Demba Diop

Born in Boghé (now in Mauritania) in 1927, Diop trained as a school teacher. He was assigned first to a school in Sédhiou Department in 1947, interrupted by his French Army service. He later served as an administrator at the Collège moderne in Thiès and at the école régionale at Mbour, where he met his wife. He was elected to the Assemblée nationale in 1956 (a post of a limited, advisory role in the revised French colonial system under the Loi Cadre of that year). With independence, he was elected to the first Senegalese National Assembly, and served as Minister of Education from 19 December 1962, moving to Minister of Youth and Sport from 9 December 1963, as a member of the ruling Senegalese Progressive Union (Union Progressiste Sénégalaise, UPS). He had been a discus champion as a youth, and helped to found Stade Mbour football club. He later served as president of the parliamentary group for the UPS, and was elected as Mayor of Mbour in 1966.

Diop was assassinated on 3 February 1967. On the way to a meeting, he was shot in a parking lot in Thiès by Abdou N'Daffa Faye, a partisan of Diop's Mbour political rival (and deputy mayor of Mbour) Jacques d'Erneville. Faye was sentenced to death and was the first person in post-independence Senegal to be executed.

Diop's funeral in Mbour was an episode of national mourning, with President Senghor and Lamine Guèye in attendance.

This political violence, rare in Senegal, has had a long legacy. Opponents of Senghor's Socialist Party, as well as former supporters of Senghor's early rival Mamadou Dia, point to the executions as part of a pattern of suppression of political enemies in Senegal, where these two crimes were used as justification for a witchhunt. Regardless of the truth of these claims, the next year saw repression against violent Dakar student protests in May 68, and the introduction of constitutional changes, approved by the referendum of 22 February 1970, which created a Presidential system, greatly expanding presidential powers in what had become a de facto one party state.

Stade Demba Diop in Dakar, the Lycee Demba Diop, and the city's Boulevard are named for Diop.

His wife, Caroline Faye Diop is also a political leader. She was elected the first female deputy to the National Assembly of Senegal in 1963 and was later a cabinet minister under President Abdou Diouf.