Qualla: Imatong Mountains

Imatong Mountains: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rise high enough above the savanna of southern South Sudan and the world changes. The grass and thornscrub fall away, and crystalline rock heaves upward into the Imatong Mountains, green with forest, cool with rain, crowned by Mount Kinyeti at 3,187 metres, the highest point in the country. These peaks are an island. For thousands of years dense montane forest here stayed cut off from other forests by a sea of dry savanna, and in that isolation life went its own way. The Imatongs hold hundreds of plant species found nowhere else in South Sudan, and animals that have drifted, over the ages, into forms slightly their own. It is a place of rare biological wealth, and of recent, brutal history.

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Imatong Mountains: An Island of Forest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The mountains sit at a crossroads of three botanical worlds, the West African rainforest, the Ethiopian highlands, and the East African ranges, and they have borrowed from all of them. Climb through the zones and the forest changes with the altitude. Lowland woodland of Albizia a...

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Imatong Mountains: What Lives in the Heights

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A 1984 survey found the slopes alive: colobus and blue monkeys in the canopy, bush-pig in the undergrowth, a bushbuck subspecies unique to the range. In the least-disturbed uplands to the south-east, the ones hunters reached last, elephant, buffalo, leopard, hyena, and duiker sti...

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Imatong Mountains: The Years of the Gun

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Remoteness that protected the wildlife also drew war. During the Second Sudanese Civil War, the Imatong Mountains became a haven for the Lord's Resistance Army, the brutal rebel force that, from 1986, raided and looted villages along the Sudan-Uganda border. South Sudan's own reb...

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Imatong Mountains: A Forest Worn Thin

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Imatongs are also a slow-motion lesson in loss. From the 1940s the British colonial administration cleared native forest in the Kinyeti basin to plant fast-growing softwoods for timber, and the project pulled labourers into the hills who began farming the slopes. A 1952 fores...

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