Wau & Bahr el Ghazal

Bahr el Ghazal, the "river of gazelles", takes its name from the river that gathers the region's streams before they join the White Nile. It has long been home to the Dinka, who make up most of its people, along with the Luo (Jur), the Bongo and the many smaller groups of the Wau area collectively called the Fertit. In the mid-19th century it became the hunting ground of traders from the north, who built fortified stations, or zaribas, and seized ivory and people; the most powerful of them, al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, ruled a private empire here until Egypt recognised him as its governor in 1873.

The Mahdist state took the area in the 1880s, and after 1898 it came under Anglo-Egyptian rule, with Catholic missions bringing schools and churches. The Babanusa–Wau railway reached Wau in the early 1960s. In the long second civil war the region suffered raids by government-backed militias from the north and a devastating famine in 1998.

Since independence, the 2013 war and later clashes brought fighting to Wau in 2016 and displaced tens of thousands into church and UN sites. President Salva Kiir comes from Warrap, and politics in the region is closely tied to Juba. To the north lies Abyei, an area claimed by both South Sudan and Sudan whose final status remains unresolved.

The Dinka, or Jieng, shape the culture of most of the region, and cattle are its centre. A family's herd carries its wealth and history; marriages are sealed with bride-wealth counted in cows, young men take names from their favourite oxen, and songs and poems praise the animals' colour and horns. In the dry season young people move with the herds to cattle camps near the rivers, where the cows are tethered at night among smoking dung fires.

Initiation, age-sets and the authority of chiefs and spear-masters remain important in rural life, and customary courts settle many disputes over cattle, marriage and compensation. Dances and songs accompany weddings.

Wau is more mixed: Luo, Fertit and Dinka live alongside each other, and the town has a long Catholic history, with its cathedral at the centre of community life. Christianity is widespread across the region, often alongside traditional belief, and Arabic closer to Sudanese Arabic than to Juba Arabic serves as the common language of Wau's markets.

Wau is the region's largest town and one of the biggest in the country, with a population in the low hundreds of thousands. Aweil, Kuajok, Tonj, Rumbek and Yirol are smaller market and administrative towns, and most people live in scattered homesteads of round, thatched huts across the plains.

Life follows the seasons. In the rains families plant sorghum, groundnuts and sesame near their homesteads and the herds graze the higher ground; in the dry season herders move to the river pastures. Trade runs along the roads to Juba and, when the border is open, north into Sudan, and markets sell goods brought in by lorry. Many households depend on food aid at times, and flooding and drought in successive years have damaged harvests.

Days begin early, with milking and tea; the heat of the afternoon slows everything, and the evening is spent around the fire in the homestead or the cattle camp. Schooling has expanded since 2005 but is still limited, and intercommunal violence over cattle and grazing land remains the most pressing local problem.

The diet rests on sorghum and milk. Sorghum is ground and cooked into a stiff porridge, or made into kisra, a thin fermented flatbread, and eaten with stews of okra, beans, groundnut paste, leafy greens or dried fish. Milk, fresh or soured, is the most prized food in the cattle camps, where young herders may live largely on it in the dry season.

Meat is eaten mainly at ceremonies, weddings and funerals, when an animal is slaughtered and shared, since cattle are too valuable to kill casually. Fish from the Jur, Lol and other rivers and from the swamps of Lakes state is eaten fresh or sun-dried, and groundnuts, sesame and wild fruits add variety in season.

In Wau and the other towns, market stalls sell ful, stewed beans, with bread, grilled meat, lentils and rice brought in by road, and sweet tea is drunk at roadside tea stalls throughout the day. Local beer brewed from sorghum is common at gatherings.

Wau, on the Jur River, is the region's main town and its most interesting: a riverside settlement of markets, older colonial-era buildings and the Catholic Cathedral of St Mary. Its mixed population of Luo, Fertit and Dinka gives it a character distinct from the cattle towns to the east.

Aweil, the capital of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, sits on the railway line from Sudan amid flat farmland dotted with thatched homesteads, and the Lol River flows nearby. Rumbek, the capital of Lakes state, is a small town of markets and schools at the heart of Dinka cattle country, and the lakes and swamps that give the state its name lie to its east and north, towards the Sudd.

The Southern National Park covers a great tract of savanna and woodland in the south of the region, crossed by rivers that flow north towards the Nile. It was once known for buffalo, giraffe and many kinds of antelope; decades of war and poaching have reduced them, and the park is almost never visited.

Across the whole region, the dry-season cattle camps are the most striking sight — thousands of long-horned cattle tethered at dusk among the smoke of dung fires.