It is a strange thing to promise a university to a town that has just emerged from two decades of civil war, but that is exactly what Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir did in February 2006, when he visited Rumbek and pledged to build one. Four years later, in 2010, Rumbek University opened its doors - not yet on its own campus, but in borrowed classrooms at Rumbek Secondary School, with 500 students and 40 academic faculties. A year after that, South Sudan was independent, and the university found itself the responsibility of a brand-new country that had almost nothing in the way of tertiary education and a population hungry for it.
Rumbek University's temporary home is the Rumbek Secondary School compound, in the town of Rumbek - whose estimated population in 2008 was 32,100. The town sits in Rumbek Central County, Lakes State, in central South Sudan, about 377 kilometers by road northwest of Juba. The UNICEF compound is nearby. The actual permanent campus is under construction in Abinajok, a suburb of Rumbek - a project that, like many development projects in South Sudan, has moved more slowly than anyone hoped. Students attend lectures in buildings that were never designed for university use. Faculty improvise labs and libraries. The campus-to-be, meanwhile, waits.
The idea of Rumbek University was adopted during the fragile window of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the 2005 deal that ended the Second Sudanese Civil War. Al-Bashir's pledge in 2006 was a political gesture as much as an educational one - part of the elaborate dance of cooperation and distrust between Khartoum and the semi-autonomous South. The project was approved at the federal level in Khartoum and at the regional level in Juba, and the university was established in 2010 as a joint federal-southern project. A year later, in July 2011, South Sudan became independent, and Rumbek University became a fully South Sudanese public institution - one of only five public universities in the entire country, alongside Juba National University (founded 1977), Upper Nile University in Malakal (1991), the University of Bahr El-Ghazal in Wau, and the University of Northern Bahr El-Ghazal in Aweil (2011).
The university maintains five colleges: Education, Economic and Social Studies, Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, and Rural Development and Community Studies. The focus is practical - training teachers who can staff the country's still-thin school system, agronomists and veterinarians who can improve the food security of the cattle economy, and community-development specialists who can help villages recover from decades of displacement. Students arrive with wildly varying academic backgrounds; many have been through schools disrupted by war, refugee camps in Uganda or Kenya, or resettlement programs abroad that brought them back to a country they barely remember. What they share is the determination to be the first generation of South Sudanese professionals trained entirely inside their own country. That is a responsibility worth more than any campus building can hold.
Rumbek itself is a Dinka-majority town at the center of Lakes State, a region that has had its own security challenges since independence - intercommunal cattle raids, localized violence, and the ripples of the larger civil war. A university in such a place is a bet on a different future, one in which disputes are settled in lecture halls rather than cattle camps, and in which the ambitions of young people are met with institutions rather than with checkpoints. The Government of South Sudan allocated five million US dollars to Rumbek University early on, and the Abinajok campus remains on the drawing board and, slowly, the ground. For now, the university operates out of buildings borrowed from a secondary school, a transitional arrangement that has lasted for over fifteen years. That is not a failure. That is what it looks like, in this country, to build something permanent while everything else is still moving.
Coordinates 6.80°N, 29.69°E in Rumbek Central County, Lakes State. Rumbek Airport (HSMK) provides regional air service; weekly flights to Khartoum have been historic though current schedules vary. Town of Rumbek is approximately 377 km northwest of Juba International (HSSJ) by road. Permanent Abinajok campus under construction nearby. Recommended viewing altitude FL150-FL200 to capture both the town core and the surrounding cattle country.