RVI Fellow Douglas Johnson discussed South Sudan’s history, historiography, and sense of identity in the context of the new nation's first anniversary. Speaking at the ninth International South Sudan and Sudan Studies Conference in Bonn, he describing South Sudan as ‘a missing piece in the jigsaw of Africa’s past’. South Sudan may no longer be part of Sudan, he concludes, but it is part of the Nile basin, of north-east Africa, of Africa itself—and ‘will be all the poorer if its history were to be written in parochial, essentialist terms’. Douglas Johnson's talk can be downloaded from the RVI Publications page.