In 1996 when I visited the war zones of the African territory of South Sudan my goal was to understand the causes and complexities of what had become one of the world's longest civil wars. I anticipated writing a history that would begin in the mid-twentieth century, one that would mirror many others in the continent of Africa where the legacy of colonial rule has often led to postcolonial disasters. What I discovered however, upon inteviewing numerous South Sudanese (including Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Luo, Bari, Azande, Balanda, Latuka, Atwot, Acholi, Fertit, and Yibel) were answers that delved far beyond the twentieth century. I uncovered issues far more complex concerning the last forty years of the modern civil war than those presented in the popular media who argue that the conflict, in simple terms, can be reduced to that of an “Islamic North” versus a “Christian South.”

It is evident that many of South Sudan's problems today—including civil war with Northern Sudan and the intense hatred of those Islamic peoples on their northern frontier, the desire to have separate nation status from the Islamic Northern Sudan, disagreements over the official geographical boundary and definition of “South Sudan,” intense intra-South Sudanese ethnic conflict, the continued and preferred reliance on the pastoral economy of raiding and its concomitant conflict, perceived ethnic expansion and dominance by one ethnic group, the Dinka, over all other South Sudanese peoples, the continued problem of Northern Islamic slave raids, the persistence of the Nilotic philosophy of fission politics, the importance of communal religion, and the centuries-old male forms of dominance over women—all have their roots in the older precolonial history of South Sudan. This book, therefore, presents a history of the formation of a precolonial stateless society in what is politically known today as “South Sudan” (in the colonial era it was Southern Sudan) and shows how these early stresses have since come to play a pivotal role in one of the world's longest civil wars.

This region has been especially important to study because there has been a perception in the community of historians and scholars that vast expanses of Africa, which have not hosted great or even small states and empires, must be devoid of any history worth knowing.