Pan-Africanist icon wanted to ‘decolonise minds’
DUBBED Africa’s Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara wanted to “decolonise minds” in Burkina Faso and across the continent, but his revolutionary dreams were cut short when he was gunned down in a 1987 coup after just four years in power.
The trial of the alleged perpetrators of the assassination, including his former friend Blaise Compaore, who succeeded him as president and went on to rule for 27 years, opens today in the capital, Ouagadougou.
During mass protests which toppled Compaore in 2014, young people carried portraits of Sankara aloft – though many had not even been born during the Marxist–Leninist leader’s rule. Born in 1949 in Yako in the north of the poor, landlocked country, Sankara was raised in a Christian family. His father was a military veteran and he was just 12 when the country gained independence from France.
After finishing high school in Ouagadougou, he underwent military training abroad. He was in Madagascar for the 1972 insurrection which overthrew President Philibert Tsiranana, considered by foes to be a lackey of former colonial power France.
Returning to his homeland in 1973, Sankara was assigned to train recruits, and stood out while fighting in a border war with Mali in 1974-1975.
After a coup d’etat in 1980, the new leader, Colonel Saye Zerbo, appointed Sankara his secretary of state for information. But the soldier’s radical views made him quit the government a year and a half later. Sankara was appointed prime minister in January 1983 after another military coup.
He was arrested in May 1983 but made president in August after yet another coup – this one led by his close friend, Compaore. Aged just 33, Sankara symbolised for supporters African youth and integrity. He changed the country’s name from the colonial-era Upper Volta to Burkina Faso – “the land of honest men” – and moved into a rundown presidential palace with his wife and two sons.
The priorities in his reform programme included reducing the size of the civil service, improving healthcare, nationwide literacy, food selfsufficiency, measures to help peasant farmers, vaccination campaigns and building pharmacies in villages. He banned female genital mutilation and forced marriages. The population was policed by the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution and sanctioned by the Popular Revolutionary Tribunal, which antagonised traditional tribal chiefs and others wielding wealth and power.
”We must decolonise minds,” he proclaimed. However he began to repress unions and political opposition, breaking up a teachers’ strike by sacking them. Sankara also urged Africa to refuse to pay its debt to Western countries and spoke out at the UN to denounce “imperialist” wars, apartheid and poverty. He also defended the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
On October 15, 1987, when called to an extraordinary cabinet session, Sankara was killed by fellow soldiers during a putsch which left Compaore alone in power. He was only 37.