From the air, Northern Bahr el Ghazal looks like a shallow green sea pierced by ribbons of river. The landscape is almost entirely grassland floodplain and tropical savanna - roughly 33,559 square kilometers of it, spilling over into Western Bahr el Ghazal and Warrap. Locals divide each county into low-, middle-, and highlands, though the state has no true highlands at all; the terms describe where the water reaches rather than how the ground rises. The lowlands flood every year from May through November, making whole swaths of the state unreachable by road for half the year. The Lol River slices across it all, a tributary of the Bahr al-Arab that flows in from Unity, westward through Warrap, and spills out into Western Bahr el Ghazal. In 2008, a flood in Aweil South County displaced 40,000 people. In 2010, floodwaters destroyed 70 percent of the livestock and crops in Aweil South and West. Water here giveth pastures and taketh entire livelihoods, sometimes in the same season.

Bahr el Ghazal's proximity to Kordofan and its single colonial railway to Wau made it one of the most politically sensitive regions in all of Sudan during the civil war from 1983 to 2005. Missriya Arab cattle herders from the north had long shared grazing and water points with the Dinka in relative peace during the colonial era. The war changed that. Khartoum armed the Missriya into murahileen militias and sent them south in waves that coincided with the government trains rolling toward Wau. Dinka villages were pillaged. Women and children were abducted into slavery - a word international reporting eventually had to use plainly, because there was no softer term for what was happening. The region ended the war with the highest poverty rate in South Sudan - 76 percent, by official statistics - and a generation of families whose relatives had been taken, whose cattle were gone, whose only wealth was the memory of what had been.

Dave Eggers' 2006 novel What Is the What carried the story of Northern Bahr el Ghazal into living rooms around the world, built on the testimony of Valentino Achak Deng, a Dinka Lost Boy who walked out of the war as a child. The book is just one thread of a much larger literature - Francis Deng's War of Visions, David Keen's Benefits of Famine, the Sudan Abduction and Slavery Project reports - that tried to make sense of what happened to the region. Aweil itself, the state capital, has grown into the commercial and administrative heart of a recovering society. Schools are reopening. Roads and bridges have been reconstructed since 2007, connecting all but one county headquarters by all-weather roads. The FAO in 2019 announced water infrastructure in Koum. Progress exists, measured in kilometers of gravel and functioning wells, even as the Human Development Index still ranks this the least-developed region on the planet.

Northern Bahr el Ghazal has also been drawn and redrawn by political decrees. In October 2015, President Salva Kiir split the original ten states of South Sudan into twenty-eight, dividing this region into Aweil, Aweil East, and a slice of Lol State. On 22 January 2020, as part of the peace agreement that ended South Sudan's civil war, the old ten states were restored. Tong Aken Ngor, who had been governor of Aweil State, was sworn in as governor of the re-established Northern Bahr el Ghazal. The borders on the map changed twice in five years. The Dinka families who live inside them had been continuous the whole time, keeping cattle, planting sorghum, raising children, tending the graves of those the railway had carried away.