Mutiny at Torit and the Anyanya Insurgency

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sudan's first postcolonial civil war began in August 1955, months before formal independence, when southern soldiers of the Equatoria Corps mutinied at Torit over fears of continued northern domination once the British colonial administration left. It grew into a guerrilla insurgency led by the southern Anyanya movement, an initially loose coalition of former Equatoria Corps soldiers and southern political exiles that gained covert regional and Israeli material support as the war lengthened, against the Arab-Muslim dominated government seated in Khartoum.

General Ibrahim Abboud's military government, in power from 1958 to 1964, pursued Arabization and Islamization policies, including mandatory Arabic instruction and the March 1964 expulsion of foreign Christian missionaries from the south, that deepened southern resistance rather than settling it. The war ended with the March 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, brokered with World Council of Churches and All Africa Conference of Churches mediation, which granted southern Sudan its own Southern Regional Government with genuine regional autonomy.