In the 1870s and early 1880s, before the Mahdist revolt reshaped everything, Liffi was a substantial Egyptian government station. The Italian explorer Romolo Gessi, writing in his journals, described Liffi as a large center with officials, granaries, and other infrastructure. An account from 1880 put the garrison at 25 regular soldiers and 150 irregulars. The country around was densely populated. Frank Lupton, Gessi's successor as governor of the Bahr el Ghazal, in his 1884 Geographical Observations placed Liffi between the Lugu and Boru rivers, on the main caravan route running north from Deim Zubeir toward the Mahdist territories. The station sat on a trade road that had been carrying ivory and (earlier) enslaved people northward for generations. The Egyptian flag that flew over it represented a regime that had inherited and intensified those trades, and the soldiers who manned it were a mix of Egyptian officers and African conscripts.

On August 18, 1882, members of the Dinka under Sheikh Jango rebelled at Liffi against the Egyptian government. This was the first outbreak of Mahdism in the province of Bahr el Ghazal. They attacked Lupton's bashi-bazouks (irregular soldiers), took the station, and held it until Lupton advanced from Deim Zubeir with 600 men and defeated Jango in a bloody battle at Jabal Telgona. Jango returned in early 1883 with reinforcements provided by the emir Madibbo. On February 1, 1883, Lupton's chief officer Ruffai Agha fought off another attack. By September 1883, Ruffai had been killed along with most of his men. The Dinka uprising spread. The road to Meshra el Rek and the north was blocked. Lupton retreated to Deim Zubeir, and within a year Bahr el Ghazal had fallen to the Mahdists entirely. The Dinka who rose at Liffi were rebelling against a government that had enslaved their neighbors and extracted their taxes for a generation. The Mahdist movement that absorbed their rebellion turned out, in time, to be another kind of oppressor.

A decade later, in June 1894, a Belgian force under Xavier-Ernest Donckier de Donceel marched into Liffi from the southwest. He was part of the Congo Free State's northward expansion, and his job was to establish a toehold before the French got there. On September 9, 1894, he raised the Belgian flag on the 400-meter Mount Den Darh near Liffi. His men were short of food, harassed by the local population trying to seize their stores, and threatened by Mahdist forces regrouping in the north. On December 9, 1894, word reached Donckier that Belgium had ceded all territory north of the Mbomu River to France. He and his men withdrew by early 1895, leaving the region to a French administration that would not effectively occupy it for years. The Belgian flag flew for three months. The Togoyo elders, presumably, noted that another foreign force had come and gone.

Today Liffi is a name on a few maps and in a handful of academic papers. It sits in Raga County, Western Bahr el Ghazal State, in a corner of South Sudan that is lightly administered and rarely visited. A 1955 article noted that Liffi post had once been in Togoyo land but was by then in Feroge land, a small way of recording how the territory of one people can close up and be replaced by another's as populations shrink and shift. The metamorphic cone is still there. The goat sacrifices, if they still happen, happen without announcement. What is worth holding in mind as you fly over this empty-looking country is that it has not always been empty. The Togoyo lived here in what they remembered as a golden age. Their descendants, if any remain as an identifiable community, live with the knowledge that the golden age ended badly for reasons that had very little to do with them.