Thomas Sankara

3 Key excerpts on "Thomas Sankara"

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  Africa’s Best and Worst Presidents

  How Neocolonialism and Imperialism Maintained Venal Rules in Africa

  • Nkuzi Mhango(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Langaa RPCIG

    (Publisher)

  155 Chapter 13 Sankara, Another Martyr Who Promised a lot for Africa “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future,” Sankara, 1985 cited in the Guardian (15 October, 2008). There are a few good African leaders of post-post-colonial era. However, only one leader stands out. This is none other than the late Figure 16: Thomas I. Sankara Burkinabe revolutionary President (image Daily Mail) 156 Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara (21 December, 1949–15 October, 1987). Born from a humble family, Sankara became the toast of the town after seizing power in the then Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) on 4 August, 1983; thereby becoming president up to 15 October, 1987 when he was tragically killed in the coup d’état his most trusted friend, Blaise Compaore staged. Sankara was too honest and too obsessed with his vision of decolonising his country so much that he was not able to see the enemies that congregated at the table with him. Therefore, his zeal and openness made him potentially an easy target for his enemies. This is natural to humans, especially when one wants to do something he or she thinks to be very important. Like Dedan Kimathi, Kenyan Mau Mau leader; and Patrice Lumumba of DRC that we have discussed above, Sankara was betrayed; and thereby killed by the person whom he wrongly trusted the most, Blaise Compaore. Wilkins (1989) notes that on Thursday October 15, 1987 when president Sankara was shot, along with thirteen others, just outside the Conseil d’Etente , the central parliament. The presidential post was immediately claimed and taken by Sankara’s right-hand man Captain Blaise Compaore, (p. 375).

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  Politics of African Anticolonial Archive

  • Shiera S. el-Malik, Isaac A. Kamola, Shiera S. el-Malik, Isaac A. Kamola(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Situating Ouagadougou in the middle of Francophone and African political life, however, conjures alternative historical imaginaries. Bougouma’s vision has an international gaze but internationality is an aesthetic feature of splendour here. This vision contrasts sharply with Sankara’s vision of Burkina as a nation where the Burkinabé citizenry are heir to the world’s revolutions. Secondly, Bougouma’s gesture to nativist aesthetics and grandeur facilitates the obfuscation of the nation’s peasantry. Bougouma’s image for the capital and for development falls aesthetically in line with an image of the nation that the elites would seek to project even if it requires overlooking the plight of its majority; again it runs contrast to Sankara’s political commitment to bettering the life of the rural peasantry even though both turn towards the international as a space for imaginal fodder. The Greater Ouaga Project originated in 2009 was a renewed promise to redress the disaster that Project ZACA had visited on the cityscape. But it now required a wholly grander scope and scale, comprising areas like Koubri and Komsilga which were previously situated far outside of the scope of urban Ouagadougou. Much of the construction boom in Ouaga and Bobo – and to a more limited extent in towns across the country – had been fuelled by an acceleration in the demarcation of land that began in the early 2000s coupled with an influx of investment from Burkinabé emigrants abroad. With the isolation of individual neighbourhoods, and the inability of protesters to join in public space as they had in the late 1990s, the city has sprawled into the countryside. Mud-brick cities cropped up well outside town in anticipation of further land demarcation, and checkpoints in and out of the city disappeared. Lines between the city and its rural surroundings have dissolved. This has also meant the intensification of social links between the countryside and the capital and the blurring of the line between rural peasant and urban labourer.

  METAMORPHOSES OF ARCHIVAL SENSORIA And there are here the errors of the rendering ... —Christopher Okigbo (1971, ‘Initiations’ 9)

  Before the neoliberal renovation of downtown Ouagadougou, Sankara was remembered as much for his international anti-imperial militancy and revolutionary spirit as he was for his everyday physical presence among the people of Burkina Faso within the social spaces they cohabited. In 2001–2, people still regularly told stories about the things they had seen or had heard Sankara do in the streets and about the capital. Anecdotes abounded of Sankara’s international grandstanding at the United Nations or in France where, for example, he refused to participate in any of the rituals of the Françafrique networks. In contrast to those African presidents at Franco-African summits photographed like feudal satraps with the French president in the middle, ‘Sankara arrived, had his meeting with Mitterand, and got right back on the plane without even taking a sip of French water’. But, these stories were closely coupled with intimate memories of his physical appearance in the cities and towns of the country. The streets where Sankara would pass on his bicycle to work in the 1980s looked visibly similar to the streets of Ouagadougou in 2002. The kiosks where he stopped to play foosball with the youth still existed, bore the same name, and probably furnished the same stools and tables. The streets were the same as when he participated in women’s day marches. People remembered when Sankara came to their town to ask questions about the problems of the country and of the town. They readily shared stories and pointed to where he met with them.

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  Endangering Development

  Politics, Projects, and Environment in Burkina Faso

  • Lars Engberg-Pedersen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  However, Sankara challenged most of the social groups who had hitherto prof- ited from national politics. Employment in the public sector was cut down, sal- aries reduced and agricultural producer prices increased, leading to a rise in food prices in the towns; trade unions, political parties and customary authorities were marginalized (Speirs 1991: 101-3). Even the rural population, whom Sankara had favored through his pricing policies, were perplexed and upset by his un- ambiguous claim that all land was the property of the state (Otayek, Sawadogo, and Guingane 1996). Sankara's assassination in 1987 ended this period of radical change from above. Captain Blaise Compaore took over. He adopted a softer line toward trade unions and customary authorities, and food prices in the towns were reduced (Speirs 1991: 105). Following internal and external pressure, a change to civilian rule RULERS AND RULED • 23 and a multi-party system was prepared. However, the process of reintroducing formal democracy did not gather pace until 1990, when the so-called revolution- ary movement, the Front National, held a congress on the subject, a commission produced a draft version of a constitution, and a national conference agreed to a slightly revised version of the constitution (Kiemde 1996; Sawadogo 1996). The ground was prepared for three elections during 1991-92, when a new constitu- tion was adopted, Compaore elected president, and a national assembly put to- gether. However, the transition to liberal democracy should be seen against the back- ground of not only eleven years of military rule but also Sankara's four years of radical and imposed change. The revolutionary project did not tolerate interaction between competing political visions or multiple agents: "Son achevement sup- posait l'inscription autoritaire de la societe dans la sphere de l'Etat et le monopole de la parole politique legitime" (Otayek, Sawadogo, and Guingane 1996: 10).

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