JUBA // At first glance, a swashbuckling US president who led a game-hunting expedition in Africa a century ago and a Greek businessman with a fancy for old buildings have little in common.
But the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, and George Ghines intersect here in what until recently was a little known city on the banks of the Nile.
That anonymity is likely to soon give way to political and geographical celebrity of sorts, as south Sudanese start casting ballots today in one of the most important votes Africa has experienced in decades. If as expected, voters approve independence, the south will secede from the north and Juba will be the capital of the world's newest nation.
Yet owing to the 22-year civil war between north and south in which about two million people perished, south Sudan is still synonymous to most outsiders with war, famine and refugees.
Even to Juba natives, as well as the aid workers, investors and modern-day fortune hunters who have flocked to Juba since a peace agreement was signed between north and south in 2005, the notion that south Sudan and its future capital have a history beyond strife and suffering is revelatory.
Motorcycle taxi drivers or East African immigrants selling boiled beans on the busy streets of Juba at lunchtime have never heard of Teddy Roosevelt or his expedition that set off 100 years ago to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Barack Obama and George W Bush are household names here. But the name of Roosevelt, a naturalist and an explorer who was also renowned for his prowess with a gun, draws blank stares.
Except from Mr Ghines. The Juba-born businessman believes an old warehouse on the city's outskirts played a key role in Roosevelt's travels through what was then British East Africa and Belgian Congo, as well as Sudan. He researched Roosevelt's Nile journey, consulting newspaper archives and Smithsonian museum sources to support the theory that the president used the building. Mr Ghines also waded through documents and photos of the warehouse.
For Roosevelt and the team of 450 hunters, scientists and porters who travelled with him, the region proved formidable.
On February 18, 1910, the New York Times reported from Gondokoro, a former British trading outpost near Juba, that Roosevelt's expedition had "passed through the most trying stage of their African journey," after spending the previous 10 days "practically isolated in a wilderness so forbidding to the white man that it has not been invaded by the telegraph companies".
Roosevelt, however, was not easily deterred, for his ambitions for his safari were not minuscule. In his request to the Smithsonian to fund the undertaking, which occurred just after he left office, he had written: "I doubt if the National Museum would ever again have the chance to get a collection which would be from every standpoint as interesting."
Roosevelt and his team of hunters, scientists and porters killed or trapped some 11,400 animals, from insects and moles to lions and elephants. These included 512 big game animals, including hippopotamuses and six rare white rhinos. The expedition is said to have consumed 262 of the animals.
Mr Ghines believes that it was in the warehouse in Juba that Roosevelt and his team, with the help of four tonnes of salt they had hauled with them, packed and shipped the carcasses downstream to Khartoum and onward by rail to Cairo. Their trophies were preserved in the four tonnes of salt they had hauled with them.
Today the Wildlife Conservation Society and Southern Sudanese officials say that the possible future nation, which encompasses a territory the size of the US state of Texas, holds enormous eco-tourism potential. It contains Africa's largest intact wetlands and one of its largest savannahs.
Major obstacles remain, though, including sparse infrastructure and ongoing insecurity in areas where tens of thousands of antelopes migrate every year.
An official from the southern government's ministry of wildlife and tourism says there are no plans in the works for a zoo or wildlife park. But the wildlife theme is irresistible - another ministry announced plans last year to refashion the southern state capitals into the shapes of animals such as rhinos and giraffes.
The wildlife motif is irresistible to Mr Ghines, too. He has converted the warehouse where Roosevelt cured and packed his trophies into a chic bar, outfitting the interior with exposed wood beams and high-backed stools ringing a wrap-around bar. The original walls, made of granite blocks hewn from rocky outcrops on Juba's outskirts, still stand.
Mr Ghines was born in Juba in 1966 to Greek parents who were part of a community of Greek traders and businesspeople large enough to have its own Hellenic club and market. Back then, Mr Ghines recalls, he and his friends used to run through the rows of stalls in what Juba's Arabic-speaking town residents called the "Souk Frangi", or "Foreign Market".
Greek communities have long histories in this part of Africa, where Greek merchants and their families followed the Nile all the way to Burundi, where the biggest food store in the capital Bujumbura is still the Greek supermarket.
Mr Ghines considers the Greeks to be the "smallest tribe in southern Sudan", noting proudly that the wife of the south Sudan leader, Salva Kiir, is one-quarter Greek.
Most of the Greek community left Juba in the early 1980s after the outbreak of the civil war. Mr Ghines, who was based in Dubai at the time, purchased the warehouse in 1991 "to keep it in the family." But he had no idea what he would do with it until peace came to his hometown in 2005.