The name

“Sudan” abbreviates Bilad al-Sudan or “Land of the Blacks,” the Arabic term that medieval geographers applied to the whole sub-Saharan belt. In the nineteenth century, “the Sudan” (or “Soudan”) became shorthand for the Nilotic and adjacent lands of that broad belt. The term was adopted by successive colonial regimes and the Khartoum-centered nationalist movement that engineered the country's independence in 1956. During the civil wars that followed, various names were mooted for an imagined Southern Sudanese state; by the turn of the twenty-first century, the cacophonous but historically defensible name of “South Sudan” had won wide acceptance and is used officially in the Republic of South Sudan.

The geographic setting

Geography is destiny. Before the advent of modern transport, the lands of South Sudan were among the most remote on the planet. Like Amazonia, the basin of the upper Nile and its main tributary, the Bahr al-Ghazal, would seem from a first glance at a map to provide at least seasonal highways into the interior. But between those regions and the African coasts lay many hundreds of miles of difficult terrain. Until the modern era, moreover, the known resources of South Sudan, like those of the American Great Plains or the Australian outback, were insufficiently portable to excite outsiders. Deserts to the north, mountains to the east, and the vast forests of the Congo Basin to the west reciprocally limited the products and effects of long-distance trade. Horses, donkeys, and camels did not flourish there, and food was not easily stored beyond a season. Even today, when air travel and mobile phones mock distance, South Sudan hardly seems “on the way” to anywhere else and remains a geographical dead end.

The climate of South Sudan is tropical. The rainy season is between April/May and November. The dominant geographical feature is the White Nile and its tributaries, the most important of which are the Bahr al-Ghazal (“River of the Gazelle”) and the Sobat, each with many tributaries of its own. Seen as a whole, South Sudan resembles a titanic soup plate, tilted slightly northward; much of the interior is an enormous floodplain.