South Sudan

Harry spends a day in Juba and opens the video by calling it the hardest experience of all his travels — not because of danger, but because filming is illegal here and stays difficult even once you have paid for permission.

The state of the country

• Independence in 2011, making it the youngest country in the world. It was part of Sudan under British and Egyptian rule, and separated because the peoples are distinct; Harry puts the origin of the problem on Britain.
• Very many tribes, each with its own rules, which he gives as the reason the government struggles to govern.
• Tribal conflict is now fought with guns rather than sticks and arrows, which is what makes it one of the more dangerous countries in Africa.
• A heavy international and military presence — UN vehicles everywhere, army convoys — none of which can be filmed.
• Life is getting worse, not better. The cost of living is what people raise first, unprompted.

The oil paradox

The most quotable exchange in the video, and the country’s economics in one answer:

• South Sudan has plenty of oil and cannot refine it.
• It sells crude and buys it back refined at three or four times the price — the machinery isn’t there.
• Petrol is therefore expensive in an oil country. Harry’s line: the people with the oil pay the most for the oil.

Practical

• Filming requires permits, and they are not cheap: $600 for the city and $400 to film with a tribe. He paid $1,000 in total and was still stopped, told off, and warned off by a passing driver.
• Why: creators are assumed to be spies or undercover journalists out to damage the country’s reputation — a distrust he attributes to the wars rather than to individuals.
• Change money at the black market rate. Using the official rate, in his words, will get you screwed.
• The largest banknote is 1,000, so $100 arrives as a brick of cash.
• Kawaja is the word for a white person, and he is told in advance that he will hear it all day.
• He travelled with a bodyguard and a local, and is explicit that this made it a completely different trip from doing it alone.
• Imported goods carry the distance in their price: a tuk-tuk shipped from India takes two months and costs $4,000.

Harry’s verdict

Split cleanly in two, and he says so in the last thirty seconds: the people he met in the street were extremely kind, and the people in charge were not helpful. He hopes that the video is eventually seen as evidence of the first half.

Source

• Nobody Visits this Country - Find Out Why 🇸🇸 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsTJ7XYw0g0