Qualla: Leer, South Sudan

Leer, South Sudan: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Emmanuel Jal was seven years old, or maybe eight (nobody kept records), when soldiers took him from Leer to carry a rifle heavier than he was. That was the late 1980s, during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Decades later, after he had become one of Africa's best-known hip-hop artists and written his autobiography, Jal returned to the town of his childhood and started building a school. It sits today in a place that has been repeatedly destroyed, most recently during the horrors that consumed Leer County from 2013 onward. Classes are often held under trees because the four classrooms cannot hold the two thousand children who show up. The children still show up. This is what holds the town together: not victory over the wars that keep arriving, but the small, stubborn business of teaching children to read while the world around them is rebuilt yet again.

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Leer, South Sudan: A Densely Populated County

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Leer sits in Dok Nuer country, in what was briefly Southern Liech State and is now again Unity State. By South Sudanese standards, Leer County is densely populated, a fact that has shaped everything that happened there. It also sits near oil concessions, which has shaped the rest...

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Leer, South Sudan: A Town That Has Been Destroyed Many Times

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 let refugees trickle back to Leer. For a few years the town stabilized. Médecins Sans Frontières ran a large hospital with 150 national staff, offering surgery, maternity care, tuberculosis treatment, and therapeutic feeding programs. A w...

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Leer, South Sudan: Boys With Rifles, Men With Microphones

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Emmanuel Jal's story is not the only one from Leer, but it is the one the world outside knows. Taken as a child soldier by the SPLA in the 1980s, he was smuggled out to Kenya by a British aid worker named Emma McCune (who also married Machar and died young in a car accident in Na...

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Leer, South Sudan: What the Archive Cannot Hold

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The researcher and journalist Nick Turse called this part of South Sudan 'the perpetual killing field' in a 2016 dispatch, and the description has not aged. Riek Machar, born here, served as Vice President of South Sudan until his arrest in March 2025 and subsequent suspension fr...

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