Sudanese social media is abuzz with reports that US President-elect Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has Sudanese roots.
Most Sudanese are quoting an entry in Wikipedia and sharing an article in Arabic linking his mother to a famous quarter of Omdurman, known as Al-Massalma, where many of Sudan’s Christian minorities lived.
In an interview with The Next Generation Initiative, Mr Preibus said his mother was born in Sudan and met his father there in the 1960s:
Back in the ’60s, northern Africa – as I understood it and as it was explained to me – was sort of the new frontier of southern Europe. So there were a lot of Italians and Greeks and Spanish that lived in northern Africa in the ’60s.
My mother was 19 or 20 when she met my dad, and she had lived in Khartoum her entire life. She worked at the American Embassy in Sudan. My dad was in the Army in Ethiopia because the United States had an Army base in, I think it was Eritrea. And then he met my mom when she was in Khartoum.”
However many of the widely circulated Sudanese claims mistakenly say Mr Priebus’s mother Roula is the younger sister of Aziza Mendel, a Sudanese Jew who was Miss Sudan in the 1950s.
The Mendels were a prominent Jewish family in Sudan who converted to Islam in the early 20th Century.
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