Thomas Sankara

A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa

Brian J. Peterson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253053787
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers the first complete biography in English of the dynamic revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Coming to power in 1983, Sankara set his sights on combating social injustice, poverty, and corruption in his country, fighting for women's rights, direct forms of democracy, economic sovereignty, and environmental justice.

Drawing on government archival sources and over a hundred interviews with Sankara's family members, friends, and closest revolutionary colleagues, Brian J. Peterson details Sankara's political career and rise to power, as well as his assassination at age 37 in 1987, in a plot led by his close friend Blaise Compaoré.

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers a unique, critical appraisal of Sankara and explores why he generated such enthusiasm and hope in Burkina Faso and beyond, why he was such a polarizing figure, how his rivals seized power from him, and why T-shirts sporting his image still appear on the streets today.

1

COMING OF AGE IN THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM, 1949–1966

“A CAPTAIN HAS BEEN BORN,” JOSEPH SAMBO OUEDRAOGO exclaimed upon the birth of his first son. The news traveled quickly, and soon family members converged on the town of Yako, where Joseph was posted as a colonial guard, living with his wife, Marguerite Kinda, and their two daughters, Florence and Marie-Denise. On December 21, 1949, Thomas Isidore Noël Ouedraogo entered the world, and henceforth, he carried the nickname Captain, portending his unusual leadership talents.¹

Bordering on the Sahel zone, Yako is in the wide central plateau of Burkina Faso. This hot steppe climate, with poor soils and frequent droughts, is a punishing place to survive. But there’s also a starkly beautiful landscape of vast ocher plains, interspersed with patches of acacia, baobab, and shea trees. Traversed by two rivers, the Nakambé (White Volta) and Nazinon (Red Volta), the region is punctuated by low mountain ranges and undulating hills. Just nineteen kilometers to the south of Yako is the Kipirsi range, the highest in the country. This is the location of Pilimpikou, a sacred hill and cave, where the ancestral spirits of the Mossi people are believed to reside. Around fifty kilometers to the east is Téma, the homeland of the Sankara family.

In December 1949, the Sahel was in the middle of the dry season, the once-verdant landscape dusty and desiccated. After the harvest, people were highly mobile, engaging in trade, visiting kin, arranging marriages, and seeking work. In fact, under colonialism, this region was a labor reservoir for the French colonial state and business interests in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. Mossi men provided crucial manpower in building roads, bridges, and railroads.²

Map 1.1. Map of Burkina Faso within West Africa. (John Norton)

This was the world that Thomas Sankara entered on the winter solstice. In family oral traditions, the birth took on symbolic importance. Marguerite Kinda, a devout Catholic, went to see the local priest, a Frenchman, and told him about her ardent desire to have a son. The priest spoke about the case of Samuel in the Bible, explaining that his mother, Anna (Hannah), had had difficulties bearing a child and resorted to prayer, promising that her son would be committed to God for his lifetime. Marguerite agreed to do the same, fasting and praying for a month. “Our mother went to see the priest, and she prayed so hard, everything so that she would have a son,” firstborn Florence Sankara remembered. “There were so many signs, like how he was baptized.” The birth of their first son—born to a Christian father, Joseph; named after Saint Thomas the Apostle; and bearing the middle names Isidore (Greek for “gift from Isis,” the Egyptian goddess) and Noël (French for “Christmas”)—was shrouded in symbolism and hope.³

Thomas Sankara felt that he had been simply lucky to survive infancy, as he explained: “Out of 1,000 children born the same year I was, half died in the first three months. I had the great fortune to escape death, just as I had the great fortune to not die later from one of the diseases here in Africa.” In fact, he was an unusually tiny infant, and Marguerite thought that he would not survive. But, in time, he grew into a healthy boy, and he was eventually fortunate enough to get an education in such an impoverished colony. He was far from being an elite, but as the son of a colonial civil servant, he had many advantages over the peasant masses of colonial Upper Volta. But in most ways, he had a rather ordinary childhood. He had loving and supportive parents; he faced no major traumas. As fellow revolutionary Soumane Touré observed: “We have to be aware of all the constructions of ‘Thomas Sankara’ after the fact. Much of what is said about him now is part of a hagiography. When I first met him, he was not even ‘Thomas Sankara.’ He was Thomas Ouedraogo, and he was an ordinary kid from Gaoua.”⁴

