Thomas Sankara

On 6 April 2022, Compaoré and two others were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in absentia. Eight others were sentenced to between 3 and 20 years in prison. Three were found innocent.

In April 2021, 34 years after Sankara's assassination, former president Compaoré and 13 others were indicted for complicity in the murder of Sankara as well as other crimes in the coup. This development came as part of President Roch Kaboré's framework of 'national reconciliation'.

In October 2021, the trial against Compaoré and 13 others began in Ouagadougou, with Compaoré being tried in absentia. Ex-presidential security chief Hyacinthe Kafondo, was also tried in absentia. A week before the trial, Compaoré's lawyers stated that he wouldn't be attending the trial which they characterized as having defects, and also emphasized his privilege for immunity, being the former head of state. After requests made by the defence attorneys for more time to prepare their defence, the hearing was postponed until March 1st.

A statue of Sankara was unveiled in 2019 at the location in Ouagadougou where he was assassinated; however due to complaints that it did not match his facial features, a new statue was unveiled a year later.

In 2017, the Burkina Faso government officially asked the French government to release military documents on the killing of Sankara after his widow accused France of masterminding his assassination.

The exhumation of what are believed to be the remains of Sankara started on African Liberation Day, 25 May 2015. Permission for an exhumation was denied during the rule of his successor, Blaise Compaoré. The exhumation would allow the family to formally identify the remains, a long-standing demand of his family and supporters.

In October 2015, one of the lawyers for Sankara's widow Mariam reported that the autopsy revealed that Sankara's body was 'riddled' with 'more than a dozen' bullets.

According to Halouna Traoré, the sole survivor of Sankara's assassination, Sankara was attending a meeting with the Conseil de l'Entente. His assassins singled out Sankara and executed him. The assassins then shot at those attending the meeting, killing 12 other people. Sankara's body was riddled with bullets to the back and he was quickly buried in an unmarked grave while his widow Mariam and two children fled the nation. Compaoré immediately reversed the nationalizations, overturned nearly all of Sankara's policies, rejoined the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to bring in 'desperately needed' funds to restore the 'shattered' economy and ultimately spurned most of Sankara's legacy. Compaoré's dictatorship remained in power for 27 years until it was overthrown by popular protests in 2014.

Twenty years after his assassination, Sankara was commemorated on 15 October 2007 in ceremonies that took place in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Tanzania, Burundi, France, Canada and the United States.

Sankara’s revolutionary programmes for African self-reliance made him an icon to many of Africa's poor, and Sankara remained popular with a considerable majority of his country's citizens, though some of his policies alienated elements of the former ruling class. These antagonistic groups included the Burkinabé oligarchy, the tribal leaders — who were stripped of their long-held traditional privileges of forced labour and tribute payments — and the governments of France and its ally the Ivory Coast, which had previously dominated the nation through colonial power. On 15 October 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by Blaise Compaoré, who assumed leadership of the state shortly thereafter.

Sankara also launched education programmes to help combat the country's 90% illiteracy rate. These programmes had some success in the first few years. However, wide-scale teachers' strikes, coupled with Sankara's unwillingness to negotiate, led to the creation of 'Revolutionary Teachers'. In an attempt to replace the nearly 2,500 teachers fired over a strike in 1987, anyone with a college degree was invited to teach through the revolutionary teachers' programme. Volunteers merely received a 10-day training course before beginning to teach.

Improving women's status in Burkinabé society was one of Sankara's explicit goals, and his government included a large number of women, an unprecedented policy priority in West Africa. His government banned female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy, while appointing women to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant. Sankara also promoted contraception and encouraged husbands to go to market and prepare meals to experience for themselves the conditions faced by women. Sankara recognized the challenges faced by African women when he gave his famous address to mark International Women's Day on 8 March 1987 in Ouagadougou. Sankara spoke to thousands of women in a highly political speech in which he stated that the Burkinabé Revolution was 'establishing new social relations' which would be 'upsetting the relations of authority between men and women and forcing each to rethink the nature of both. This task is formidable but necessary'. Furthermore, Sankara was the first African leader to appoint women to major cabinet positions and to recruit them actively for the military.

