Nobody Visits this Country - Find Out Why 🇸🇸

A short day in Juba, South Sudan, and the video Harry opens by calling the hardest experience of all his travels — because filming is illegal here without permits, and it stays difficult even with them.

He paid $1,000 for the paperwork, and still gets stopped, told off and warned off by strangers. His conclusion is not that people were hostile: everyone he met in the street was kind, and the problem is upstream of them.

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Key moments

• [00:00] Filming is completely illegal in the country, which is the premise of the whole video.
• [00:00] The youngest country in the world — independence in 2011, 13 years old at the time of filming. Part of Sudan under British and Egyptian rule before that, and separated because the peoples are distinct. He assigns the original fault to Britain.
• [00:32] Why it hasn’t gone well since: corruption, and a very large number of tribes, each with its own rules, which makes the country hard to govern.
• [01:05] Tribal conflict now involves guns, not sticks and arrows, which is what makes it one of the more dangerous countries in Africa.
• [01:05] Everyone is tall, which is the first thing he notices and keeps noticing.
• [01:43] He is with a bodyguard and a local, and says outright that this makes it a completely different experience from being alone.
• [01:43] UN vehicles and army convoys everywhere — thirty personnel in one truck convoy — none of which he can film.
• [01:43] The permits: $600 to film in the city and $400 to film with a tribe.
• [03:28] The fixer’s own explanation of the height: it’s tribal, and he is from a state where people are not tall.
• [03:28] Change money on the black market rate, not the official one — his words are that the online rate will get you screwed. $100 comes back as a brick, because the largest banknote is 1,000.
• [04:00] Kawaja, the word for a white person, which he is told he’ll hear shouted all day.
• [04:00] Life is getting worse, not better, and the cost of living is the thing people name first.
• [04:34] The oil problem, in one exchange: South Sudan has plenty of oil and cannot refine it, so it sells crude and buys it back refined at three or four times the price. Petrol is expensive in an oil country, and he says the line the whole page turns on — the people with the oil pay the most for the oil.
• [05:08] Tuk-tuks shipped from India, two months in transit, $4,000 each.
• [05:38] A driver winds down a tinted window to tell him he can’t film, while he is filming himself and holding a permit.
• [06:14] Water at 200 a container, carried on the head. He buys one, tries to carry it and can’t, and overpays deliberately.
• [06:48] Buying water from one seller produces a queue of sellers.
• [07:23] A local clay fridge — 25,000 — which keeps water cold with no power.
• [07:58] The women running the stall: one widowed, one whose husband left. They are 18 and 28.
• [08:29] The phone market, mostly used handsets, and his claim that he may be the first person to document it — because filming here is otherwise illegal.
• [08:59] A 6’5” trader on what life is like: not good, very expensive, hustling. Asked his dream, he says he wants to be successful.
• [09:32] A street shave, 2,000. A comb, scissors and half a mirror.
• [10:42] The blade used freehand, with no razor holder — the first time Harry has seen it done.
• [11:12] Ten shaves a day, and seven men working the same pitch.
• [11:49] Earnings of maybe 10,000 to 20,000 on a good day, split across the group, against $50 at around 75,000 (from video – unverified — the figures are garbled).
• [12:19] Why he gives money away on camera, explained unprompted: the sponsor money isn’t really his, and channel memberships fund the rest — so the more members, the more he hands out.
• [12:53] Stopped and told off, permits and all, because of the specific area he was filming in.
• [13:25] A football, 8,500 — about $5. He collects one from every country he visits.
• [13:59] The basketball team, which is what South Sudanese are proud of, and the running joke about his height.
• [14:31] The conclusion: filming here is extremely hard because creators are assumed to be spies or undercover journalists trying to damage the country’s reputation — a distrust he traces to the conflicts. The people in the street were extremely kind; the people in charge were not.

Extracted pages

• Country: South Sudan
• Place: Juba