Salva Kiir Mayardit

Salva Kiir Mayardit has been president of South Sudan since it became independent on 9 July 2011, having led the country out of Sudan and then into a civil war against his own deputy. Born into a Dinka family in 1951, he joined the Anyanya rebels as a teenager in 1967, during the First Sudanese Civil War. When the second war began in 1983 he joined John Garang's Sudan People's Liberation Movement and became a senior commander of its armed wing, running military intelligence and eventually heading the SPLA. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 ended twenty-two years of fighting and gave the south autonomy under Garang; when Garang died in a helicopter crash weeks later, Kiir succeeded him as SPLA commander-in-chief, as president of the Government of Southern Sudan and as first vice-president of Sudan. Where Garang had argued for a reformed united Sudan, Kiir was a straightforward separatist, and after winning re-election in 2010 he steered the south to the referendum in which almost ninety-nine per cent voted to leave. Independence did not settle the distribution of power. In July 2013 he dismissed his entire cabinet including Vice-President Riek Machar, and that December fighting broke out in Juba between soldiers loyal to each man, spreading rapidly along ethnic lines between Dinka and Nuer. The war killed an estimated four hundred thousand people and displaced millions before a revitalised agreement in 2018 returned Machar to the vice-presidency. Elections have been repeatedly postponed since. Kiir is rarely seen without the black cowboy hat given to him by George W. Bush, which has become his identifying feature.

• Lived: 1951 CE – ?
• Nationality: South Sudanese
• Roles: head_of_state, military