The British development organization Oxfam recorded the arrest of trade union leaders in 1987. In 1984, seven individuals associated with the previous régime were accused of treason and executed after a summary trial. A teachers' strike the same year resulted in the dismissal of 2,500 teachers; thereafter, non-governmental organizations and unions were harassed or placed under the authority of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, branches of which were established in each workplace and which functioned as 'organs of political and social control'.

On 15 October 1987, Sankara was killed by an armed group with twelve other officials in a coup d'état organized by his former colleague Blaise Compaoré. When accounting for his overthrow, Compaoré stated that Sankara jeopardized foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighbouring Ivory Coast, and accused his former comrade of plotting to assassinate opponents.

Thomas Sankara defined his program as anti-imperialist. In this respect, France became the main target of revolutionary rhetoric. These attacks culminated in François Mitterrand's visit to Burkina Faso in November 1986, during which Thomas Sankara violently criticized French policy for having received Pieter Botha, the Prime Minister of South Africa, and Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA, in France, both 'covered in blood from head to toe'. French economic aid was reduced by 80% between 1983 and 1985.

A program of cooperation with Cuba was set up. After meeting with Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara sent young Burkinabés to Cuba in September 1986 to receive professional training and to participate in the country's development upon their return. The latter must be volunteers and are recruited on the basis of a competition with priority given to orphans and children from rural and disadvantaged areas. Some 600 teenagers have flown to Cuba to complete their schooling and receive professional training to become doctors, engineers, agronomists or gynecologists.

In July 1985 Burkina Faso declared the Malian secretary general of the Economic Community of West Africa, Drissa Keita, a persona non grata after he criticized Sankara's regime. In September Sankara delivered a speech in which he called for a revolution in Mali. Malian leaders were particularly sensitive to the inflammatory rhetoric, as their country was experiencing social unrest. Around the same time Sankara and other key figures in the CNR became convinced that Traoré was harbouring opposition to the Burkinabé regime in Bamako and plotting to provoke a border war which would be used to support a counterrevolution.

At dawn on 25 December 1985, about 150 Malian Army tanks crossed the frontier and attacked several locations. Malian troops also attempted to envelope Bobo-Dioulasso in a pincer attack. The Burkina Faso Army struggled to repel the offensive in the face of superior Malian firepower and were overwhelmed on the northern front; Malian forces quickly secured the towns of Dionouga, Selba, Kouna, and Douna in the Agacher. The Burkinabé government in Ougadougou received word of hostilities at about 13:00 and immediately issued mobilization orders. Various security measures were also imposed across the country, including nighttime blackouts. Burkinabé forces regrouped in the Dionouga area to counter-attack. Captain Compaoré took command of this western front. Under his leadership soldiers split into small groups and employed guerrilla tactics against Malian tanks.

On 4 August 1984, the first anniversary of his accession, he renamed the country Burkina Faso, meaning 'the land of upright people' in Mooré and Dyula, the two major languages of the country. He also gave it a new flag and wrote a new national anthem (Ditanyè).

Denouncing the support of the United States to Israel and South Africa, he called on African countries to boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At the United Nations General Assembly, he also denounced the invasion of Grenada by the United States, which responded by implementing trade sanctions against Burkina Faso. Also at the UN, he called for an end to the veto power granted to the great powers. In the name of the 'right of peoples to sovereignty', he supported the national demands of the Western Sahara, Palestine, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the South African ANC. While he had good relations with Ghanaian leader Jerry Rawlings and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, he was relatively isolated in West Africa. Leaders close to France, such as Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d'Ivoire and Hassan II in Morocco, were particularly hostile to him.

