"Africa's newest nation has a long history. Often considered remote and isolated from the rest of Africa, and associated with slavery and civil war, South Sudan has been an arena for a complex mixing of peoples, languages, and beliefs. Its diversity is both its strength and a challenge as its people attempt to overcome decades of war to build a new future. Most recent studies of South Sudan have a foreshortened sense of the past, focusing on recent civil wars and ongoing conflicts. This brief but substantial overview of South Sudan's longue durée, by one of the world's foremost experts on the region, rights that imbalance. Drawing on recent advances in the archaeology of the Nile Valley, archives, and new fieldwork and ethnography, Johnson recovers South Sudan's place in African history and challenges the stereotypes imposed on its peoples."--Page 4 of cover.

Introduction : "this is where we came from" -- South Sudan in the Nile Basin -- Trees and wandering bulls -- Trade and empires, tribal zones and deep rurals -- Dispersal and diasporas -- The dual colonialism of the condominium -- The politics of competing nationalisms -- Two wars -- Self-determination in the twenty-first century -- Legacies of war.