Up from the Village

Born a Sudanese in the then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Peter Adwok Nyaba went to American Mission School at Dolieb Hill. From there he went to Rumbek Secondary School, then one of the two only secondary schools serving the three southern provinces. He studied in the University of Khartoum graduating with a BSc (Hons) in Geology. He worked briefl y as a field geologist in the Red Sea Hills, Eastern Sudan, before travelling to Leoben, Austria to participate in UNESCO sponsored course on Mining and Prospecting in the Developing countries. He joined the College of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies in the University of Juba before preceding to undertake postgraduate studies at the Eőtvős Loránd technical University, Budapest, Hungary leading to PhD awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He then taught in Juba and Asmara University. He was a trade unionist, a civil society activist, a revolutionary combatant in the SPLM/A, former member of the SPLM National Liberation Council, Secretary for Mining in the SPLM National Executive Committee. After the war, he represented Upper Nile State for the SPLM in the Council of States in the National Legislature, and became Minister of Higher Education and Scientifi c Research, Government of National Unity, Khartoum. He was then appointed Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology in the first government of independent Republic of South Sudan. Peter Adwok Nyaba is the author of The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider's View, Fountain Publishers, Kampala (1997), a Noma Award winning title for publishing in Africa (1998). He has since authored South Sudan: The State we Aspire to (2010), South Sudan: The crisis of Infancy (2014) and South Sudan: Elites, Ethnicity, Endless Wars and the Stunted State (2019). This autobiography sums up a life spent in the struggle for public good.