| Summary/Abstract |
South Sudan, composed originally of 10 states populated by more than 12 million inhabitants of numerous ethnicities and languages and practicing mostly an animist or Christian faith, received its independence from predominantly Arab and Sunni Muslim Sudan on July 9, 2011, becoming the fifty‐fourth sovereign country in Africa. Following decades of conflict and a referendum, it is only one of two political entities on the continent that has successfully seceded from another country and been universally recognized as a sovereign state (Eritrea being the other) since the period of European decolonization (Ghana in 1957 to Zimbabwe in 1980) and Namibia's independence from Apartheid South Africa in 1990.1 However, despite sizable oil deposits and other natural resources as well as fertile land, South Sudan's population suffers from a lack of education and health care as well as food shortages and extreme poverty.
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