Qualla: Juba

Juba: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Juba is the capital of the world's youngest country, and it wears its newness openly. When South Sudan declared independence in 2011, this riverside city on the White Nile became the seat of a nation that had to build almost everything from scratch - ministries, roads, an economy, a sense of shared future - all at once. A century earlier it had been a small Bari village of the same name, chosen by colonial officials for a mission school and a bend in the river. From those modest beginnings it has grown into a sprawling capital of well over half a million people, and likely far more counting the suburbs that ring it.

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Juba: A Village Becomes a Capital

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The present city was laid out in 1920-21, when the Church Missionary Society established a mission and a school in the Bari village of Juba. In the late 1920s, Anglo-Egyptian officials ordered Bari residents to move so the town could be rebuilt as the capital of Mongalla Province...

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Juba: On the White Nile

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Geography made Juba a hub long before it made it a capital. The city is a river port, the southern terminus of Nile traffic, and before the wars it anchored highways reaching out to Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The river still defines daily life, and s...

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Juba: Independence and Its Cost

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Juba's modern history is bound to the wars that birthed the nation. A 1955 mutiny of southern soldiers in nearby Torit helped spark the First Sudanese Civil War, and during the Second, Juba was a contested strategic prize fought over for years. Peace came with the 2005 Comprehens...

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Juba: The Years of Mass Violence

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 2013, a political rupture between President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar, ignited the South Sudanese Civil War. The first fighting erupted in Juba itself, and hundreds of people were killed in the city's suburbs in those early days - estimates...

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Juba: A City Still Becoming

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

And yet Juba endures, and in places insists on hope. In October 2019 it opened the first public library in South Sudan's history, more than thirteen thousand books donated to a country desperate to read. Its markets sell kisra, the fermented sorghum flatbread eaten with stews of ...

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