Bishop Joseph Mamer Manot, currently serving the Diocese of Wanjok in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, will speak at the Cumberland Presbyterian Center on the status of Christianity in the world’s newest country on Thursday, January 12, 2023, at 2:30 PM. Bishop Manot is in the Memphis area as a guest of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Germantown (Presbytery for the Mid-South).

The Republic of South Sudan is a landlocked country in East Africa bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Kenya. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011. Sudan was occupied by Egypt under the Muhammad Ali Pasha dynasty. It was governed as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium until Sudanese independence in 1956. Colonial rule had generally prevented widespread ethnic violence.

The First Sudanese Civil War broke out almost immediately after independence. The Southern Sudan Autonomous Region was formed in 1972, after the civil war, and lasted until 1983. A second Sudanese civil war broke out in 1983 and ended in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Later that year, southern autonomy was restored when an Autonomous Government of Southern Sudan was formed.

Since independence in 2011, South Sudan has suffered ethnic violence and endured a civil war characterized by rampant human rights abuses, including various ethnic massacres and killings of journalists by various parties to the conflict from December 2013 until February 2020, when competing combat leaders Salva Kiir Mayardit and Riek Machar struck a unity deal and formed a coalition government, paving the way for refugees to return home.