- Omar Al-Bashir
Field Marshal Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir is a Sudanese military leader, and politician, chief of state (1989-1993) and President (1993-).
- John Garang
John Garang de Mabior was the vice president of Sudan and former leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.
- Hassan Al-Turabi
Dr. Hassan 'Abd Allah al-Turabi, commonly called Hassan al-Turabi (sometimes transliterated Hassan al-Tourabi) (حسن الترابي), is a religious and political leader in Sudan, who may have been instrumental in institutionalizing sharia in the northern part of the country. He was influential as a government figure under several heads of state in the country, …
- Riek Machar
Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon (born 1952), a Dok Nuer, is the current vice-president of the autonomous Government of Southern Sudan.
- Lam Akol
Dr. Lam Akol Ajawin (born 1950) is a high-ranking official in the Sudan People's Liberation Army. He has served as foreign minister of Sudan since September 2005, when a national unity government took office in which the SPLM/A received the foreign affairs ministry and several other key ministries in the government. Formerly a chemical engineering lecturer at the University of Khartoum, with a Ph.D. from the University of London, Dr.
- Ahmed Haroun
Ahmed Mohammed Haroun, is former state Minister of Interior of Sudan. Haroun was in office during the peak of the Darfur conflict and was recently named by the International Criminal Court as one of the first Darfur war crimes suspects. Haroun is the current state humanitarian affairs minister which is a role that is a level below that of a minister. Ahmed Haroun was named by the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, …
- Mustafa Osman Ismail
Mustafa Osman Ismail (born 1955 in Dongola, Sudan) was the foreign minister of Sudan from 18 February 1998 to 18 September 2005. His main job as foreign minister was to be the government's main spokesman in diplomatic efforts to solve the Sudanese civil wars. He was the longest-serving foreign minister in Sudanese history. He was replaced by southerner Lam Akol when the national unity government took office.
- Emmanuel Jal
Emmanuel Jal. Emmanuel is a spokesman for the Make Poverty History campaign, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and the Control Arms campaign. Among other places he performed at the Live 8 Concert in Cornwall this summer. He was awarded a 2005 American Gospel Music Award for best international artist.
- Ali Osman Taha
Ali Osman Taha (also transliterated "Othman" or "Uthman") is the second Vice President of Sudan from August, 2005 to the present. He held the position of first First Vice President from 1998 to August 2005. He was the country's Foreign Minister for three years prior to becoming first Vice President and is a member of the National Congress Party (Sudan). Taha is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Khartoum and was known for his academic prowess.
- Salva Kiir Mayardit
Salva Kiir Mayardit (born 1951) is the President of autonomous Government of Southern Sudan and the successor to the post of Vice President of Sudan, following the death of John Garang in a crash on 30 July 2005. A founding member of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), he was chosen by the SPLA leadership to continue the peace process that formally ended the Second Sudanese Civil War in January 2005. Like Garang, he is of the Dinka tribe, …
- Sadiq Al-Mahdi
Sadiq al-Mahdi is a Sudanese political and religious figure. He is head of the National Umma Party and Imam of the Ansar, a sufi sect that pledges allegiance to Muhammad Ahmad who claimed to be Islam's messianic saviour, or the Mahdi. Sadiq al-Mahdi was Prime Minister of Sudan on two occasions: first briefly in 1966-67, and second starting in 1986, …
- Minni Minnawi
Minni Arcua Minnawi (born about 1972) is the leader of the largest faction of the Sudanese Liberation Army. Under Minnawi's leadership, his SLA faction signed a peace agreement, known as the May agreement, with the Khartoum government in May 2006. Nevertheless, fighting has continued with Minnawi's group fighting other SLA factions. In July 2006, fighting broke out around the northern Darfur town Korma, resulting in the deaths of at least 80 people.
