The Sudd

The Sudd is the place where the Nile loses itself: north of Juba the White Nile leaves its bed and spreads over a plain so flat that it becomes a swamp of papyrus and floating islands thirty thousand square kilometres in the dry season and four times that in the flood — one of the largest wetlands on Earth, a labyrinth of channels where steamers once took weeks to find the way and where half the river's water simply evaporates into the sky. Around it live the Dinka and the Nuer with their cattle, in camps of dung-smoke and song along the banks; over it fly the shoebill and a million other birds; across the plains to its east move the white-eared kob and the tiang in one of the greatest animal migrations left on the planet, towards Boma. A canal meant to drain it — Jonglei, two hundred and sixty kilometres dug straight through the east — stopped in 1984 when the war began, and its digging machine still rusts where it stood.

When the doors open, the traveller will come up from Juba to Bor on the road and take a boat into the channels with a Dinka or Nuer guide who knows them — a day or several, camping on the islands, watching the papyrus part for a hippo, the shoebill standing like a statue in the reeds, the cattle camps at dusk with their fires and their songs; will, in the dry season, fly or drive east to the plains for the migration, which the country hopes will one day head its excursions; and will, if the old steamer route from Juba to Kosti ever runs again, take it slowly north to Malakal, through the whole swamp, which is the only way it was ever meant to be seen.

The Guide's honesty, which here is a vow made gently: this page is the youngest in the book, and the Guide holds it the way one holds anything young — with both hands. South Sudan's peace remains uneven, the swamp has few roads and fewer beds, and the Guide sends no travellers where it cannot promise them a way back; the papyrus and the birds and the herds do not need visitors to be what they are. When the mornings on the White Nile belong to fishermen and cattle boys and a boat that leaves Bor because someone wants to go north, these doors will fill, and the Sudd will head the wetlands of a continent. Until then: patience, honest reading, and the respect owed to a people still writing their first chapters under difficulty. Young pages deserve long shelves.