After being appointed Prime Minister in 1983, disputes with the sitting government led to Sankara's eventual imprisonment. While he was under house arrest, a group of revolutionaries seized power on his behalf in a popularly-supported coup later that year. Aged 33, Sankara became the President of the Republic of Upper Volta. He immediately launched programmes for social, ecological and economic change and renamed the country from the French colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso ('Land of Incorruptible People'), with its people being called Burkinabé ('upright people'). His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism and he rejected aid from organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. Sankara welcomed foreign aid from other sources but tried to reduce reliance on aid by boosting domestic revenues and diversifying the sources of assistance.

His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating more than 2 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles, which saved the lives of 18,000 to 50,000 children annually. His government focused on building schools, health centres, water reservoirs, and nearly 100 km of rail, with little or no external assistance. Total cereal production rose by 75% between 1983 and 1986. Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10 million trees to combat the growing desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from private landowners, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had pharmacies built in 5,384 out of 7,500 villages. From 1982 to 1984 the infant mortality rate dropped from 208 per 1,000 births to 145. School attendance under Sankara increased from 6% to 22%. Moreover, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to work outside the home and stay in school.

A coup d'état organized by Blaise Compaoré made Sankara President on 4 August 1983 at the age of 33. The coup d'état was supported by Libya, which was at the time on the verge of war with France in Chad (see history of Chad).

Sankara saw himself as a revolutionary and was inspired by the examples of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and Ghana's military leader Jerry Rawlings. As President, he promoted the 'Democratic and Popular Revolution' (Révolution démocratique et populaire, or RDP). The ideology of the Revolution was defined by Sankara as anti-imperialist in a speech on 2 October 1983, the Discours d'orientation politique (DOP), written by his close associate Valère Somé. His policy was oriented toward fighting corruption and promoting reforestation.

Sankara's first priorities after taking office were feeding, housing and giving medical care to his people who desperately needed it. Sankara launched a mass vaccination programme in an attempt to eradicate polio, meningitis and measles. From 1983 to 1985, 2 million Burkinabé were vaccinated.

Sankara was appointed Minister of Information in Saye Zerbo's military government in September 1981. Sankara differentiated himself from other government officials in many ways such as biking to work everyday, instead of driving in a car. While his predecessors would censor journalists and newspapers, Sankara encouraged investigative journalism and allowed the media to print whatever it found. This led to publications of government scandals by both privately-owned and state-owned newspapers. He resigned on 12 April 1982 in opposition to what he saw as the regime's anti-labour drift, declaring 'Misfortune to those who gag the people!' (Malheur à ceux qui bâillonnent le peuple!).

After another coup (7 November 1982) brought to power Major-Doctor Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo, Sankara became Prime Minister in January 1983 but he was dismissed (17 May). In between those four months, Sankara pushed Ouédraogo's regime for more progressive reforms. Sankara was then arrested after the French President's African affairs adviser, Guy Penne, met with Col. Yorian Somé. Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani were also placed under arrest. The decision to arrest Sankara proved to be very unpopular with the younger officers in the military regime and his imprisonment created enough momentum for his friend Blaise Compaoré to lead another coup.

In the 1980s, when ecological awareness was still very low, Thomas Sankara was one of the few African leaders to consider environmental protection a priority. He engaged in three major battles: against bush fires 'which will be considered as crimes and will be punished as such'; against cattle roaming 'which infringes on the rights of peoples because unattended animals destroy nature'; and against the anarchic cutting of firewood 'whose profession will have to be organized and regulated'. As part of a development program involving a large part of the population, ten million trees were planted in Burkina Faso in fifteen months during the 'revolution'. To face the advancing desert and recurrent droughts, Thomas Sankara also proposed the planting of wooded strips of about fifty kilometers, crossing the country from east to west. He then thought of extending this vegetation belt to other countries. Cereal production, close to 1.1 billion tons before 1983, will rise to 1.6 billion tons in 1987. Jean Ziegler, former UN special rapporteur for the right to food, emphasized that the country 'had become food self-sufficient'.

