Historical/Cultural Context

Sudanese Civil War

Sudan was one of the African countries colonized by European nations in the nineteenth century who won their independence in the twentieth century.

In 1956 Sudan broke away from the United Kingdom and the country came under the leadership of a military regime controlled by Arabic-Islamic groups living in northern Sudan. These leaders failed to take into account the needs and desires of the southern Sudanese who are largely neither Arabs nor Muslims, and this ultimately led to fifty years of prolonged civil war. In 2011, The Republic of South Sudan gained independence from the Republic of Sudan and temporary peace was achieved. In 2013, civil war broke out again bringing ethhic violence, massacre, and wide-spread human rights abuse. In February 2020, the two rival leaders agreed to a unity deal that would pave the way for refugees to return home, but by the end of the year, the leaders had incited conflict once again.

The Lost Boys of Sudan

In the late 1980s, as the civil war reached the remote hills of southern Sudan where the Didinga lived, many of those who died were not soldiers. Young boys, many only seven or eight years of age, returned home from tending their herds to find their homes burning and their families dead. Not knowing what else to do, they started walking. Eventually they met up with other boys, walking in groups, the older ones taking care of the younger ones. Too many of them died of starvation and thirst, or were killed by wild animals or enemy fire. They kept moving, trying to find someplace that was safe.

After a few months of walking, about 12,000 of the boys arrived in a refugee camp in Ethiopia where they stayed for three years, going to school and eating a daily meal of wheat and maize. When civil war broke out in Ethiopia, they were chased away and traveled another 1,000 miles across rivers, deserts and mountains to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Many of the Lost Boys lived in that camp for the next decade.

Beginning in 2000, the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a name given to the young men by international aid workers, began arriving in the US as refugees. Thousands have been relocated throughout the US, including in Utah, where a small, but vibrant community of Didinga have been reunited in recent years with young families from their war-torn homeland.