Demba Diop

Demba Diop (1927 – 3 February 1967) was a Senegalese politician. He served as Minister of Youth and Sport under President Léopold Sédar Senghor and was Mayor of Mbour from 1966 to 1967.

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.

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