This account of one of the Sudan's remotest provinces, at the end of 1930, provides the historical context for the early classics of British social anthropology. It contains descriptions of local life by some of the first British officials to become conversant in the languages of the Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk - at a time when Evans-Pritchard's field-work had only just begun.<br> This report on the Upper Nile Province was compiled by its governor, Charles Willis, midway through the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. It includes documentation on the origins of the Jonglei Canal, one of the most controversial environmental engineering projects in modern Africa.<br> With almost all traces of previous governmental structures now obliterated by war, this record of the beginnings of civil administration will be of immense value.