Kettles steam on charcoal stoves in the cool morning breeze. It’s a rainy day in Juba, South Sudan’s capital. There are few customers at the tea stall where Kiden Mary, 19, works on the corner of Bilpam Road – one of the city’s asphalted thoroughfares – and a muddy street leading to a residential area where houses are mostly rented to NGOs.

“I came here to look for money,” she says, pouring thick coffee boiled with ginger through a strainer. She provides for her mother and siblings at home in Kajo Keji, a village 70 miles to the south, near the border with Uganda. “Sometimes I work until 9pm. The little I get, I send to them.”

Kiden’s is a familiar story in Juba – a city of incomers. The lack of security or basic services in rural South Sudan, a country the size of France with a population approaching 12 million, pushes people to seek opportunities in the capital.

Since April, when war broke out in neighbouring Sudan, more than 6,000 of the country’s refugees have arrived in Juba. Most ended up at Gorom, south-west of the city, a camp created years ago to host Ethiopian refugees. Here, food is scarce. Refugees share the little humanitarian assistance they get with some support from the Sudanese community in Juba. The lack of aid has already driven some young people back to Sudan, or even to Libya.

In many ways, Juba tells the story of South Sudan. The country broke away from Sudan in July 2011, after a period of autonomy that started at the end of the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005). By then, Juba was a small garrison town of the Sudan armed forces (SAF) that had been surrounded for years by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels, led by John Garang. When he died in a helicopter crash in July 2005, weeks after being sworn in as Sudan’s first vice-president, Juba opened up for his funeral; the former rebels entered the city they had besieged but never captured, and the rest of the world followed.

The soon-to-be youngest capital city in the world became the centre of a new “goldrush”. With oil money flowing into the coffers of a nation that needed to be built from scratch, and the financial backing of western donors, Juba attracted a large influx of well paid humanitarian workers and diplomats, traders, investors and jobseekers from neighbouring Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. They flocked into Juba to claim their share of this new market for imported food and goods, but also for lucrative contracts in services and infrastructure.

The new capital was called the fastest-growing city in Africa until civil war broke out in December 2013, exposing the fragility of South Sudan’s new institutions, the deep-rooted divisions of its leaders, and the flaws of the nation-building programmes put in place by the UN. A peace agreement was signed in 2018 to end the conflict, which had resulted in nearly 400,000 deaths and twice ravaged the capital, including when, in July 2016, a first attempt at a peace deal collapsed. Guards of the two warring rivals – the president, Salva Kiir, and the vice-president, Riek Machar – started shooting at each other in front of the presidential palace, leaving hundreds dead. The bullet holes were only repaired when Pope Francis visited Juba in February this year.

But in 2018, Juba started to grow again. It is now hosting a unity government aiming to organise elections at the end of 2024. While instability continues in rural areas of South Sudan, Juba has been thriving, with freshly paved roads and improved services, a new airport terminal and a variety of buildings under construction. New hotels and clubs open every week catering to the children of the elite. The city is expanding upwards and outwards. While online estimates set its population at 459,000, “it is at least a million”, says Martin Simon Wani, the Juba city council CEO. And that’s not taking into account the city’s suburbs, where perhaps another million or two have now settled.

Our husbands are either dead or drunkards, we’re doing this to put our children to school so we can get out of poverty

Martha Angeth Mayen, fish seller

In the ever-changing city landscape the very rich, the very poor and a growing middle class coexist. Shiny expensive cars with tinted windows drive past old women crushing stones to sell in bags along the road. Herders from the countryside use sticks to guide their long-horned cattle across town, and at weekends weddings take place on the medan (squares) of the city, with tents, music and dancing.

Juba is where South Sudanese entrepreneurs and NGO workers mingle with khawajat (foreigners) on hotel rooftops and at expensive restaurants overlooking the Nile. Behind high fences and swirls of barbed wire, expats, mostly working with the humanitarian agencies, gather around their pools.