Indeed, until his teenage years, Sankara bore the official surname Ouedraogo and the stigma of not being a “pure” Mossi. The change in surname reflected political alliances and marital ties between clans. And Ouedraogo—meaning “stallion” in the Mooré language—was a historically significant name. According to Mossi foundation narratives, the warrior princess Yennenga fought many battles and produced a son, Ouedraogo, named in honor of her beloved warhorse. Ouedraogo went on to establish the Mossi kingdom in the twelfth century. But the Sankara clan drew their lineage from Fulbé, or Peul, pastoralists who had migrated into Mossi territory over the centuries and entered into alliances with the king, or Naba, of Téma.⁵ In time, through intermarriage, they took on Mossi cultural practices, giving rise to the Silmi-Mossi ethnic group to which the Sankara family belonged. Mousbila Sankara, an uncle to Thomas Sankara, provided the following oral history: “We are all part of the Sankara clan of Téma, which was Fulbé and Mossi, or Silmi-Mossi. We derive our name from Sangaré. They say that our ancestors came from among the Sangaré in Wasulu, and in fact there’s a river in Wasulu called the Sankarani. We kept this identity, but our Fulbé ways and language were slowly lost as we stayed among the Mossi. We entered into marriage alliances with the chiefs of Téma, and were viewed as the little brothers of the Ouedraogo.”⁶

In this way, belonging to one of the smallest ethnic groups, Thomas Sankara developed a strong identification with marginalized or minority groups. He came to envision a form of national identity based more on ethical principles and morals than on bloodlines. As a result, Jean Ziegler observed, “neither ‘true Mossi’ nor ‘true Peul,’ Sankara was forced, very young, to define himself through his own actions, his convictions.”⁷

The political fortunes of the Mossi kingdom had changed in 1895 when French colonial conquest began. According to Skinner, the French pressured the Mossi ruler Moro Naba Wobogo to surrender, but the king refused to sign a treaty. Then, with news of French forces marching on Ouagadougou, Wobogo fled and took refuge in the neighboring British Gold Coast. The French promptly placed Wobogo’s brother, Sigiri, on the throne. Nearly two decades of brutal conquest ensued, until the territory was incorporated into the larger colony of Upper Senegal-Niger. There were ongoing acts of resistance, such as the massive armed rebellion known as the Volta-Bani revolt, which led to the creation of the separate colony of Upper Volta in 1919. French interests in Côte d’Ivoire lobbied for more labor, and in response the French dissolved Upper Volta in 1932, making it part of Côte d’Ivoire. However, the suppression of Upper Volta did not produce the desired results, and the colony was reconstituted in 1947.⁸

Within this context, Sankara’s father, Sambo (“Joseph”), was born in 1919, the second of four sons in a Muslim family. As a boy, Sambo worked as a shepherd for the Naba of Téma. Years later, leading up to Sankara’s assassination, rumors swirled that he was the “son of Mossi slaves.” In fact, given that this region of West Africa was a post-emancipation society that had seen a widespread resurgence of so-called pawning—essentially volunteering a child’s labor in exchange for credit—it’s possible that Sambo served as a pawn for the Naba. When the Second World War broke out, rather than risk his own son, the Naba volunteered Sambo for military service under the Ouedraogo name. Sambo and his future family were then mistakenly recorded as Ouedraogo in colonial bureaucratic records.⁹

Family oral traditions indicate that for most of the war—after France’s quick defeat by the Germans—Sambo found himself in a Red Cross camp, where a Catholic sister, Marie-Joseph, took him under her wing and proselytization ensued. “Our father had the good fortune that he was taken as an aid to the nurses in the Red Cross,” Florence Sankara remembered. “He learned about medicine from the Catholic sisters. There was one sister in particular, Marie-Joseph, and she later gave him the name, Joseph, and baptized him.” When Sambo “Joseph” Ouedraogo returned home with his new Christian faith, he discovered that hardships had hit the population because of wartime grain requisitions, famine, and epidemics. Family members had perished, including his father. But Joseph found employment with the colonial state, serving as a colonial guard and military nurse in Ouagadougou. As a reward for their service, veterans were given preferential access to jobs. But it meant that they were in constant displacement, living in disparate localities across the colony.¹⁰

