Emmanuel Jal was seven years old, or maybe eight (nobody kept records), when soldiers took him from Leer to carry a rifle heavier than he was. That was the late 1980s, during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Decades later, after he had become one of Africa's best-known hip-hop artists and written his autobiography, Jal returned to the town of his childhood and started building a school. It sits today in a place that has been repeatedly destroyed, most recently during the horrors that consumed Leer County from 2013 onward. Classes are often held under trees because the four classrooms cannot hold the two thousand children who show up. The children still show up. This is what holds the town together: not victory over the wars that keep arriving, but the small, stubborn business of teaching children to read while the world around them is rebuilt yet again.
Leer sits in Dok Nuer country, in what was briefly Southern Liech State and is now again Unity State. By South Sudanese standards, Leer County is densely populated, a fact that has shaped everything that happened there. It also sits near oil concessions, which has shaped the rest. The Dok are one of several Nuer subgroups who have lived in these grasslands for centuries, organized around cattle camps, age-sets, and an oral tradition of prophets whose words carry across generations. Naath FM, the county's only community radio station, broadcasts in the Nuer language; naath is the Nuer word for themselves, meaning simply 'the people.' When the station went on air in 2009, it was the first time most of the county could hear news reported by someone who understood their own lives.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 let refugees trickle back to Leer. For a few years the town stabilized. Médecins Sans Frontières ran a large hospital with 150 national staff, offering surgery, maternity care, tuberculosis treatment, and therapeutic feeding programs. A woman selling milk in the market in 2010 reported earning seven US dollars a day, enough to feed her family in a cattle camp 30 kilometers out. Then in December 2013 the Second South Sudanese Civil War began, triggered by a political rupture in Juba between President Salva Kiir and his Vice President, Riek Machar. Leer is Machar's home village. In 2014, 2015, and again in 2022, government-aligned forces overran Leer, burned parts of it, destroyed the hospital, and killed civilians. The reports from survivors are unsparing: villages razed, women raped in organized campaigns of terror, boys forcibly conscripted, entire communities driven into the swamps to hide for months on minimal food. The dead have names that rarely make it into international press releases.
Emmanuel Jal's story is not the only one from Leer, but it is the one the world outside knows. Taken as a child soldier by the SPLA in the 1980s, he was smuggled out to Kenya by a British aid worker named Emma McCune (who also married Machar and died young in a car accident in Nairobi in 1993). Jal learned to rap in Nairobi's slums. His song 'War Child' became an anthem for former child soldiers across Africa. His charity, GUA Africa, funded the Emma Academy in Leer and has now committed to building five new classrooms for Leer Primary School, which was opened in 1962 and today teaches most of its 2,000 children under trees. Jal's trajectory, from rifle-carrying child to international musician to school-builder, is an unlikely arc, but it is also, in a specific way, the arc the people of Leer have been making collectively for forty years: always rebuilding, always from less than before.
The researcher and journalist Nick Turse called this part of South Sudan 'the perpetual killing field' in a 2016 dispatch, and the description has not aged. Riek Machar, born here, served as Vice President of South Sudan until his arrest in March 2025 and subsequent suspension from office — a reminder that the national unity government's future remains profoundly uncertain. His hometown is still rebuilding, as it has been rebuilding for decades. From the air, Leer looks like a small town among others: grass-roofed compounds, the pale lines of tracks, the tight green of mango trees where water has pooled. The camera misses the history. It misses the mothers who still walk to Naath FM to tell the stories nobody else will broadcast. It misses the two thousand children who show up each morning at a primary school with four rooms and not enough teachers. What the town has is not a monument. It is a record of showing up again, after the burning.
Leer is at 8.30°N, 30.14°E in Unity State. Nearest paved airport is Bentiu Rubkona Airport (HSBT) about 100 km north. Leer has a grass airstrip used by humanitarian flights. At cruise altitude in clear weather the town appears as a small cluster on flat grassland, with the Sudd wetlands to the east. Much of the surrounding countryside seasonally floods, creating braided wet patterns from July-October. Dry-season haze is common.