The Nuba Mountains are a geological and cultural island. Isolated by surrounding plains from the Arab-dominated north, the Nuba peoples developed a mosaic of languages and customs - Heiban, Moro, Otoro, Koalib, Tira, and dozens more - that linguists classify across three different language families. Before Islam arrived in force, the mountains were a refuge for populations fleeing slave raids from the Sudanese plains. That history is not distant. As recently as the 19th century, Turkish-Egyptian and then Mahdist forces staged slaving expeditions into these hills. When the British imposed colonial order in the early 20th century, the Nuba kept their religions - Christianity, Indigenous traditions, some Islam - alongside their agricultural traditions and their terraced hillside farms. Kaduqli, the state capital, sits in the southern foothills at the junction of plain and mountain, a city of government offices, markets, and displacement camps depending on which decade you are looking at.

During Sudan's second civil war (1983-2005), many Nuba communities fought alongside the SPLA against the Khartoum government. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 was supposed to protect them; it established South Kordofan, along with Blue Nile and Abyei, as one of the "Three Areas" that would hold popular consultations to determine their constitutional future. When independence loomed for the south in 2011, Governor Ahmed Haroun - a man the International Criminal Court had already charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in Darfur - suspended the consultation process. On 6 June 2011, a month before South Sudan raised its flag, armed conflict broke out in the Nuba Mountains between Sudan's army and the SPLA-North. The war that many hoped had ended resumed, with Antonov bombers targeting villages, markets, and schools, and hundreds of thousands of Nuba civilians driven into caves in the hills or into refugee camps in South Sudan's Yida and Ajuong Thok.

South Kordofan's conflicts are not only vertical - between government and insurgents - but horizontal. In 2009 and 2010, a series of violent clashes between rival nomadic tribes, particularly the Misseriya and the Rizeigat, killed many and displaced thousands. These conflicts have roots in competition over pasture, water, and cattle-trading routes, stressed by climate change that is making the Sahel both drier and more unpredictable. Khartoum's long practice of arming certain nomadic groups as counterinsurgency proxies has also poisoned relationships that were, in previous generations, managed through customary law and seasonal negotiation. The farmers and the herders are real people with real economies, not just pieces on a political board, and many of them would like nothing more than to go back to arrangements that worked before outsiders decided to weaponize the differences between them.

South Kordofan is divided into twelve districts - Dilling, Rashad, Abu Jubaiyah, Talodi, Kadugli, Al Qoz, Habila, Reif Ashargi, Heiban, Umm Dorein, Al Buram, and El Abassiya. Its cities and towns include Ed Dubeibat, Mabsouta, and Um Dehilib. Oil has been discovered in the state - at one point it was thought to be the only oil-producing state in northern Sudan, though bigger finds followed in White Nile State. The ruins of colonial infrastructure, the mission schools that trained a generation of Nuba intellectuals, the independent churches where services are still conducted in Nuba languages - all of these persist, often precariously, amid the bombs and the displacement. The documentary film Eyes and Ears of God, and the tireless advocacy of activists like Abdelaziz Adam al-Hilu, have kept the Nuba struggle visible to outsiders. What the Nuba have kept visible to themselves is simpler: a stubborn insistence that their mountains are their own, that the languages spoken in them matter, and that no government in Khartoum has the right to decide otherwise.