While in Ouagadougou, Joseph met Marguerite Kinda, a fellow Catholic from Loumbila whose brother was also a World War II veteran. In the early 1930s, Kinda’s father was conscripted as a forced laborer to work on the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Ouagadougou. “While working on the cathedral, he embraced Catholicism,” Valentin Sankara told. “The workers stayed there for a few years in their small community, and that was how they were brought into the church. He became Marc, and he was the first Catholic in the Kinda family. He died in 1950, when Thomas was only nine months, so he never knew either grandfather.” On a broader level, Catholic missionaries had been in the Upper Volta since the turn of the century. The first officially baptized Catholic was the renowned Alfred Simon Diban Ki-Zerbo, a former slave who converted in 1901 and played a central role in spreading Catholicism. His son, the historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, became a major political figure in postcolonial Upper Volta. But it took decades for Catholicism to really take hold in the colony, as the Mossi chiefs resisted proselytization efforts. In 1948, the colonial census recorded just 63,600 Catholics (and 523,000 Muslims) in a population of roughly four million. The vast majority of people adhered to “traditional” local religions, which colonial officials believed were on the decline as a result of the “well-organized and deeper penetration of Catholic missions,” according to one colonial report. Aside from the White Father apostolic vicariate in Ouagadougou, there were newly created vicariates in Ouahigouya, Bobo-Dioulasso, and Nouna. Each vicariate was tasked with spreading mission stations into surrounding villages and towns. But they were winning converts by taking a lax attitude vis-à-vis traditional customs, as one colonial official reported: “The White Fathers intensify their efforts to succeed in spreading the Catholic religion without seriously harming the traditions and customs of the races. . . . It is thus that among the Bobo the wearing of masks has not been abolished; we just advise them that when they wear the mask they pray to God instead of their fetish.” Indeed, many Catholic converts preserved indigenous practices and beliefs, and there was considerable ritual cooperation between Christians and Muslims. In time, mosques and churches stood side by side without stirring controversy, and intermarriage between Muslims and Christians was common.¹¹ One of Sankara’s friends, Germaine Pitroipa, described her religious upbringing in Fada N’Gourma during this era:

Even those who are Catholic, they had their old practices. My father was converted to Islam and he prayed, but my mother kept her ancestral practices. I was baptized as a Catholic by my uncle, and this didn’t pose any problems for anyone. So my father was Muslim, my mother was animist, and I was Catholic. In Burkina, there were so many villages where you had mosques and churches next to each other, and you had villagers who continued to do their sacrifices. On Sundays we went to mass, and if it was the Muslim holidays we celebrated with them, and if it was a Catholic holiday they celebrated with us. If it was Easter, the Muslims came and celebrated, or the end of Ramadan or Tabaski we went to their homes. So we shared meat together. The children grew up without distinctions. We didn’t even realize that the religions were separate, and I never saw conflicts in the villages about religion. It wasn’t an issue back then.¹²

After their marriage in Ouagadougou, Joseph and Marguerite moved to Zorgo in 1944 and within a few years had their daughters, Florence and Marie-Denise. But in her first year of life, Marie was stricken with bacterial meningitis. She was one of thousands who were afflicted when a meningitis epidemic hit the Upper Volta. According to colonial reports, there were 13,976 cases of meningitis in 1947–1948, with a 20 percent mortality rate. Although Marie survived, she was disabled. Even so, for his first few years, Thomas was mostly under her tutelage. “Marie was the closest to Thomas of all the siblings,” Pauline Sankara said. “She was the one who really witnessed his childhood. They protected each other.” Marie recalled that Thomas was a “very sensitive” boy who helped her out with chores, such as gathering wood and carrying water, which were quite difficult tasks given her disability.¹³

Although it was unusual for African societies of this era, Sankara grew up without the typical multigenerational extended family. As the children of a civil servant who constantly moved around and lived in towns, he and his siblings were cut off from their traditional rural roots. Moreover, theirs was the only Christian household in a larger Muslim family. They grew up without grandparents who might tell stories and teach them village foundation narratives, myths, and oral traditions, and so their social frames were very different from those in the Mossi heartland. Both of their grandfathers were deceased, and they never knew their maternal grandmother. Florence Sankara recalled: “Among our grandparents, Thomas only knew our paternal grandmother, Ralamanakaba, a little bit. She lived with our father, Sambo, briefly until Lassané took her to live with him in Tanguy.” Marie similarly explained that “Thomas knew her, but he didn’t have many chances to talk with her.” This absence of deep rural roots and ties to elders arguably made it much easier for Sanka...