Juba

The Bari people have farmed and fished this stretch of the White Nile for centuries, and the area around present-day Juba lay on the route that Egyptian, Sudanese and European traders and explorers followed upriver in the nineteenth century. Their base was Gondokoro, a station a little downstream that was the furthest point boats could reach on the Nile and where Samuel Baker met the returning explorer John Hanning Speke in the 1860s; Rejaf, upstream, was the seat of the Belgian commander of the Lado Enclave before the area passed to British administration.

The present town began with a Church Missionary Society mission and school set up in a Bari village in 1920-21, and in the late 1920s Anglo-Egyptian officials laid out a new town on the site as the capital of Mongalla Province; traders moved up from Rejaf in 1929 and the provincial governor's office followed in 1930. The Juba Conference of June 1947 agreed that the northern and southern provinces would form a single Sudan, a decision that shaped the politics of the next sixty years, and Juba was a focus of much fighting during the second civil war.

The 2005 peace agreement made Juba the capital of the autonomous south, and independence on 9 July 2011 made it the capital of a new state. Ministries, embassies and aid agencies arrived and the population grew rapidly. Fighting broke out in the city in December 2013 at the start of the civil war and again in July 2016, and although the 2018 peace agreement reduced the violence, the political crisis that deepened in 2025 and the fighting reported in parts of the country during 2025 and 2026 have kept the capital tense.

Juba is the one place where all of South Sudan's peoples meet. Bari is the language of the original inhabitants of the area, but the street language is Juba Arabic, a simplified Arabic creole that grew up in the nineteenth-century garrisons and trading posts and now serves as the common tongue of the markets, buses and bars. English is the official language, used in government, schools and newspapers, and Dinka, Nuer, Zande, Madi and dozens of others are spoken at home.

Church life is central. Catholic and Anglican cathedrals stand within the city, church choirs are a serious musical training ground, and Sunday services are long, sung and well attended. Music is the city's strongest cultural export: a generation of South Sudanese singers and rappers, many of them raised in Khartoum, Nairobi or Kampala and returning after 2005, record and perform here, mixing Juba Arabic and English lyrics with East African styles.

Social life runs through extended family and community associations, which support new arrivals from the states and organise weddings and funerals. Wrestling matches between communities, football and church events draw the largest crowds. Visitors are treated with courtesy, but the city is also watchful: politics is discussed carefully, uniforms are given a wide berth, and cameras are regarded with suspicion.

Juba's population was put at 525,953 people in 2017; no recent census figure is agreed, and the number rises and falls with conflict and displacement in the rest of the country. Growth since 2005 has been fast and largely unplanned, spreading the city west and north over several kilometres of low, self-built housing.

Government, aid organisations, trade and transport provide most formal work. Nearly everything consumed in the city arrives by lorry from Uganda and Kenya through Nimule, so a closed road or a fall in the value of the pound is felt immediately in the market. Many households also rely on remittances from relatives abroad, on small trade, or on farming plots at the city's edge.

The day begins early, before the heat, with tea sold at the roadside; offices and markets work through the morning, slow in the afternoon and revive in the evening. Electricity comes mainly from private generators and solar panels, water is delivered by tanker from the river, and fuel shortages and price rises are constant subjects of conversation. Unpaved streets flood in the rains, public services are thin, and displacement from elsewhere in the country continues to add to the city's population.

Juba eats the food of the whole country and of its neighbours. The staple is sorghum, ground and cooked into a stiff porridge (asida) or made into kisra, a thin fermented flatbread, and eaten with stews of okra, dried fish, beans, leafy greens or groundnut paste. Cassava and maize from Equatoria's farms are common too, and rice and wheat bread arrive by road.

Fish from the Nile is the local speciality: tilapia and Nile perch grilled whole over charcoal, or split and sun-dried and then stewed. Grilled goat and beef are eaten at gatherings and at roadside grills, and ful, slow-stewed brown beans dressed with oil, is the standard cheap breakfast, a habit inherited from Sudan.

Because so many residents have lived in neighbouring countries, the city's small restaurants are unusually varied for its size. Ethiopian and Eritrean kitchens serve injera with spiced stews, Ugandan and Kenyan places do chapati, beans and grilled meat, and there are Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants catering to traders and aid workers. Sweet black tea and spiced coffee are drunk all day, bottled beer is easy to find in the capital, and sorghum and maize beers are brewed at home for gatherings.