Juba
— — the youngest capital on the river.
Not only on a wall.
“Juba sits on the west bank of the White Nile, where the river slows after the last cataracts and broadens into the long run north toward Khartoum. It became the capital of the world's youngest country in July 2011. The skyline is low: tin roofs, the white drum of All Saints Cathedral, the granite hump of Jebel Kujur rising west of town. The Nile here runs the colour of clay and carries water lilies down past the port. — from the studio
Juba, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Juba is the capital of South Sudan and the seat of Central Equatoria state, on the west bank of the White Nile at about five hundred fifty metres elevation. The population is estimated at around five hundred thousand, though wartime displacement and seasonal movement make a firm count difficult. The town was first settled in the early twentieth century by Greek traders, grew under the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan administration through the 1920s, and became a regional capital after the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement. It became a sovereign national capital on 9 July 2011, when South Sudan declared independence after a referendum.
The White Nile, called the Bahr al-Jabal in this stretch, runs north past Juba on its way to meet the Blue Nile at Khartoum some seventeen hundred kilometres downstream. The river here is broad and slow, the last cataracts upstream at Bedden and Fula breaking the rocky run from Lake Albert. Water hyacinth drifts past the port in long mats. The Juba Bridge, a 1972 single-span steel arch, was the only road crossing of the Nile in the south for forty years; the Freedom Bridge, opened in 2022, now carries the heavier traffic.
Juba has two seasons. The dry season runs from December through March, with daytime temperatures often above thirty-six Celsius and the Nile dropping by a metre or more along the banks. The wet season runs April through November, peaking in August, with afternoon thunderstorms over the savanna and Jebel Kujur, the granite hill west of town, briefly green. The annual rainfall averages about nine hundred fifty millimetres, almost all of it between May and October. The harmattan wind, dust-bearing from the Sahel, can reach this far south in January and turn the air the colour of bone.