Count the times Mayom has changed hands, and the arithmetic gets tiring. In September 1988 Riek Machar's SPLA forces captured it. Early in 1989 Paulino Matiep, working with a young Sudanese officer named Omar al-Bashir who was about to seize power in Khartoum, took it back. In September 1999 Peter Gadet Yak shelled the town, causing mass displacement. In December 2013 the Nuer White Army seized Mayom from a government that had just lost Juba to itself. In July 2022 rebels killed the county commissioner Chuol Gatluak Manime and his bodyguards inside his own office before withdrawing. In June 2025 the South Sudanese army recaptured the town yet again. Before any of these armies arrived, Mayom was a cattle trading center. When the armies eventually all go somewhere else, the cattle trading will resume, because the families who live here have been moving cattle across this country for longer than any of the armies have existed.
Mayom sits in Mayom County, Unity State, west of Bentiu. In peacetime, the surrounding area is sparsely populated by nomadic Bul Nuer herders (about one person per square mile) and the town served as a major cattle trading center for the western reaches of what was then called Upper Nile. The geography that makes it valuable is also what makes it vulnerable: flat grassland open to cavalry, open to air attack, and crucially positioned over oil infrastructure. Mayom lies in the Block 4 oil concession, to the south of the Kaikang oilfield. For the Bul Nuer who traded here, none of that geology mattered much until the wider world noticed it. When the wider world did notice, beginning in the late 1970s, the cattle market of Mayom became a strategic town.
During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), Paulino Matiep Nhial established himself as an Anyanya II leader in what was then called Western Upper Nile, supported by Khartoum against the SPLA. Based at Mayom, he held a strategic position blocking SPLA forces in Bahr el Ghazal from moving east toward the oilfields. This was a game of proxy armies: the Sudanese government used militias like Matiep's so that it did not have to commit its own overstretched forces. Riek Machar's SPLA seized Mayom in September 1988. Matiep, with support from Omar al-Bashir (then an army officer, soon to lead a coup and become president of Sudan), retook the town early in 1989. A 1993 report on refugees fleeing Mayom northward described people being robbed of their last belongings by Arab militias. One man was killed for trying to hold onto roughly US$200. By 2000, outside observers were calling Mayom 'a decimated village within the Talisman oil concession,' referring to the Canadian oil company then operating in the region, and the Sudanese government was refusing to permit humanitarian aid flights to land.
On April 11, 2011, three months before South Sudan's independence, Major General Peter Gadet Yak issued his Mayom Declaration from this town. He denounced Juba's leadership and styled himself the commander of a new South Sudan Liberation Army. The declaration was dismissed by the SPLA as void, but the violence it triggered was not. On December 29, 2013, during the early weeks of the Second South Sudanese Civil War, Nuer White Army militiamen seized Mayom from the government of President Salva Kiir, which had just collapsed into an ethnic-political feud with its own Vice President. Fighting in and around the town continued through the peace agreements of 2015 and 2018, through their partial collapse, and on into the revitalized peace process.
On July 22, 2022, forces of the SSPM/A (South Sudan People's Movement/Army) attacked Mayom, killed County Commissioner Chuol Gatluak Manime and his bodyguards, burned the commissioner's office, and then withdrew to nearby villages. On June 30, 2025, South Sudanese government forces recaptured the town after another period of rebel control. Each recapture is a press release in Juba, a line in a UN report, and for the Bul Nuer families who live here, a question about whether this is the year the cattle can move back onto the seasonal pastures. Mayom has been a market town, a battle objective, a propaganda backdrop, and a refugee departure point. Its people have been all those things too, but they have also, throughout, been the ones keeping the place standing. They build, they get burned out, they come back. They know where the good dry-season water is. They know which bend of which dry creek gives shade in April when the temperatures climb. The place has a continuity that the armies on its maps do not.
Mayom town is at 9.22°N, 29.17°E in Unity State, South Sudan. The town has a basic airstrip used primarily for humanitarian flights. Bentiu Rubkona Airport (HSBT) about 130 km east is the nearest paved airport. Terrain is flat savannah with scattered seasonal water; the Bahr el Ghazal wetlands lie to the east. Oilfield infrastructure is scattered through the region; gas flares may be visible at night. Security conditions change rapidly; check current NOTAMs and local advisories. Wet season (July-October) flooding can make surface travel impossible.