Qualla: Lakes State

Lakes State: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. Drive at dawn past a cattle camp in Lakes State and you pass through woodsmoke thick enough to taste. Herders stand among the ash, letting the smoke wash over them and their cattle to drive off biting flies, and the long-horned Ankole cows glow orange-gray in the rising light like something out of a much older world. For the Dinka communities who make up most of the population here, these camps (toch in their language) are not primitive leftovers from some earlier century. They are functioning, elaborate, highly organized social institutions, each with its own rules and songs and praise-names given to favored bulls. Lakes State is 43,595 square kilometers of this, plus the lakes that give it its name, plus a patch of bush where the national government may one day decide to build a new capital.

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0

Lakes State: Between Two Niles and the Ghazal

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JennaCB123, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lakes sits in the center of South Sudan, one of four states (alongside Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Western Bahr el Ghazal, and Warrap) that make up the historic Bahr el Ghazal region. The White Nile forms its eastern boundary, separating it from Jonglei State. Unity State lies to th...

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Image: JennaCB123 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lakes State: A Capital That May Never Be Built

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JennaCB123, CC BY-SA 3.0. In July 2011, as South Sudan was taking its first breath as an independent country, the federal government publicly floated the idea of moving the capital from Juba to a site called Ramciel, in northern Lakes State. The reasoning was partly geographic (Ramciel sits roughly in the...

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Image: JennaCB123 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lakes State: The 28 States That Weren't

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JennaCB123, CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 2015, at the height of the South Sudanese Civil War, President Salva Kiir issued a decree dividing the country's ten states into 28. Lakes was split into three: Eastern Lakes, Gok, and Western Lakes. The move was widely read as an attempt to reshape political constitue...

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Image: JennaCB123 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lakes State: Cattle, Raids, and a Journalist

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JennaCB123, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cattle are everything and nothing in Lakes. Everything in the sense that Dinka social life, marriage, and inheritance all pivot on them. Nothing in the sense that Western economic accounts routinely fail to register their importance. Inter-communal cattle raids have been a period...

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Image: JennaCB123 | CC BY-SA 3.0