On January 9, 2005, SPLM/A Chairman John Garang, and Ali Osman Taha, Sudan’s Vice President and head of the government delegation to the peace talks, signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in Nairobi, Kenya. In his speech to the crowd gathered at Nyayo Stadium, Garang referred to the tumultuous history of the country:

As he spoke to the crowd, Garang alluded to the major changes the CPA promised for the people of Sudan, implying that the lessons of the tumultuous history of the past century would be an important resource for Southern Sudan’s erstwhile state-builders. Although he perhaps did not think of the southern leaders of his own party within the lineage of the violent and extractive states that had ruled over southern Sudan since the Turco-Egyptian period, his call to heed the lessons of history foreshadowed the challenges that the new southern government would face as it attempted to implement its vision for urban reconstruction in Juba.

Garang’s speech highlights the fact that the process of state construction in southern Sudan has been continuous since the nineteenth century. It began with the Turco-Egyptian invasion of Sudan in the 1820s, which heralded the initial expeditions into the area of Equatoria in the 1840s. It continued with the incorporation of the southern region into the framework of the Sudanese state following the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement. During that period, towns such as Juba were established as commercial and administrative centres.