It’s been just over a decade since South Sudan’s steaming capital exploded with joy and revelers sang and danced the night away to celebrate the birth of their nation as it split from its old enemy, Sudan.
The new country was hailed in 2011 by the American diplomats who had accompanied its shipment and the Hollywood celebrities who championed its cause. Billions of dollars flowed into an ambitious state-building project that gave a new start to a people weary after decades of war. “Freedom!” they cried.
Now it feels like a very long time ago. Devoured by civil war, famine and, most recently, floods, the world’s youngest country has been plagued by divisions and thwarted by leaders who sacked its considerable oil wealth. No Western leader has ever paid a public visit, leaving many South Sudanese feeling forgotten.
But not by Pope Francis. He arrived in the capital Juba on Friday after visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo – an African tour meant to shed light on some of the continent’s most troubled but ignored countries.
Francis immediately made an urgent appeal to the country’s leaders, whose violent clashes plunged South Sudan into civil war in 2013 and continue to sow chaos despite a shaky peace deal.
“No more bloodshed, no more conflict, no more violence and mutual reproaches about who is to blame,” Francis said in the gardens of the presidential palace while seated alongside South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and other authorities. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace come!”
Excitement has been building for weeks in Juba, where colorful murals of Francis have appeared on the dilapidated streets and authorities have rerouted the route to the papal nunciature with a new paved road, still a rarity in South Sudan.
At Juba International Airport, Francis was greeted by Mr. Kiir, an ex-rebel who has led South Sudan since 2011, largely mired in a vicious feud with his arch-rival Riek Machar.
The last time the Pope met both men was in 2019 at the Vatican, when he prostrated and prostrated in a dramatic gesture kissed her shoes – a calculated display of humility designed to pressure them to resolve the rivalry that sparked the Civil War and resulted in an estimated 400,000 deaths.
The two men also represent the major fault line in South Sudan: Mr Kiir belongs to the Dinka ethnic group, which dominates the government and security forces, while Mr Machar belongs to the Nuer, the Dinka’s bitter rivals.
If these leaders expected Francis to be a thoroughly sympathetic visitor, they received a nasty shock on Friday when he lashed out at the notorious, large-scale corruption that has caused billions of dollars in oil revenues to evaporate — much of it the fault of the leaders gathered around him.
“Future generations will either honor your names or erase their memory based on what you do now,” he said.
“The unfair distribution of funds, secret schemes to get rich, patronage deals, lack of transparency: all these pollute the river bed of human society; They divert resources from the things that are most needed.”
Francis arrived with unusually prominent companions: the Archbishop of Canterbury and symbolic leader of the global Anglican Communion, Justin Welby, and the leader of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields. In colonial times, Christian missionaries in Sudan were divided by the Nile, with Catholics preaching on one side and Anglicans on the other.
Now the “three wise men,” as some call them, are uniting in a joint pilgrimage — the first of its kind, church leaders say — in an effort to bring the plight of suffering South Sudanese to the world.
Sudan is a predominantly Christian country with a population of 11 million, of which the Catholic Church claims six million, including the President, Mr Kiir. Still, the papal kiss of 2019 had only a modest impact on the country’s deadly division.
Although Mr Kiir and Mr Machar formed a unity government in 2020, local conflicts continue to rage, often manipulated by national leaders, particularly Mr Kiir, to undermine rivals or consolidate power, analysts and diplomats say. A plan to integrate dueling armed groups into the national army is incomplete.
In a brief address on Friday, Mr Kiir said the Pope’s shoe-kissing gesture “was not in vain”. But he acknowledged that “not everyone is happy with the pace” of progress towards peace and reiterated his pledge to resume negotiations with a number of reluctant rebel groups – talks initiated by the Community of Sant’Egidio, one related group, will be convened by Pope Francis.
At least 27 people, including five children, were killed in the recent violence died in clashes on Thursday in the state of Central Equatoria.
Archbishop Welby lamented the “massacre” and on Friday exhorted South Sudan’s divided leaders. “We expected more. You promised more,” he said. “The answer to peace and reconciliation is not in visits like this. But it is in your hands.”
South Sudan regularly tops the least desirable rankings. Last year Transparency International ranked it the world’s most corrupt country (in this year’s list, released on Tuesday, it was beaten to first place by Somalia). The United Nations call it the deadliest country for helpers.
And a growing heap of investigative reports have documented how billions of dollars in oil revenues continue to disappear. But no one seems to know where the money went – not even the official responsible.
“I don’t see the money,” said Puot Kang Chol, South Sudan’s oil minister, in an interview, “I only see numbers on paper.”
Mr Chol, 38, a Machar staffer who joined the unity government in 2020, said oil revenues would be managed by the Treasury, which is controlled by Mr Kiir.
A sense of uneasiness pervades Juba, where glamor meets nagging poverty. Huge four-wheel drive vehicles — often the latest Toyota Land Cruisers — jostle for space with goats and rickshaws. Luxury hotels offer comfort at prices worthy of Manhattan.
At the Pyramid Hotel, a restaurant on the 11th floor offers panoramic views of the Nile and an adjacent shanty town. The fourth floor is the Las Vegas Casino, where Chinese-speaking players gathered around the blackjack table the other afternoon.
The extent of the dysfunction in South Sudan is only evident in places like Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, 530 km north of Juba.
With big oil factories nearby, Bentiu should be a boomtown. Instead, it resembles an impoverished village, with no electricity or running water and few concrete buildings. The wreckage of a crashed plane is parked at the gate of the city’s airstrip, which is largely used by the relief workers who provide the services in place.
There is water everywhere. Floods that started three years agolinked to climate change now cover an area larger than Switzerland and affect a million people, satellite imagery show released by the United Nations last month.
UN peacekeepers have built 55 miles of levees to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from being flooded again. Every day they patrol the eight-foot barriers, looking for cracks that could herald a catastrophic collapse.
Water is not the only danger. Most days, Nyayien Yow, a widowed mother of five, paddles a canoe out into the water, where she climbs half-submerged trees to collect firewood to sell at a local market.
Cobras and other venomous snakes lurk in the branches. Then last month she was brutally beaten by a man who accused her of driving into his canoe.
With little law or order in Bentiu, Ms Yow didn’t even think to report the attack to the authorities. “I couldn’t do anything,” she said simply. “He is a man.”
She eventually found help at a nearby shelter run by the International Rescue Committee, which supports women affected by an alarming rise in gender-based violence in recent years.
Longstanding concerns for Mr Kiir’s health, 71, resurfaced in December after video footage showed him urinating on his trousers at an official event. Weeks later, the feared National Security Service arrested seven employees of the state broadcaster and accused them of having passed on the footage.
The incident underscored Mr Kiir’s increasing trust in the NSS, said Brian Adeba of The Sentry, a research group. “It’s an army within an army, the regime’s Praetorian Guard,” he said.
Sentry’s co-founder, actor George Clooney, was once a strong supporter of South Sudan’s independence and is now a harsh critic of its government.
The US government, which provides $1 billion a year in aid to South Sudan, has expressed its displeasure with Mr Kiir by blocking non-humanitarian funding for his country at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Still, some South Sudanese are determined to keep the 2011 dream alive and, as the pope said on Friday, “move from words to deeds.”
On a recent night, a local comedian named Akau Jambo, 25, was having a drink at The Baobab House, a hip bar in Juba, with friends who, like him, had grown up in refugee camps in Kenya or Uganda.
Despite everything, they returned to South Sudan, determined to make the best of their new country.
“We can’t wait for things to change,” he said. “We have to do it ourselves”
