Qualla: Malakal

Malakal: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 2015, a BBC reporter wrote a dispatch from Malakal and titled it 'The city that vanished in South Sudan.' At the time the description was accurate. Malakal had changed hands twelve times between government forces and opposition fighters in the twenty-two months since the civil war began, and what had once been a city of roughly 130,000 people was a landscape of burned roofs, empty markets, and a Protection of Civilians camp run by the United Nations that held tens of thousands of displaced residents behind wire. A decade later, the city is being rebuilt. It is still the capital of Upper Nile State. It still sits on the White Nile just north of the Sobat confluence, and families who scattered to Khartoum, Nairobi, and the POC camps have come back to rebuild houses on the footprints of the ones that burned.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Malakal: Where the Rivers Meet

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA, CC BY 2.0. Malakal's location is why Malakal has always existed. It sits on the White Nile's west bank, just north of where the Sobat pours in from the east carrying the runoff of the Ethiopian highlands. This confluence is one of the great water features of the southern Sudd basin. North-b...

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Image: Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA | CC BY 2.0

Malakal: Garrison Town, Then City

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) Malakal was a garrison town for the Sudanese Armed Forces, held by Khartoum against the SPLA rebels operating in the surrounding countryside. The November 2006 Battle of Malakal pitted government troops against SPLA forces that had...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0

Malakal: The Civil War That Erased the City

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. In December 2013 a political rupture in Juba between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar metastasized into a full civil war along partly ethnic lines. Malakal became one of its worst-affected cities. Between 2013 and 2015 it changed hands twelve times between gove...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0

Malakal: The People Who Returned

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxfam East Africa, CC BY 2.0. Revitalized peace agreements in 2018 and 2020 opened the door for returns. The city now has a climate that continues as it has always continued: hot semi-arid, with a wet season from June to October and a dry season of dust and haze from November to March. April is the hottest mo...

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Image: Oxfam East Africa | CC BY 2.0