Qualla: Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan)

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

British district officers assigned to the Bahr el Ghazal in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan nicknamed the place The Bog, and called themselves Bog Barons. It was not flattery. The Bahr el Ghazal - translated from the Arabic as Sea of Gazelles, after the herds that once roamed its plains - is a region of swamps and ironstone plateaus in the northwest of what is now South Sudan. It floods every year. Roads dissolve. Entire seasons pass in which travel between villages is impossible except by canoe or by waiting. It is also, and has been for many centuries, Dinka country.

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): The Sea of Gazelles

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The region borders the Central African Republic to the west. Its defining terrain features are the swamps - where the tributaries of the Nile spread out before gathering again in the Sudd - and the ironstone plateaus, raised lateritic shelves that offer the only dry land in many ...

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): The Raids from the North

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The region has long been subject to raids from the Fur peoples of the neighbouring region of Darfur. In 1864, the khedive of Egypt made Bahr el Ghazal his province - or claimed to. Powerful native merchants, whom the Egyptian administration struggled to control, set themselves up...

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): Evans-Pritchard and the Bog Barons

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1929, the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard visited the region. His subsequent work on the Nuer would become a founding text of modern social anthropology - though the Nuer heartland lies east of here in Upper Nile, and his time in Bahr el Ghazal was part of a broader surve...

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): Two Million Dead

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The First Sudanese Civil War fought across this region from 1955 to 1972. In 1982, the Sudan People's Liberation Army was formed here by John Garang, a Dinka from Bor, to fight the Khartoum government's dominance of the south. What followed became known as the Second Sudanese Civ...

Bahr el Ghazal (region of South Sudan): A Capital That May or May Not Exist

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2011, the newly independent South Sudanese government approved legislation for a planned city at Ramciel, in Lakes State, to serve as the new national capital - shifting power away from Juba, deep in Equatoria. A decade and a half later, Ramciel remains an idea and a parcel of...