Holidays in South Sudan

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in South Sudan

The World's Newest Country, Six Months in the Making

In January 2011, over the course of six days, South Sudanese voters cast ballots in a referendum on secession from Sudan, a vote guaranteed under the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that had ended a devastating civil war between the country's north and south six years earlier. When the official results were announced on 7 February, 98.83 percent of voters had chosen independence, one of the most lopsided referendum outcomes recorded anywhere in modern history.

Five months later, on 9 July 2011, South Sudan formally declared its independence at a ceremony in the new capital, Juba, attended by dignitaries including the president of Sudan itself. The country became a United Nations member state five days later, on 14 July, making it, at the time, the 193rd recognised sovereign state in the world and the newest internationally acknowledged nation on Earth, a status built on a referendum-to-independence timeline that had been fixed in writing six years before either date arrived.

A Wetland That Doubles in Size Every Year

The Sudd, formed where the White Nile's Bahr al Jabal branch spreads out across the flat clay plains of central South Sudan, ranks among the largest tropical wetlands on Earth, and its physical size genuinely changes with the calendar rather than staying fixed. Driven by seasonal rains concentrated between April and September and controlled by the shifting position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, the wetland's flooded area can roughly double between the dry season's low point and the wet season's peak, an annual pulse of expansion and contraction that shapes nearly everything living within it.

The Sudd takes its name from the Arabic word for "barrier," a reference to the dense floating vegetation that for centuries obstructed attempts to navigate the Nile through the region. That same seasonal rhythm supports one of the largest antelope migrations anywhere in the world, hundreds of bird species, and the largest known population of shoebill storks, while communities including the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk peoples have long timed their own seasonal movements, herding cattle toward higher ground in the wet season and toward permanent water sources as the dry season deepens, to match the wetland's own annual cycle of flood and retreat. Recognised as a Wetland of International Importance since 2006, the Sudd remains on South Sudan's tentative list for future UNESCO World Heritage status.

Telling Time Without a Calendar

When the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard lived among the Nuer people of what is now South Sudan in the early 1930s, he documented a way of organising time that operated almost entirely without reference to a fixed calendar. The Nuer divided their year into two broad seasons, tot, the rainy season running roughly from May to October, and mai, the dry season spanning the remaining months, and virtually every major activity, cultivating millet and maize, burning grassland for fresh pasture, fishing, moving cattle between villages and temporary camps, was paced by which of these two ecological periods was underway rather than by any particular date.

Evans-Pritchard, whose 1940 study of the Nuer remains a foundational text in social anthropology, described this as "ecological time," distinguishing it from a second, entirely separate system he called "structural time," in which the Nuer reckoned duration not through days or years but through genealogical generations and formal age-sets, cohorts of young men initiated together who moved through recognised life stages as a group. Together, the two systems allowed the Nuer to coordinate the practical rhythms of a pastoral, transhumant society and to situate individuals within their lineage and community, without either system requiring the kind of fixed, numbered calendar most literate societies had long taken for granted.

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