Never good, the dusty red roads of South Sudan’s capital, Juba, have been further potholed and haphazardly widened by the steady increase in traffic since peace between north and south was signed in 2005, ending Africa’s longest running conflict. In the same three years sprawling markets filled with crockery, cloth, never-before-seen vegetables and thousands of bright, cheap Chinese motorcycles have sprung from areas that formerly housed soldiers, half-buried mines and unexploded ordinances. Small hills of the side-products of peacetime plenty — Ugandan water bottles, Congolese plastic bags, milk powder packets from Mombasa — pile up on every street corner. Foreign journalists dropping in have called the former garrison, miserably cut off during the long years of civil war, Africa’s new “boom town”. But while Juba has plenty of northern Sudanese, Somali and Kenyan wholesalers, thousands of Ugandan traders and a fair share of Chinese restaurateurs, it is hard to find
