Thomas Sankara

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was born on December 21, 1949, in Yako, in what was then the French colony of Upper Volta. His father was a Mossi and his mother a Peul, an interethnic marriage that was itself a small political act in the region. He was the third of ten children, raised Catholic, and sent to military academy in Madagascar at age nineteen — where, during student uprisings in Antananarivo in 1971, he first read Marx and the Pan-African anti-colonial literature that would shape his thinking. He returned to Upper Volta a paratrooper and a guitarist.

He took power in a coup on August 4, 1983, at age thirty-three. Within weeks he had renamed the country from Upper Volta — a colonial geographical label — to Burkina Faso, a constructed phrase drawn from two of the country's major languages, Mooré and Dioula, meaning "the land of upright people." He was thirty-three years old. His government would last four years.

What that government accomplished in those four years is the substance of the legend. He vaccinated 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles in a single mass campaign — an extraordinary public-health logistical feat. He built schools, clinics, and railroads using national labor mobilization rather than borrowed foreign capital. He outlawed female genital cutting, forced marriage, and polygamy by decree, and required every government official to attend market once a week and prepare meals as the women of their household did — a deliberate inversion of patriarchal habit. He appointed women to senior cabinet posts. He redistributed land to peasants. He planted ten million trees against the southern advance of the Sahara, a precursor to today's Great Green Wall.

He refused International Monetary Fund loan conditions. At the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in July 1987, he called for African nations to refuse collectively to repay colonial-era debt, arguing that the debt was illegitimate — owed to the institutions that had taken from the continent rather than given to it. He warned, in that speech, that any single nation that refused would be assassinated; "we need a united front against the debt." He drove a Renault 5, the cheapest car in the country, and sold the government Mercedes fleet. He paid himself approximately $450 a month.

He was assassinated on October 15, 1987, by a hit team organized by his closest comrade and second-in-command, Blaise Compaoré, with French and Ivorian intelligence support. Compaoré held the presidency for the next twenty-seven years. He was finally overthrown in 2014, tried in absentia for Sankara's murder, and convicted in 2022.

Sankara's body, which had been buried hastily in an unmarked grave outside Ouagadougou, was exhumed in 2015. The original burial site has been declared a national monument. Across Burkina Faso, across West Africa, and across the continent, his face appears on murals and his speeches play in markets. He said: "While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas."