The Canal That Stopped Halfway
A bucketwheel excavator weighing some 2,300 tonnes cut 240 kilometres of a 360-kilometre canal across the Sudd, and then stopped in 1984 and never moved again. It is still there, and the argument it was built to settle has come back inverted.
The White Nile arrives in South Sudan as a river and leaves it as considerably less of one. Between Mongalla and Malakal it spreads sideways into the Sudd, a floodplain of papyrus, open water, drowned grass and channels that move from year to year — somewhere around 30,000 square kilometres in an ordinary dry season and several times that when the river is high. Roughly half the water that goes in does not come out. It evaporates, or the papyrus breathes it back into the sky.
To a hydrologist working downstream, that is a loss to be recovered. To the Dinka and Nuer who move cattle onto the toic — the grassland the flood uncovers as it retreats — it is not a loss at all; it is the mechanism the entire year is organised around. The Jonglei Canal was the attempt to settle that disagreement with earthmoving equipment, and the reason to write about it now is that the equipment is still sitting where it stopped.
The arithmetic of 1959
On 8 November 1959 Egypt and Sudan signed an agreement dividing the Nile between them: 55.5 cubic kilometres a year to Egypt, 18.5 to Sudan, measured at Aswan. Nobody else in the basin was a party to it. The agreement also provided for jointly funded works in the south to reduce what it called swamp losses, with the cost and the recovered water shared equally between the two signatories. The Jonglei Canal was the first of those works: a channel about 360 kilometres long running from near Bor to the mouth of the Sobat above Malakal, taking part of the river around the wetland instead of through it. The design figure was roughly 4.7 cubic kilometres of additional water a year at Malakal, split down the middle between Cairo and Khartoum.
What the 1954 report had already said
The people who would lose the toic had been studied in unusual detail long before a machine arrived. The Jonglei Investigation Team was set up by the Sudan government in 1946 and reported in 1954 in four volumes, and the report is not a whitewash: it concluded that diverting the river would shrink the seasonally flooded grazing on which the population and its cattle depended, and that the canal itself would be a barrier across the routes people, herds and wildlife used to cross that country. It proposed compensating works. The scheme went ahead anyway, in a form that had grown larger than the one studied, and the compensating works were never the part that got built.
Every technical objection to the Jonglei Canal had been published, by the government proposing it, twenty-four years before the digging started. Being right on paper turned out to be worth nothing at all.
Two hundred and forty kilometres
Digging began in 1978, contracted to a French firm, using a German-built bucketwheel excavator of some 2,300 tonnes that had been shipped in after finishing a canal in Pakistan. It did not dig so much as chew, cutting a trench and throwing the spoil into a bank alongside — which is why the finished sections are not a canal so much as a wall with a ditch beside it. There had already been protests in Juba in 1974, in which people were killed, and southern politicians had spent the intervening years arguing that a project sized in Cairo and Khartoum was being imposed on a region that had been given no say and would receive no water. In 1983 the Sudan People's Liberation Army was formed and the second civil war began. The SPLA attacked the canal works over the following months, the contractor evacuated in early 1984, and the excavator was left where it stood. About 240 of the 360 kilometres had been cut.
The man who wrote the thesis
The detail that makes this more than a story about a broken machine is who stopped it. John Garang, who led the SPLA from its formation until his death in 2005, was an agricultural economist by training. He took a doctorate at Iowa State University in 1981, and his dissertation was on rural development strategy in the Jonglei project area — the same swamp, the same scheme, examined by a southerner in the years the excavator was working. Two years later he was in the field commanding the movement whose fighters shut the site down. It is an unusually literal case of a country producing its own expertise about a project designed elsewhere, and then acting on it.
The argument comes back inverted
The Sudd is now a Ramsar wetland of international importance, designated in June 2006 and covering around 57,000 square kilometres, which makes it one of the largest sites on that list. It is also, on the evidence of an aerial survey announced in June 2024 by the wildlife ministry and African Parks, part of a landscape holding an estimated six million antelope — white-eared kob, tiang, Mongalla gazelle, bohor reedbuck — moving on an annual cycle described as the largest land mammal migration on earth. The canal line, as surveyed, runs across it.
And the water problem has reversed itself. Since about 2019, record levels in Lake Victoria have pushed far more water down the White Nile than the Sudd can hold; the wetland has expanded, and flooding through the early 2020s displaced hundreds of thousands of people across Unity and Jonglei, with Bentiu kept dry only by dykes that have to be rebuilt each year. The scheme was designed to remedy a shortage of water in Egypt and Sudan. The present emergency in the country the canal crosses is a surplus of it.
The proposal has been raised again more than once since the 2005 peace agreement, and it comes back each time with the same structure: a hydrological case made downstream, a political case that has to be made in Juba, and a population on the ground whose grazing calendar is the variable everyone else treats as an externality. Nothing about that arrangement has been settled. The trench is still there under the grass, the bank beside it still steers water where it was told to, and 120 kilometres short of the Sobat there is a very large machine rusting in the open, which is the most honest monument in the country to what happens when the engineering is finished before the politics is started.