The region borders the Central African Republic to the west. Its defining terrain features are the swamps - where the tributaries of the Nile spread out before gathering again in the Sudd - and the ironstone plateaus, raised lateritic shelves that offer the only dry land in many landscapes. The primary inhabitants are the Dinka, who make their living through subsistence farming and cattle herding, alongside Luwo and Fartit communities. The region today is divided into four states - Lakes, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Warrap, and Western Bahr el Ghazal - plus the disputed Abyei Area. Between October 2015 and January 2020, a more fragmented arrangement replaced this, dividing the region into ten states named for the landscapes and peoples within: Eastern Lakes, Gok, Western Lakes, Aweil East, Aweil, Tonj, Twic, Lol, Wau, and Gogrial. The 2020 reversion to four states is itself probably not permanent.

The region has long been subject to raids from the Fur peoples of the neighbouring region of Darfur. In 1864, the khedive of Egypt made Bahr el Ghazal his province - or claimed to. Powerful native merchants, whom the Egyptian administration struggled to control, set themselves up as princes with private armies. The most powerful, al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, defeated a joint Turkish-Egyptian force sent against him in 1873. The khedive, conceding defeat, made al-Zubayr his governor. In 1884, with the Mahdist uprising sweeping across Sudan, Karam Allah Muhammad Kurkusawi was appointed governor under the new religious-military state. Successive outsiders - Egyptian, Mahdist, British, Sudanese - tried to administer the Bahr el Ghazal. Each found that the land itself, and the people who knew it, set the terms of the attempt.

In 1929, the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard visited the region. His subsequent work on the Nuer would become a founding text of modern social anthropology - though the Nuer heartland lies east of here in Upper Nile, and his time in Bahr el Ghazal was part of a broader survey. During the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, the region was administered by British district officers. Because of the annual flooding and the difficult travel conditions, colloquial Sudan Service usage called the area The Bog, and the officers Bog Barons. The label was affectionate in the way colonial labels often were - which is to say, not very. In 1948, Bahr el Ghazal was split from Equatoria and became the ninth province. In 1996, it was divided into four districts in another round of administrative surgery.

The First Sudanese Civil War fought across this region from 1955 to 1972. In 1982, the Sudan People's Liberation Army was formed here by John Garang, a Dinka from Bor, to fight the Khartoum government's dominance of the south. What followed became known as the Second Sudanese Civil War - a conflict that lasted until 2005 and killed more than two million people. A substantial fraction of the population of Bahr el Ghazal became internally displaced or refugees in neighbouring countries. Famine walked with the war; the 1998 famine in the region killed tens of thousands. The Dinka who survived did so largely by the pastoral skills that had always kept them through hard seasons, and by the international emergency aid that, however late and however inadequate, eventually arrived.

In 2011, the newly independent South Sudanese government approved legislation for a planned city at Ramciel, in Lakes State, to serve as the new national capital - shifting power away from Juba, deep in Equatoria. A decade and a half later, Ramciel remains an idea and a parcel of land. Whether South Sudan ever builds it depends on futures the country can barely afford to imagine. Meanwhile, the Bahr el Ghazal continues in its older rhythms. The rains come. The rivers rise. The cattle move to higher ground. The Dinka homesteads hold their places on the ironstone, and the Sea of Gazelles spreads out around them, briefly, every year.