Most people in Unity are agro-pastoralists, which is a way of saying that life moves with the rain. When the wet season arrives, the families plant sorghum and maize on the higher ground. When the dry months come, the herders follow the water with their cattle, tracing routes their grandparents traced before them. The toich - the seasonal floodplains along the rivers - turn to lush pasture in the dry months and to vast shallow lakes in the wet ones. Bentiu, the state capital, sits near the Bahr el-Ghazal River's junction with the Nile system. From the air you see the geometry of cattle camps scattered across the green, smoke rising from small fires lit each evening to keep mosquitoes off the animals the people depend on.

Southern Sudan's first oil reserves were discovered here in the 1970s, beneath the same grasslands where the herders grazed their cattle. The Unity oilfield sits within the largest hydrocarbon accumulation in the Muglad rift basin and holds an estimated 150 million barrels. The Greater Nile Oil Pipeline begins in these fields and runs north across the border to Port Sudan. Oil changed everything. The international companies that came to drill contributed, according to Human Rights Watch reports from the 1990s and early 2000s, to the massive displacement of indigenous Nuer and Dinka communities. Villages were cleared to make way for infrastructure. The wealth flowed out; the grievance stayed behind.

Unity divides administratively into seven counties - Guit, Koch, Leer, Mayiandit, Mayom, Panyijar, and Rubkona - but it has always divided more sharply by ethnicity. The Nuer are the majority; the Dinka are the minority, though both have deep roots in this land. The distinction mattered less when decisions were made by the spear-masters and the cattle-camp leaders. It mattered enormously when President Salva Kiir's 2015 decree briefly split Unity into three smaller states, drawing lines that felt to many residents like ethnic enclaves. The 2020 peace agreement restored Unity, but with a smaller footprint - the northern region split off as the Ruweng Administrative Area.

Unity has been reorganized more often than most people have moved house. Before 1994 it was part of a much larger Upper Nile province. Then it became its own state. Then in 2015 it was three states - Ruweng, Northern Liech, Southern Liech - carved along lines the Nuer and Dinka read immediately as political. Then in 2020, it was Unity again, smaller. The people on the ground - the herders in Mayom, the market traders in Rubkona, the farmers in Panyijar - have lived through all these configurations while also living through civil war, famine, and the wider collapse of South Sudan's peace. They continue. Cattle still go to the toich in the dry season. Sorghum still gets planted when the rains come.

From cruising altitude the state reveals itself as a mosaic of greens and browns, cut by the slow meanders of the White Nile and its tributaries. In the wet season the lowlands glitter with standing water. In the dry season the grasslands brown and smoke from controlled burns lifts into the haze. The Unity oilfield shows itself by its access roads - straight cuts through otherwise organic terrain - and by the flares that burn off natural gas, visible at night from distance. Bentiu sits at the crossroads where the river and the road meet, a town that has been destroyed and rebuilt more times than its population can easily count.