In 1976 he became commander of the Commando Training Centre in Pô. In the same year he met Blaise Compaoré in Morocco. During the presidency of Colonel Saye Zerbo, a group of young officers formed a secret organization called the 'Communist Officers' Group' (Regroupement des officiers communistes, or ROC), the best-known members being Henri Zongo, Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani, Blaise Compaoré and Sankara.

Following the 1974 clashes between Burkina Faso and Mali over the disputed territory of the Agacher Strip, the Organization of African Unity created a mediation commission to resolve the disagreement and provide for an independent, neutral demarcation of the border. Both governments declared that they would not use armed force to end the dispute. Nevertheless, by 1983 the two countries were in disagreement about the work of the commission. Sankara also personally disliked Malian President Moussa Traoré, who had taken power by deposing Modibo Keïta's left-leaning regime. On 17 September Sankara visited Mali and met with Traoré. With Algerian mediation, the two agreed to have the border dispute settled by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and subsequently petitioned the body to resolve the issue.

Returning to Upper Volta in 1972, he fought in a border war between Upper Volta and Mali by 1974. He earned fame for his performance in the conflict, but years later would renounce the fighting as 'useless and unjust', a reflection of his growing political consciousness. He also became a popular figure in the capital of Ouagadougou. Sankara was a decent guitarist. He played in a band named Tout-à-Coup Jazz and rode a bicycle.

In 1970, 20 year old Sankara went on for further military studies at the military academy of Antsirabe (Madagascar), from which he graduated as a junior officer in 1973. At the Antsirabe academy, the range of instruction went beyond standard military subjects, which allowed Sankara to study agriculture, including how to raise crop yields and better the lives of farmers—themes he later took up in his own administration and country. During that period, he read profusely on history and military strategy, thus acquiring the concepts and analytical tools that he would later use in his reinterpretation of Burkinabe political history.

Sankara is often referred to as "Africa's Che Guevara". Sankara gave a speech marking and honouring the 20th anniversary of Che Guevara's 9 October 1967 execution, one week before his own assassination on 15 October 1987.

He entered the military academy of Kadiogo in Ouagadougou with the academy's first intake of 1966 at the age of 17. While there he witnessed the first military coup d'état in Upper Volta led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana (3 January 1966). The trainee officers were taught by civilian professors in the social sciences. Adama Touré, who taught history and geography and was known for having progressive ideas, even though he did not publicly share them, was the academic director at the time. He invited a few of his brightest and more political students, among them Sankara, to join informal discussions about imperialism, neocolonialism, socialism and communism, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, the liberation movements in Africa and similar topics outside of the classroom. This was the first time Sankara was systematically exposed to a revolutionary perspective on Upper Volta and the world. Aside from his academic and extracurricular political activities, Sankara also pursued his passion for music and played the guitar.

After basic military training in secondary school in 1966, Sankara began his military career at the age of 19 and a year later was sent to Madagascar for officer training at Antsirabe where he witnessed popular uprisings in 1971 and 1972 against the government of Philibert Tsiranana and first read the works of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, profoundly influencing his political views for the rest of his life.

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara (French pronunciation: ​[tɔma sɑ̃kaʁa]; 21 December 1949 – 15 October 1987) was a Burkinabé military officer, Marxist–Leninist revolutionary, and Pan-Africanist who served as President of Burkina Faso from his coup in 1983 to his deposition and murder in 1987. Viewed by supporters as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly referred to as 'Africa's Che Guevara'.

Thomas Sankara was born Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara on 21 December 1949 in Yako, French Upper Volta, as the third of ten children to Joseph and Marguerite Sankara. His father, Joseph Sankara, a gendarme, was of mixed Mossi–Fulani (Silmi–Moaga) heritage while his mother, Marguerite Kinda, was of direct Mossi descent. He spent his early years in Gaoua, a town in the humid southwest to which his father was transferred as an auxiliary gendarme. As the son of one of the few African functionaries then employed by the colonial state, he enjoyed a relatively privileged position. The family lived in a brick house with the families of other gendarmes at the top of a hill overlooking the rest of Gaoua.