- Jamal Al-Fadl
Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl is a Sudanese militant and associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. Al-Fadl was recruited to the Afghan mujahideen "through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn" (presumably in the later 1980s), and he became a "senior employee" of al-Qaeda. After embezzling $110,000 from the organization, al-Fadl "defected". He contacted the CIA via the US's Eritrean embassy and, …
- Alek Wek
Alek Wek (born April 16 1977) is a Sudanese supermodel who appeared on the catwalks at the age of 18 in 1995. She is from the Dinka ethnic group in the Sudan, but her family fled to Britain to escape the civil war between the Muslim North and the Christian South of the Sudan. She also designs a range of designer handbags called "Wek 1933", which are available throughout selected Selfridges department stores. The year refers to the year her father was born.
- Muhammad Ahmad
Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Allah (b. 12 August, 1845 - June 22, 1885) was a Muslim religious leader, in Sudan. Under his religious authority the divided clans of the Baggara and their subject Fur tribesmen were united into an aggressive alliance dedicated to establishing an Islamic Republic as the first step in the global Islamic state. Believing himself to be the long awaited Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed Al Mahdi declared a jihad, raised an army, …
- Francis Bok
Francis Piol Bol Bok (born February 1979) is a Dinka tribesman, former Sudanese, alleged slave turned abolitionist. He was captured and enslaved during an Arab militia raid on the village of Nymlal in Southern Sudan on May 15, 1986 and enslaved at age seven. Bok lived in bondage for 10 years before his escape and journey to America. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and currently works for the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG).
- Kola Boof
Kola Boof (possibly 3 March 1972) is the pseudonym of an American author who claims Sudanese and Egyptian origin. She is best known for having claimed an involuntary relationship with Osama bin Laden that she says took place during 1996.
- Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909 - January 18 1985) was a Sudanese political figure and theologian. Taha played a prominent role in Sudan's struggle for independence, and was a cofounder of the Sudanese Republican Party. He was notable for his advocacy of liberal reform within Sudanese society and within Islam itself. The regime of Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiry executed Taha for his views.
- Francis Deng
Dr Francis Mading Deng is Research Professor of International Politics, Law and Society at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he is also the Director of a newly established Center for Displacement Studies. He has served as Human Rights Officer in the United Nations Secretariat, as Ambassador of Sudan to Canada, the Scandinavian countries and the United States of America, and as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
- Manute Bol
Manute Bol is a Sudanese-born basketball player and activist. Until the debut of Gheorghe Mureşan (who was supposedly a few millimeters taller), Bol was undisputedly the tallest player ever to appear in the National Basketball Association. Bol is believed to have been born on October 16, 1962 in either Turalie or Gogrial, Sudan. He is the son of a Dinka tribal chief, who gave him the name "Manute," which means "special blessing."
- Rose
Rose was a goat from the Hai Malakal suburb of Juba, the capital of the Sudanese region of South Sudan, who became an internet phenomenon when a local man was caught by the goat's owner having sex with the goat. The owner subdued the perpetrator and asked village elders to come over. One elder noted that he and the other elders found the perpetrator, tied up by the owner, at the door of the goat shed.
- Luol Deng
Luol Deng (born April 16, 1985 in Wau, Sudan) is a British professional basketball player for the National Basketball Association's Chicago Bulls, where he plays small forward.
- Omer Ismail
Omer Ismail was born in the Darfur region of Sudan. He has spent over 20 years working both independently and with international organizations on relief efforts. Omer fled Sudan in 1989 as a result of his political views.
- John Dau
John Bul Dau is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, whose emigration to the United States was filmed in the 2006 documentary "God Grew Tired of Us". He serves as the Director of the Sudan Project at Direct Change.
- Alfred Taban
Alfred Taban (born 1957, Kajokeji) is a Sudanese broadcast journalist. He is currently working as the BBC's correspondent in Khartoum. He is the founder of the "Khartoum Monitor", the only independent English-language newspaper in the Sudanese capital. Having trained as a laboratory technician, Taban embarked on a career in journalism, a vocation that in Sudan is subject to constant government intimidation.
