Andrew Mayen worked in the banking sector in America before he came back home, together with thousands of others, to South Sudan after the 2005 peace agreement. His new place of work is very different. Buffalo Commercial Bank opened in February 2008, the third and newest of the South’s indigenous banks in a very small sector hoping for considerable growth over the next few years. Buffalo, owned by a group of southern entrepreneurs, has dreams of branches across the war-torn South’s ten states and providing southerners with their first bank cards and the South’s first ATM machine, but Mayen knows that it will be some time before that becomes a reality. Currently, indigenous banks are forced to fly cash around in chartered planes and organize transfers through emails and sometimes satellite telephone text messages after they have been entered in giant, dusty ledgers: there is not much precedent for Buffalo’s
