At independence South Sudan had almost no paved highways outside the capital. Rainy-season mud could strand entire towns for months. A 600-kilometer journey that would take eight hours in Kenya could take three days here, or three weeks, or prove impossible. Every sack of sorghum, every vaccine shipment, every generator and schoolbook had to cross earth that became soup in April and concrete in January. The Juba–Terekeka–Rumbek road was one of the first major infrastructure commitments of the new state, a line drawn northwestward from the capital through the town of Terekeka on the Nile's western bank, then angling further west through Tindalo and Yirol until it reached Rumbek, capital of Lakes State and one of the country's most important inland cities.

The first contract was signed in 2014 with Shandong Hi-Speed Group at a price of 711 million US dollars, but the 2016 outbreak of fighting in Juba froze the project almost immediately. Workers fled. The earthmovers sat idle. In 2018, with the country's second civil war dragging on, Exim Bank of China restructured the whole arrangement: a $1.3 billion loan secured against oil, with the bank itself paying the contractor directly so that money never touched a South Sudanese ministry. The first crude shipments left Port Sudan in May 2019. Construction resumed that October. To class II bitumen standard, the road now carries drainage channels, culverts, shoulders, bridges over seasonal streams. In a country where the cost of moving goods consumes much of their value, every kilometer of smooth surface translates directly into cheaper food, faster medicine, and towns that can receive visitors from outside their county.

A spur of this highway is meant to lead somewhere strange: Ramciel, in Lakes State, which South Sudanese authorities have designated as the future national capital. Juba, they argue, is too far south, too close to Uganda, too cramped on the banks of the White Nile. Ramciel is closer to the country's geographic center, a place chosen partly for symbolism and partly for drainage. The planned city does not exist yet. There are no embassies, no ministries, no housing. But the road is already being laid toward it, another act of anticipation in a country that has spent most of its history being anticipated rather than built.

The route passes through country that most outsiders will never see. Terekeka, 75 kilometers north of Juba, is heartland of the Mundari, whose tall Ankole-Watusi cattle are among the most photographed in Africa and whose riverside cattle camps glow at night with dung-fire smoke. Further north, the road crosses into Dinka country, where cattle are currency, marriage dowry, and the center of a pastoral culture older than any state. The bitumen cuts across their migration routes, joining places that until recently were connected only by footpaths and the memory of trade. Whether the road finally opens South Sudan to itself, or simply opens it to oil companies and outside buyers, is a question the communities along it will answer in the next generation. For now they watch the pavement creep northwest, kilometer by kilometer, barrel by barrel.