By Brojen Thangjam
“A nation is not built by slogans or flags, but by the daily sacrifices of its people.” John Garang
South Sudan: A New Flag Unfurls
South Sudan became the world’s newest country on 9 July 2011, emerging from Sudan after decades of civil war. The split was, remarkably, peaceful—an outcome few would have predicted given the violence that preceded it. At the independence ceremony in Juba, President Salva Kiir declared that South Sudan was now “born free” and pledged to build a nation grounded in unity, justice, and dignity. The words carried hope, but also the weight of expectation.
Geographically, South Sudan is vast and underpopulated, yet home then to only eight or nine million people. It is a landlocked country of wide horizons: open savannahs, seasonal swamps, and the Nile cutting through its centre from south to north, binding communities even as it floods and recedes with the seasons. Beneath this landscape lie substantial oil reserves—an inheritance that promised revenue but also carried the seeds of future contention.
The people—especially the height of the Dinka—were among the country’s most striking features. Inside the aircraft, almost every man had to bend forward simply to stand. At five feet eleven inches, I felt unexpectedly short. It was a small, physical reminder that I had entered a place with its own scale and proportions. Of course, not all communities shared this stature; South Sudan is ethnically diverse, with many groups of slighter build as well. But first impressions have a way of settling in, and this one stayed with me.
Politically, the roots of independence lay in a long history of exclusion. Successive governments in Khartoum had governed the South as a periphery—underdeveloped, underrepresented, and often brutally suppressed. Over time, this sense of marginalisation cut across ethnic and regional lines. The communities of the South were not identical in culture or interest, but they shared a conviction that remaining within Sudan meant continued subordination. Independence came to be seen less as a dream than as a necessity.
Yet wars alone do not create nations. Negotiation and international support mattered just as much. If the long wars demonstrated the South’s resolve, the peace process revealed a growing political dexterity—the ability of its leaders to negotiate, compromise, and secure sustained external backing. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, ended active hostilities and laid out a carefully sequenced framework: an interim period of power-sharing arrangement followed by a referendum on self-determination.
I had a close, ringside view of that referendum. In January 2011, as polling stations opened across the South, people stood in long, patient queues—many waiting for hours, some walking great distances simply to cast a vote. The process, conducted between 9 and 15 January, was largely orderly and remarkably calm given the country’s history. The outcome was unequivocal: more than 98 percent voted in favour of independence. It felt less like a choice being made than one being formally affirmed and now finally given legal and political form.
Independence, however, brought new challenges. Economic fragility, weak institutions, and stark inequalities between communities quickly surfaced. The unity forged during the war was genuine, but it was also thin—untested by the demands of governing. UNMISS was created to support the uncertain transition. I arrived when the mission was still being set up and it was in that state of incompleteness that my journey into the world’s youngest nation began.
Borders of Belonging: Diversity and the Making of a Fragile State
When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it entered the world as a state before it had fully become a nation. History offers no single formula: sometimes a shared identity gives rise to a state; at other times, a state comes first and hopes to grow a sense of belonging over time. In South Sudan’s case, its borders were inherited from colonial maps, not shaped by a common national story. What held the country together at independence was less a shared vision of the future than a shared memory of exclusion under Khartoum.
Within those borders lay extraordinary diversity. South Sudan is home to more than sixty tribes, each with its own language, customs, and territorial attachments, and existing at very different levels of social and economic development. There was no common language that linked these communities. English was adopted as the official language, but fluency was limited. What functioned in daily life was “Juba Arabic,” a pidgin used in markets, camps, and barracks but ill-suited for administration, education, or sustained written exchange.
Education levels reflected the long disruption of war. Decades of conflict had left schooling uneven and often absent altogether. A generation had grown up fighting, fleeing, or surviving, leaving the new state with a severely constrained pool of trained professionals.
The institutions of the state were therefore being built almost from scratch. Colleagues involved in security-sector reforms often expressed quiet exasperation. Former rebels were inducted into police and other services as part of integration efforts, but many had little or no formal education. Training programmes struggled as recruits found it difficult to follow lessons, attendance was inconsistent, and discipline hard to sustain. These challenges were not failures of intent, but symptoms of a society attempting to transform a liberation movement into a civilian state apparatus.
Land remained the strongest marker of belonging. Borders between communities were often unclear. Political power soon became concentrated largely within the Dinka elite, generating resentment among other smaller communities. When the rivalry between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar erupted in 2013, political disagreement quickly took on ethnic form, reopening unresolved tensions and plunging the country into violence.
There were, nonetheless, sincere and deliberate efforts to imagine a shared future. The Transitional Constitution articulated the idea of “unity in diversity,” explicitly recognising South Sudan as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society. It adopted a decentralised structure, initially organised around ten states, intended to bring government closer to communities and accommodate regional differences. Provisions on wealth-sharing, particularly oil revenues, sought to balance national cohesion with local entitlement, while education was identified as a cornerstone of long-term nation-building, with commitments to expand access and promote a common civic identity.
