Muhammad Ahmad Mahgoub

Muhammad Ahmad Mahgoub (محمد أحمد المحجوب; 17 May 1908 – 23 June 1976 ) was both Foreign Minister and then the 5th Prime Minister of Sudan. He was also an important Sudanese literary writer, who published several volumes of poetry and literary criticism in Arabic.

He was born in the city of Ed Dueim in 1908. He moved to Khartoum at the age of seven. Mahgoub graduated from engineering school in 1929 and in 1938, he obtained a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Gordon Memorial College. He was elected to parliament in 1946. After independence, Mahgoub was foreign minister between 1956 and 1958, and then again between 1964 and 1965. In 1965, he was elected Prime Minister, but was subsequently forced to resign. In 1967, he was elected Prime Minister for the second time and served in that position until 1969.

His war policy in South Sudan was characterized by extreme brutality and the indiscriminate use of terror, reaching levels of violence never before experienced in the south. His campaigns, which included massacres against southern civilians and looting that destroyed entire towns, have been described by some scholars as genocidal and have been compared to the methods of Alphonse de Malzac, a 19th-century European White Nile slave-raider.