالة أين يمر خط الحدود بينهما. ويفحص التقرير الاول في سلسلة الحدود المتنازع عليها، حينما تصير الحدود الاداريّة حدوداً دوليّة، موضوعاً آخر لكنه يتميّز بنفس القدر من الأهميّة هو: الأثر المحتمل للحدود الجديدة على سكان الاراضي الحدوديّة وعلى التطورات السياسيّة على المستوى المحلّي. وفي تقصّي شامل للمصادر الارشيفيّة والبحوث الراهنة تلخّص…

Discussion of the border between Sudan and South Sudan has focused on the question of where the boundary line is to be drawn. When Boundaries Become Borders examines a different, but equally important issue: the potential impact of the new boundary on the peoples of the borderlands and political developments at the local level. In a comprehensive survey of archival sources and current research…

In South Sudan there is no system of governance so popular—yet so little understood—as the federal system. Historically the demand for federation with North Sudan was seen as the way to keep Sudan united, and the absence of such a system was held up as one of the causes of the long wars between North and South. Now federalism is proposed as a panacea for problems of governance in independent…