““Our revolution is not a public- speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country“.- Thomas Sankara
Today (21 December), marks the 76th anniversary of the birth of one of Afrika‘s greatest revolutionary figures- Baba Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara.
Born on 21 December 1949, Sankara was a Burkinabé military captain, pan-afrikanist theorist, and practioner.
From 1983 to 1987, he was also President of Burkina Faso. In 1983, at age 33, Sankara seized power in a popularly coup.
Part of his agenda was to eliminate elite corruption, free Burkina Faso from French domination, and build a truly sovereign Afrikan country, wherein Afrikans can live as full human beings and not colonial subjects.
He immediately launched one of the most ambitious programmes for social and economic change ever attempted on the Afrikan continent.
His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign, andpromoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles.
Other components of his national agenda included plantingover 10 million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel, doubling wheat production by redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents, and establishing an ambitious road and rail construction programme to “tie the nation together”.
In the various regions, Sankara also called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities construct schools with their own labour.
His commitment to restoring the dignity of women saw him outlawing female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy and appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant.
He also nationalised all land and mineral wealth as a way of breaking from the control of predatory western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
His foreign policies were centered on anti- imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for the rejection of the debt owed to European countries.
He crowned all this by renaming the country from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (“Land of Upright People”).
In order to achieve this radical change of society, he increasingly exerted tight control over the nation, eventually banning unions and a free press, which he believed could stand in the way of his plans.
To counter opposition in towns and workplaces around the country, he also tried corrupt officials, “counter-revolutionaries” and “lazy workers” in Popular Revolutionary Tribunals.
Additionally, as an admirer of Fidel Castro‘s Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs).
While his radical policies made him popular among ordinary Burkinabe and Afrikans on the continent, they also unsettled certain sections of the Burkinabe elite.
This included the small but powerful Burkinabé middle class, the ethnic leaders, France, and its ally, the Ivory Coast.
All of this helped precipitate his overthrowal and assassination on 15 October 1987, in a coup d’état led by his friend and confidante Blaise Compaoré.
A week before his assassination, Sankara declared: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can not kill their ideas.”
Today, Sankara‘s ideas continue to inspire anti-imperialist resistance in Burkina Faso, Afrika, and the world.
His influence is also palpable in the policies and programmes of the current Burkina Faso government, under, Captain Ibrahim Troare, who came to power in a similar fashion as Sankara.
In the face of reinvigorated imperialism and bullying, today, Afrika needs the courage and political clarity of Sankara more than ever before.