National symbols—the flag, the anthem, and public rituals of independence—were designed to cultivate a sense of collective belonging that transcended tribe and region. These frameworks did not resolve the deeper challenges of state formation, but they reflected a genuine attempt to move beyond a unity forged solely in war toward one grounded in shared institutions and a common political imagination.
The scholar Benedict Anderson reminds us that nations are “imagined communities”— formed through shared narratives, institutions, and everyday practices that allow strangers to conceive of themselves as belonging to the same collective. While common threats and memories of struggle can help catalyse this imagination, Anderson’s insight suggests that fear alone cannot sustain it indefinitely. Enduring nationhood depends on the slower, more constructive work of building shared languages, civic institutions, and routines of coexistence. In South Sudan, that shared imagination, beyond the unity forged in war—was still painfully in the making.
The Bari Country: Whose Capital, Whose Land?
Juba became the capital of South Sudan partly because it had already functioned as the administrative hub during the peace process and possessed the rudimentary infrastructure needed to host a new government. I first saw Juba in 2005, when it was still a quiet settlement with barely ten kilometres of paved road. Long before it assumed the role of national capital, however, Juba was the heart of Bari country—the ancestral land of the Bari community, whose identity and livelihoods were deeply tied to this stretch of the Nile.
Mogga Waran was a member of the investigation unit I headed. Exceptionally resourceful, he served as a vital link with local authorities and the wider community. But Mogga was also a Bari, and he watched the transformation of Juba with growing unease. For him, and for many in his community, Juba was not simply an administrative centre. It was home in the deepest sense: land cultivated over generations, burial grounds of ancestors, and a sense of belonging rooted firmly in place.
As the city expanded, people arrived from across South Sudan in search of work, security, and opportunity. Juba’s demographic profile shifted rapidly, and land around the city acquired immense value. Mogga worried that the Bari—lacking national political influence—were being gradually pushed to the margins. This was not always through overt dispossession, but through quieter forces: the steady pull of urban growth, rising market pressures, and the influence of larger, better-connected communities. His unease found resonance in an assessment by UN-Habitat, which noted that “the city’s growth, at an estimated annual rate of 12.5 per cent, is among the fastest rates of urbanization in human history.”
These sentiments were shared by many smaller communities. While independence had ended domination from Khartoum, political power at the national level rested largely with the bigger Dinka and Nuer communities, shaping how development and urban expansion were experienced on the ground.
In retrospect, Mogga’s unease reflected a broader challenge facing the new nation. Rapid urbanisation, unequal political weight, and rising land values placed real strain on local communities. The promise of independence endured, but in Juba—the city that symbolised national rebirth—the practical question of belonging, and on whose terms, quickly came to the fore.
Power on the Streets
One of the most striking sights in the early years of independence was the President’s motorcade. I had grown up seeing, managing, and even writing convoy manuals, but never had I witnessed convoys move with such speed and aggression through public streets. What should have been a protective arrangement quickly became a theatrical display of power. Large, armoured SUVs—gleaming and imposing—hurtled down narrow, dusty roads utterly unsuited to them. It was hard to see how such velocity enhanced presidential security when every sharp turn and cratered pothole seemed a danger in itself.
In truth, safety appeared secondary to spectacle. The motorcade functioned as performance—a moving assertion of authority and a public reminder of where power resided. The President did not merely govern the state; he was made to appear as its embodiment, surrounded by force and motion.
This spectacle did not go unnoticed. Journalists and observers remarked on the distinctly “militarised aesthetic” of presidential movement, noting how it echoed liberation-era command structures rather than civilian governance. As one commentator observed at the time, South Sudan’s leadership often “looked more like a victorious army on parade than a government at ease with its own institutions.” In post-conflict states, scholars remind us, symbolic performances of power frequently substitute for institutional legitimacy. When law is uncertain and institutions remain thin, spectacle rushes in to fill the void. From there to impunity, the distance is alarmingly short.
Cake Deng and the Burden of Independence
I first met Cake Deng in Khartoum, where he worked as a security guard. Like many Southerners living in the North, he carried himself with quiet discipline—careful in speech and deferential in manner. When South Sudan finally became independent, Cake was among the many who returned home, eager to take part in the promise of a new country.
In the months that followed, I noticed subtle changes. He grew more relaxed in his speech, lingered longer in cafés during breaks, and carried himself with a new assertiveness. The turning point came after an international staff member complained about his behaviour at the gate. When I spoke to him, his response was blunt: “They are arrogant… they think our independence was given by them. We fought for it.”
His words stayed with me. Beneath the defensiveness lay a bruised sense of dignity. Human relationships in the aftermath of independence are rarely straightforward. Many international staff—especially those who had served through the referendum—carried a quiet sense of proprietorship, a belief that their efforts had helped midwife a new nation. In unguarded moments, this could slip into condescension, often unintended. For South Sudanese, newly sovereign and acutely conscious of the struggle behind that sovereignty, even the faintest hint of this was intolerable.
