In July 2011, South Sudan became the world’s newest nation. After decades of civil war against the north, the people of South Sudan voted overwhelmingly for independence in a referendum that drew international observers and global goodwill in equal measure. The flags went up. The cameras arrived. For a brief moment, the world was paying attention.
It did not pay attention for long. Two years after independence, in December 2013, conflict erupted between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those of his former deputy Riek Machar, splitting the country along ethnic lines and plunging it into a civil war that would last five years and cost nearly 400,000 lives. A peace agreement was signed in 2018, but the underlying tensions were never resolved. By 2022, South Sudan remains one of the most fragile and desperate places on earth — and one of the least reported.
The statistics are staggering and largely unreported in the Western press. More than 8.3 million people — nearly seventy percent of the country’s entire population — require humanitarian assistance, according to UNICEF. Nearly 2.3 million South Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries, making it one of the largest refugee crises in Africa. A further 1.6 million remain internally displaced within the country’s own borders. Severe flooding in 2020 and 2021 has destroyed crops and displaced hundreds of thousands more, compounding the effects of conflict with climate catastrophe. South Sudan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Rape has become so widespread that, according to a UN human rights team, many women no longer report repeated attacks.
Behind these numbers are the communities that Misha Somerville documented in his 2013 photo documentary People of the Earth, Wind and Fire, made among the Dor Dinka people of South Sudan. The film is a portrait of a culture of extraordinary richness and resilience — communities that have evolved across centuries, shaped by the land, the seasons and a set of traditions and identities that resist easy description. Somerville’s camera captures something that the humanitarian statistics cannot: the texture of daily life, the dignity of people who have endured more than most could imagine, and the cultural depth of a country that the world has consistently reduced to a series of crises.
The crisis in South Sudan is not the result of inevitable chaos or ancient ethnic hatreds — a framing that Western media has consistently reached for when covering African conflicts. It is the product of elite political competition, the manipulation of ethnic identity by political actors, and the failure of an international community that celebrated independence in 2011 and then walked away. The oil wealth that should have funded development has been looted. The peace processes that should have created stability have been undermined. The aid that should have reached the most vulnerable has been blocked, diverted and in many cases stolen. Funding for humanitarian operations in 2022 is critically low at a time when needs are at a record high.
South Sudan is not without hope. Its people have survived things that should not have to be survived, and they continue to build lives, maintain cultures and hold communities together under conditions that would have broken most institutional structures long ago. But hope requires attention, and attention requires that the world does not look away simply because the story has become inconvenient or familiar. It has not become familiar enough. Most people in the countries that cheered South Sudan’s independence in 2011 could not today tell you what has happened there since.