- Mubarak Al-Fadil
Mubarak al-Fadil led the Umma Reform and Renewal Party, an opposition political party in Sudan, until his arrest in 2007 for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Sudanese government.
- Emma McCune
Emma McCune (1964 in India - 1993 in Nairobi) was an expatriate British foreign aid worker in Sudan who married guerrilla leader Riek Machar. She was killed in a car accident in Kenya. McCune was born in India to ex-colonial parents who could not adjust to life in England after their return. Eventually her parents divorced and her father committed suicide. In 1985 Emma flew to Australia and back in a single engined light aircraft with her friend Bill Hall.
- Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl
Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, a Sudanese-born Arab, was recruited for the Afghan war through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. He joined al Qaeda and took an oath of fealty to Osama bin Laden but later became an informant to the US government on al Qaeda activities.
- Mohammed Wardi
Mohammed Osman Hassan Salih Wardi a Sudanese singer and songwriter.
- Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela ,Arabic 'ليلى ابوالعلا' is a Sudanese writer and playwright.
- Sharif Ahmed
Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed is a member of the Islamic Court Union (ICU), which controlled Somalia's capital of Mogadishu and much of south and central Somalia until the war in Somalia. Ahmed was born in Shabeellaha Dhexe province, Somalia, and studied at Libyan and Sudanese universities. He is from the Abgaal branch of the Hawiye clan. He has also worked as a secondary school teacher of geography, Arabic, and religious studies. He speaks Arabic, Somali, and English.
- Josephine Bakhita
Josephine Bakhita (1869 - February 8 1947) is a Roman Catholic saint. Bakhita was born to a locally important family in Olgossa, a village in the southern Sudanese district of Darfur in Africa. Her father was the brother of the village chief. At the age of six or seven she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders and over the course of the next eight years was sold and resold five times in the markets of El Obeid and Khartoum.
- Bushra Elfadil
Bushra Elfadil (b. 1952) is a Sudanese writer and poet.
- Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi
Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi is a Sudanese citizen and alleged paymaster for al-Qaida. He was captured in December, 2001 in Afghanistan. Qosi is held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. Qosi's Guantanamo detainee ID number is 54. The Department of Defense reports that Qosi was born on July 3 1960, in Khartoum, Sudan.
- Tayeb Salih
Al-Tayyib Salih is a noted Sudanese writer. Born in the Northern Province of the Sudan in 1929, he studied at the University of Khartoum before leaving for the University of London, England. Coming from a background of small farmers and religious teachers, his original intention was to work in agriculture. Except, however, for a brief spell as a schoolmaster before coming to England, his working life has been in broadcasting.
- Gaafar Nimeiry
Gaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry (otherwise known as Jaafar Nimeiry, Gaafar Nimeiry or Ga'far Muhammad an-Numayri; born 1 January 1930) was the President of Sudan from 1971 to 1985. He was born in Wad Nubawi Omdurman in central Sudan, and is the son of a postman and the great grandson of a tribal leader from the Wad Nimeiry region in Dongola. In 1952 Nimeiry graduated from the Sudan Military College, …
- Joseph Lagu
Joseph Lagu was born 21 November 1931, in a hamlet called Momokwe in Moli (northern region of Madiland), about 80 miles south of Juba, Sudan. He belongs to the Madi ethnic group of southern Sudan. May 1960 he graduated from military college in Omdurman and was commissioned an officer in the Sudanese Army and posted to 10th Brigade, Northern Command.
- Ibrahim Abboud
Ibrahim Abboud was a Sudanese dictator, general, and political figure. He served as the head of state of Sudan between 1958 and 1964; and as president of Sudan in 1964 but soon resigned
- Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein
Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein is the minister of the interior of Sudan. He is Major General. He has been accused for supporting the Janjaweed militias during his term. In 2004 he proposed to move more than a million displaced persons into 18 proposed "settlements".
- Deng Gai
Deng Gai (born March 22 1982 in Wow, Sudan) is a Sudanese professional basketball player, formerly in the NBA.