The idea for a Southern Sudanese archive originated with late Mading de Garang when he was Regional Minister of Information, Culture, Youth and Sports.

Initially he wanted and archive to preserve the record of the Southern Sudanese nationalist movement, but Professor Robert Collins from the United States persuaded him that the administrative files that still existed in the province and district offices of the Southern Region needed preserving too.

The basement archive storeroom in the Equatoria Province headquarters was later transferred to the jurisdiction of the Ministry. But for several years no further records were added to that collection.

Between 1980 and 1983, Douglas H. Johnson was employed as Assistant Director for Archives, with the task of collecting closed files from district and provincial headquarters and bringing them back to Juba.

In that time, Johnson was able to collect some 5,000 district files from Jonglei, Eastern Equatoria and Western Equatoria provinces, plus provincial files from Malakal, Torit and Yambio.

The dissolution of the Southern Region and the outbreak of war in 1983 brought that project to a halt. While Johnson had been able to collect some files from Nasir, he was unable to visit Renk, Kodok, or Bentiu in Upper Nile, Yei in Equatoria, or any office in Bahr el-Ghazal and Lakes.

On the eve of the outbreak of war in 1983, when the Southern Regional Government was dissolved and the Southern Region divided into three, there was no single place to store the files and no proper means of storing them. The files, therefore, were left where they were and first Equatoria Region, and then Central Equatoria State were responsible for preserving them.

During the next twenty-two years of war, the archives were neglected and many records were lost or destroyed. No archive staff were trained in the preservation and repair of records; so damaged documents were just thrown away.

As these records dealt with many development projects in agriculture, livestock, water management, and communications, South Sudan has lost a valuable part of its institutional memory so necessary for planning development.