In Juba, many South Sudanese declined work as waiters in newly opened restaurants, seeing such labour as incompatible with the dignity of freedom. These moments reflected a society renegotiating its place in the world—testing the boundaries of authority, dignity, and respect after decades of subjugation. Cake’s anger, though sometimes misdirected, was part of a wider transition: a people learning to move from the memory of struggle to the discipline of a functioning state, with emotions often running ahead of institutions.
Muddy Water and Empty Stomachs
It was one of the most brutal ambushes I had ever encountered. Yet what stayed with me was not only the number of lives lost, but the condition in which we found them—stripped to the last piece of clothing. The vehicles had been thoroughly ransacked; food, water, and anything of use had vanished. As the first responder and later as the investigator, I had to reconstruct the attack step by step, trying to understand not only how it unfolded, but why.
Among the evidence collected at the site, one object stood out: a plastic jerry can, half-filled with muddy water. At first, it seemed an inconsequential detail, hardly worth noting. Its significance became clear only later, when I spoke to someone intimately familiar with the people of the area. He explained that in some parts of South Sudan, deprivation ran so deep that people mixed water with clay to stave off hunger and thirst—thickening the stomach, dulling the ache of emptiness. It was a desperate coping practice, born not of ignorance, but of absence.
That single jerry can reshaped how I understood the attack. Beyond pointing to possible perpetrators, it opened a window onto the scale of deprivation confronting the new country—one where the state’s presence was thin, basic services were absent, and survival was an hourly struggle rather than a distant abstraction.
South Sudan remains among the poorest nations on earth, with estimates suggesting that nearly 92 per cent of its population lives below the extreme poverty line. At one point, a place called Akobo was even described by humanitarian workers as “the hungriest place on earth”—not as a statistic, but as a cry of alarm, capturing the severity of hunger in that moment.
In the end, the jerry can became the most honest piece of evidence. It did not simply point to perpetrators, but to the structural hunger and abandonment that framed their choices. Independence had delivered a flag, but not yet the essentials that give life dignity. The violence of the ambush was immediate and visible; the violence of deprivation was quieter, deeper, and far harder to overcome.
Sovereignty Without Cohesion
In December 2013, less than three years after independence, South Sudan descended into crisis. What began as a political dispute between President Salva Kiir and his Vice President, Riek Machar, quickly escalated into a full-blown civil war with deep ethnic overtones. Clashes between forces loyal to Kiir, largely drawn from his Dinka support base, and those aligned with Machar, many from the Nuer community, spiralled into cycles of communal violence. Within weeks, thousands were killed and over a million displaced, shattering the fragile optimism that had accompanied independence.
I was already out of the country when the violence erupted, en route to Afghanistan, but the forebodings were not lost on me. South Sudan’s tragedy lay in a paradox long noted by scholars: unity without cohesion. For many South Sudanese, identity was forged in opposition to Khartoum rather than through an inclusive vision of nationhood. Their identity emerged largely in opposition to an external enemy, rather than from an inclusive political imagination. This form of what scholars describe as negative solidarity sustained the liberation struggle, but independence laid bare its fragility.
Independence also carried inflated expectations—the belief that suffering itself entitled the new state to rapid prosperity and international deference. When resources proved limited and governance uneven, disappointment set in quickly. Personal rivalries at the apex of power, most notably between Kiir and Machar, did not remain confined to elite politics; in the absence of neutral institutions, they spilled into society at large.
What followed was not merely a failure of leadership, but the absence of institutions capable of mediating difference. The new state inherited weak legal frameworks, minimal bureaucratic traditions, and little experience of civilian governance. Authority therefore reverted to familiar forms: ethnic hierarchies, military command structures, and personalised networks of loyalty. In a landscape marked by stark demographic asymmetries, larger communities quickly came to dominate political power, military influence, and access to resources. Liberation, from the outset, was unevenly distributed.
The historian Mahmood Mamdani offers a helpful way of thinking about South Sudan’s collapse. In Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, he explains how colonial rule governed people by fixing them into rigid identity categories, and how many post-colonial states, rather than undoing this system, continued to rule through it. Such arrangements could hold during periods of struggle or mobilisation, but they left little space for a shared civic life once independence arrived.
In lectures delivered after South Sudan fell into civil war, including his reflections in 2016, Mamdani warned against explaining the violence as the result of “ancient tribal hatreds.” Instead, he pointed to the failure to build institutions capable of rising above inherited identities and placing limits on power. Seen this way, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) succeeded as a liberation movement but never made the difficult transition into a civilian political organisation able to govern a diverse society. Independence brought sovereignty, but not citizenship and the institutions needed to hold difference together.
Yet South Sudan’s future is not foreclosed. Scholars and practitioners alike argue that peace will depend less on elite power-sharing and more on the slow construction of institutions that outlast individuals—credible local governance, civilian control over armed forces, and a political imagination that moves beyond ethnic mobilisation. Without that transition, independence will remain a moment achieved, but not a nation secured.
(Brojen Thangjam recently retired from service with the United Nations. He can be reached at [email protected])