The military government of Burkina Faso recently said that its intelligence service had thwarted a coup attempt and alleges it was plotted in the Ivory Coast.
Reflecting on the Interim President Ibrahim Traoré, a captain in the military who came to power during a 2022 coup, you can’t help but see Traore as trying to fill the very large shoes of his assassinated predecessor, Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara.
Murdered during the overthrow of his government, Sankara was a military captain, pan-Africanist theorist, and served as president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. He was born in 1949.
Sankara was “viewed by supporters as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly referred to as ‘Africa’s Che Guevara,’” according to Facts about Thomas Sankara on ThomasSankara.net.
In a message delivered at Wellesley College in Boston years ago, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan discussed the importance of some of Africa’s revolutionary leaders, including Sankara.
Minister Farrakhan said, “We are not oppressed because we are Black; we are oppressed because we are ignorant. It is ignorance that keeps us on the bottom, not Blackness.”
In recapping the message Minister Farrakhan delivered at Wellesley College, in a 2019 edition of Zimbabwe’s The Herald (herald.co.zw) titled “Black ignorance, not black skin,” the author of the article wrote what he gleaned from Minister Farrakhan’s remarks.
“The west did not agree to work with Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Haile Selassie, Kenneth Kaunda or Robert Mugabe,” wrote Reason Wafawarova, a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.
“These are some of our African nationalists who sought to head the economic affairs of the African continent and they were castigated, demonized, assassinated, murdered in cold blood, and discredited as examples never to be followed,” Wafawarova wrote.
Sankara was once such a leader.
According to wilsoncenter.org, Sankara gave Burkina Faso its name, meaning “land of honest people” in the majority Mooré language. He rose to power at the age of 33 in a coup led by junior army officers in 1983. “Once in control, he set in motion efforts to dramatically reconfigure social and economic relations in his country’s conservative society.
He aimed to eliminate the state’s foreign debt, to attain food self-sufficiency, and to curtail the influence of the French, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank,” noted wilsoncenter.org.
Explaining the substance of his mission, Sankara said in 1984 to the United Nations General Assembly, “We had to take the lead of the peasant uprisings in the countryside, threatened by desertification, exhausted by hunger and thirst,” as he outlined the vision of his popular revolution.
“We had to give some sense of meaning to the revolts of the unemployed urban masses, frustrated and tired of seeing the limousines of the alienated élite flash by, following the head of State, who offered them only false solutions devised and conceived in the brains of others,” he added.
Sankara’s subsequent political reforms included removing Burkina Faso’s traditional leaders, and also radical cuts to government spending, which he considered wasteful.
According to ThomasSankara.net on its facts page, his other accomplishments included:
– He initiated a nationwide literacy campaign, increasing the literacy rate from 13% in 1983 to 73% in 1987.
– He planted over 10 million trees to prevent desertification
– He built roads and a railway to tie the nation together, without foreign aid.
– He appointed women to high governmental positions, encouraged them to work, recruited them into the military, and granted pregnancy leave during education.
– He outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy in support of women’s rights.
– He sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of the ministers.
– He reduced the salaries of all public servants, including his own, and forbade the use of government chauffeurs and first-class airline tickets.
– He redistributed land from the feudal landlords and gave it directly to the peasants. Wheat production rose in three years, making the country food self-sufficient.
– He opposed foreign aid, saying that “he who feeds you, controls you.”
– He spoke in forums like the Organization of African Unity against continued neo-colonialist penetration of Africa through Western trade and finance. He called for a united front of African nations to repudiate their foreign debt. He argued that the poor and exploited did not have an obligation to repay money to the rich and those who exploited them.
However, according to TRT Afrika, in an article headlined “How Thomas Sankara’s legacy continues to shape politics in Burkina Faso,” over time, “a group of high-ranking officials, including his former colleague Blaise Compaoré, did not support his progressive policies.
These sentiments led to the division of the military into two main factions, with one supporting Sankara and the other siding with Compaoré. With significant foreign support and a local military advantage in Burkina Faso, Sankara was eventually assassinated in a bloody coup led by Compaoré in 1987.”
Compaoré was later handed a life sentence in absentia, after fleeing to the Ivory Coast, for the murder of Sankara, reported Reuters.
“After his death, Sankara’s body was hurriedly buried in a mass grave in the Dagnoën neighborhood of Ouagadougou. It wasn’t until 2014, during the popular uprising that toppled his successor, Compaoré, that his slogans began to echo in the streets again, and under Traoré, Sankara has been officially recognized as the first national hero of the country.
Boulevard Charles de Gaulle has been renamed Thomas Sankara Boulevard, and his remains were exhumed and reburied in a more dignified space,” noted ThomasSankara.net.
Francis Kéré, the first African architect born in Burkina Faso to win the Pritzker prize, when he was presented the “Nobel Prize of Architecture” in 2022, was awarded the project of designing a mausoleum in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to honor the life, legacy and memory of Thomas Sankara.
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