Qualla: Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road

Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The loan terms read like a commodities contract. For every day that passes, 30,000 barrels of South Sudanese crude oil are sold, the proceeds deposited into an account the Exim Bank of China controls, and from that account the bank pays a Chinese state-owned construction firm to lay bitumen across the savannah between Juba and Rumbek. This is how a 392-kilometer road gets built in a country that won its independence in 2011 and lost a third of it to civil war almost immediately afterward. The surface goes down one lift at a time, financed barrel by barrel, while the land it crosses belongs to Mundari cattle herders, Bari farmers, Dinka pastoralists, and the White Nile itself, broad and slow to the east.

Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road: A Country Without Paved Roads

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At independence South Sudan had almost no paved highways outside the capital. Rainy-season mud could strand entire towns for months. A 600-kilometer journey that would take eight hours in Kenya could take three days here, or three weeks, or prove impossible. Every sack of sorghum...

Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road: Paved With Crude

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first contract was signed in 2014 with Shandong Hi-Speed Group at a price of 711 million US dollars, but the 2016 outbreak of fighting in Juba froze the project almost immediately. Workers fled. The earthmovers sat idle. In 2018, with the country's second civil war dragging o...

Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road: A Road to a Capital That Does Not Yet Exist

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A spur of this highway is meant to lead somewhere strange: Ramciel, in Lakes State, which South Sudanese authorities have designated as the future national capital. Juba, they argue, is too far south, too close to Uganda, too cramped on the banks of the White Nile. Ramciel is clo...

Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek Road: What the Highway Crosses

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The route passes through country that most outsiders will never see. Terekeka, 75 kilometers north of Juba, is heartland of the Mundari, whose tall Ankole-Watusi cattle are among the most photographed in Africa and whose riverside cattle camps glow at night with dung-fire smoke. ...