Juba keeps spreading far beyond its limits on the west bank of the White Nile, where it was established by the British colonisers a century ago. A foreign creation from the beginning, Juba is quick at forgetting its history. Colonial-era landmark buildings are destroyed or transformed, such as the Greek-built Juba cinema that was turned into a church. The Indigenous Bari community of Juba resent the loss of their ancestral territory to the capital, where land grabs by powerful members of the military can lead to violent confrontations. These tensions were one reason a new capital at Ramciel, 150 miles to the north, was announced as soon as South Sudan became independent. So far it has not materialised.

On the east bank of the Nile, Gumbo-Sherikat is now densely populated. Tens of thousands of people, coming mostly from the Bor area in neighbouring Jonglei state, have settled in what is still considered the countryside by the city’s administration. The main cattle market operates there, by the newly constructed Juba-Bor highway. As hundreds of cows are driven to grazing, Maguen Aleth Alith, 52, a chief elected by the traders, is one of those benefiting from Juba’s development. “The demand for cows is increasing, and when there are issues on the roads, we face shortages of cattle,” he says. He has “traded cattle around Juba since 1994”, he says. By then, the second Sudanese civil war was at its peak. “We used to dodge the Sudan army,” he recalls.

Young people are less familiar with the history but it resonates for many older residents who gave years to the liberation war and who are now barely surviving. Under an umbrella on the side of the road in Sherikat, Simon Anei Madut, 37, from Warrap in the north-western Bahr el Ghazal region, recalls being “around Juba” with the SPLA as a teenager. Today, he is still a soldier in the government army, but his salary is “very low”. He sells charcoal to pay his children’s school fees.

It’s the same struggle for the women in Sherikat’s fish market. “Our fish used to rot,” says Esther Yom Mabior, 35. They formed a co-operative, built a roof and acquired secondhand freezers to preserve the fresh fish they bring from Bor. “Our husbands are either dead or drunkards; we’re doing this to put our children to school so we can get out of poverty,” says Martha Angeth Mayen, 43.

Through the green canopy of neem and mango trees, half-finished apartment blocks rise up. Juba neighbourhoods comprise concrete buildings alongside mud houses and shelters of plastic sheeting. Mahad, near the Konyo Konyo market, is one of the capital’s camps housing 3,700 internally displaced people. Chol Anok teaches there at a school built in the 1970s. “All the tribes of South Sudan are here,” he says, “most displaced by the 2013 crisis.”

Teaching in a public school is more of a vocation given the meagre salary. Most of the teachers have left, looking for jobs with the NGOs, he says. But not him. “We need to raise our young ones so they can change this nation.” Convinced that with education, peace will eventually come, he says: “Farmers will go back to farm and South Sudan will be one of the best countries in Africa.”

But for the people in Mahad, life is getting tougher. Food rations stopped in November 2022. NGOs and UN agencies are cutting programmes due to the shortage of funds. Only 45% of the humanitarian response plan is funded this year so far in South Sudan, although food insecurity levels have never been higher, with 76% of the population in need of assistance.

Joseph Gurloch, 32, from Mahad, was a child soldier with the SPLA and was shot while fighting in 2002. He now has a prosthetic leg. Displaced from the Pibor area by conflict in 2013, he has no means to get back home. “We survive on garbage,” says Roda Racho, who also lives at the camp. “We collect plastic bottles and sell them.” Others collect leftovers to eat from the Konyo Konyo market.

When the little aid they receive runs out each month, it’s the same ordeal for the people living in the Hai Malakal cemetery. “Life here is difficult,” says Joyce Sunday Juan, 17, dressed in a checked skirt and a bra topped by a lawa, a flowery piece of cloth tied on the right shoulder. “Sometimes we eat and sometimes we don’t.”

Fleeing conflict and cattle raids in their homeland around the village of Terekeka, 45 miles north of Juba, this community has lived among the graves since 2008. Two five-star hotels, opened in recent years, overlook the plastic shelters of the cemetery. “We have been forgotten,” says chief James Jelle Pitia, 45. “Without guns or money, you can’t get land in Juba,” he says.