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Shannon Jensen / AP
A man holds South Sudanese flags as he prepares to dance at the country's anniversary celebrations at the John Garang mausoleum in Juba on July 9, 2012.
Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters
Boys wash a tractor in the Pibor river in Pibor on June 24, 2012. All pictures made available to msnbc.com on July 9, 2012.
Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters
Children sing and dance on a Sunday morning at the Presbyterian Church of South Sudan in Pibor on June 24, 2012.
Reuters reports — South Sudanese celebrating their nation's first birthday on Monday will bask in the pride of their hard-won political freedom, but many may ask when they will enjoy the material benefits promised by the government of former rebels.
Paula Bronstein / Getty Images
South Sudan's first president, Salva Kiir, stands after placing flowers at the mausoleum for Dr. John Garang during a ceremony celebrating the first anniversary of South Sudan's independence day on July 9, 2012 in Juba.
'Free at last': South Sudan is world's newest nation
South Sudan split from Sudan after a civil war that killed some 2 million people over two decades, becoming the world's newest nation. But the jubilation that saturated the ramshackle capital last year has dimmed.
Slideshow: South Sudan declares independence
"We have waited for the flower of freedom," student Pater Achuil said as he sat in an unfinished building near Juba airport, shards of concrete poking through the capital's skyline behind him. Read the full story.
More images from South Sudan on PhotoBlog
Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters
A boy sets up his shop at a market in Pibor on June 23, 2012.
Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters
A boy works in the corner of a classroom at Pibor Primary School in Pibor on June 25, 2012.
Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters
Cows are seen tied behind a house at sunset in Pibor on June 21, 2012.
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we should look around us ,to be thankful of what we have
This is the face of poverty. Real poverty does not have air conditioning, cel phones and HDTVs.
The founding of a nation, the uniting of an ethnic group, the attainment of religious and cultural freedom in your own country...these are all beautiful things. It's people like the South Sudanese that should receive God's blessings from the rich nations of the world. The Arab swine who cry for an independent Palestine have been giving up their opportunities for over 60 years with their unwinable wars, terrorist attacks, and failure to use their resources for their own good. They have partnered with other Muslim terrorists in a jihad against Israel, the most successful nation in the Middle East, to their own economic detriment. Watch to see how Israel helps South Sudan even though it's a Muslim nation.
Kountryking; though i agree with most of your post, South Sudan is not a Muslim country,it is a christian country. The Muslims live in the north, they used to both live in the north ,side by side,but the Muslims kept killing the Christians and driving them south. They finally had enough ,grabbed their own guns ,fought back and created their own country where they can pray and live in peace. I hope Israel and many other nations will help them get started and prosper, good luck my Christian Sundanese brothers, may God be with you.
I wish them well, I hope that they remain stable and somehow achieve some level of prosperity. I see cronic and abject poverty at every turn and that creates resentment, I hope that peace stands a chance for a change in a tiny pocket of Africa.
See the sacrifices Christians had to make for freedom.
Muslim dominated Sudan had been attacking S. Sudan's oil rich regions and many in those regions had to run as refugees!
When most don't care for religion much these days, followers of Islamic cult, especially Sunni Saudi inspired Islamic radicals and militants (al-Qaida, Salaffi, Wahhabi, MB and other label ones), are fast marching backwards to their seventh century desert tribal days of rapings, lootings, killings and genocides of non-Muslims.
We see Muslims inventing problems in most of the non-Muslim nations.
When Muslims form more than five percent, downhill march starts.
When they form more than 30 percent then it is Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Lebanon (few decades back)
In Muslim majority nations, they kill each other! Look at Syria. In Egypt troubles are starting!
Better wake up before it is too late on inventions of problems by followers of Islamic cult!
As an African and as an aetheist, both muslim and christian religions can go some place...they don't belong anywhere in Africa.
Throughout centuries, we have seen many tragedies in Africa, all perpetuated in the name of religion or sanctioned by the leading doctrine, christianity and islam alike.
Slave trade: Muslims/Arabs and Christians/Europeans. I know most of you will brush this off as so long ago, but all those who say that are whites, never heard of a black person dismissing the slave trade as out of date.
Apartheid: White minority supported by the bulk of western democracies! Supported by the church while branding the ANC and Mandela as terrorists! So much so, that Mandela was only recently removed from the FBI's list of terrorists.
Sudan: Muslims wanting to enslave blacks by using their backward religious beliefs...See what's happening in Dafur?
What I say is this: Religion, islam or christian, has absolutely no place in Africa. Period. Then let all of us Africans go to hell. We have lived in the white mans hell for centuries(both caucasian and arabs are white in my book), and most of it using their religion as an interface!
Is hell worse than Dafur, the abject poverty we Africans live under, the slave trade or the millions of other challenges Africans face every single day?
Religion and religious people should be kicked out of Africa, then we will talk on equal terms.