Dakar, Jul 7 (APS) – The documentary film ”Omar Blondin Diop, un revolted” by director Djeydi Djigo dedicated to the intellectual and anti-colonialist activist declared dead in detention in the prison on the island of Gorée on May 11, 1973 , was screened on Wednesday at the Daniel Sorano Theater.
Through this production, the director says he wants to go in search of the truth regarding the “mysterious” death of this emblematic figure of the post-independence and anti-imperialist revolutionary movement.
“The objective was to discover Omar Blondin Diop, because one cannot do research on political figures in Senegal without coming across him,” he said on Wednesday at the end of the screening of the film in a packed Daniel Sorano national theater.
For the screenwriter, “the idea is to uncover the truth regarding his death, because there are enough documents to prove that the official thesis is false”.
Did Oumar Blondin Diop commit suicide by hanging in his cell as evidenced by the thesis of the regime of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal? Or, did he die as a result of the abuse suffered in detention, as his family maintains?
The 80-minute documentary feature brushes aside the thesis of suicide with the testimonies of key men in the case such as the magistrate Moustapha Touré Dean of the Investigating Judges at the material time, who died on 23 June 2022.
There are also the testimonies of Dialo Diop, his brother, of his former classmates in France who portray the character and convictions of Omar Blondin Diop and his fellow prisoners, including his younger brother Mohamed Blondin Diop and Alioune Sall ”Panoma’ ‘.
49 years following the “violent” death of Omar Blondin Diop in the prison on the island of Gorée in Dakar, the Senegalese director Djeydi Djigo investigates the life and the tragic circumstances of the disappearance of this young revolutionary of the Senghor years .
The documentary film is a mastered chronological framework starting from the birth to the death (1946-1973) of this first committed Senegalese normalien who managed to enter ”Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud” where the poet-president Senghor failed following his time at Lycée Louis Le Grand in France.
The director looks back on a life of struggle and refusal of the young Omar Blondin Diop who died at the age of 26.
In a mixed aesthetic, it waltzes between video archive images and animated texts of Omar Blondin Diop’s participation in the events of May 1968 in Nanterre, France, which earned him his expulsion to Senegal.
Due to the lack of video archives on the events in Senegal, the director uses drawing to reconstruct the “radicalization” of this revolutionary in Senegal in order to free his imprisoned brothers.
The latter, including Dialo Diop, had set fire to the French cultural center in Dakar and the Ministry of Public Works a few weeks before the visit of French President Georges Pompidou.
Djigo’s documentary thus lifts a corner of the veil on this eventful page of Senegal’s political history, as were the documentaries ”President Dia” by Ousmane William Mbaye (2012) and ”Valdiodio Ndiaye, a trial for the ‘story’ by Amina Ndiaye Lecleck (2021).
Djigo questions the past and hopes his film will change history for a ”reopening of the case” for the ”rehabilitation” of a ”pan-Africanist and revolutionary hero” following four years of filming.
It comes to enrich the films devoted to Omar Blondin Diop following that of the Belgian Vincent Meessen ”In the footsteps of Omar Blondin Diop” exploring the effects of colonialism on Senegal today released last October.
Omar Blondin Diop, born September 18, 1946 in Niamey (Niger) to Senegalese-Malian parents with eleven brothers, was an active member of the young Marxist-Leninist movement in Senegal, close to the Black Panthers in the United States and other movements in Latin America. .
The documentary film ”Omar Blondin Diop, a rebel” was screened at the last Pan-African Film and Television Festival in Ouagadougou last October.
