Sean Jacobs, The Guardian
Twenty-one years ago
today, armed men burst into the office of Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina
Faso, and murdered him and 12 of his aides in a violent coup d'état. In events
that eerily paralleled those in the Congo 27 years earlier, the attackers cut
up Sankara's body and buried his remains in a hastily prepared grave. The next
day Sankara's deputy, Blaise Compaoré, declared himself president. Compaoré has
ruled the country ever since and has both attempted to co-opt and distort
Sankara's memory.
Burkina Faso is a very
poor country in west Africa and hardly merited any mention outside that region
until Sankara overthrew the country's corrupt military leadership in 1984. By
this year, according to the UN human development report, life expectancy stood
at 51 years, 23% of adults can read, three in every ten children are
underweight for their age, and more than two-thirds of its 13.5 million people
live on less than $2 a day.
Like Patrice Lumumba – an
earlier principled political leader who was a violent casualty of the cold war
– Sankara proved to be a creative and unconventional politician. He wanted to a
chart a "third way," separate from the interests of the major powers
(in his case, France, the Soviet Union and the United States). This, however, resulted
in a complex legacy where those who praise his social and economic reforms (see
below) have a hard time squaring it with his often-undemocratic politics.
The recently released
documentary film, Thomas Sankara: the Upright Man by the British filmmaker
Robin Shuffield, details how Sankara made tactical blunders and underestimated
the strength of his opponents. This might be why, unlike Lumumba among third
world nationals or Nelson Mandela among western elites, people don't talk much
of Sankara today, whether in Africa or in the west. One west African historian
suggests he was a 1960s figure trapped in the politics of the 1980s.
In 1985, Sankara said of
his political philosophy:
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 openly challenged
both French hegemony in west Africa as well as his fellow military leaders
(Sankara labelled them "criminals in power"). He called for the
scrapping of Africa's debt to international banks and to their former colonial
masters.
His reforms were
widespread. For one, in 1984 he changed the country's name from Upper Volta,
the name it kept from colonialism, to Burkina Faso. The country's new name
translates as "the land of the upright people".
Sankara preached economic
self-reliance. He shunned World Bank loans and promoted local food and textile
production. (There's a classic scene in Shuffield's documentary where he had
the whole Burkina delegation to an OAU meeting decked out in local textiles and
designs.) Women, the poor and the country's peasantry benefited mostly from the
reforms. Sankara outlawed tribute payments and obligatory labour to village
chiefs, abolished rural poll taxes, promoted gender equality in a very
male-dominated society (including outlawing female circumcision and polygamy),
instituted a massive immunisation programme, built railways and kick-started
public housing construction. His administration aggressively pushed literacy
programmes, tackled river blindness and embarked on an anti-corruption drive in
the civil service.
He discouraged the
luxuries that came with government office and encouraged others to do the same.
He earned a small salary ($450 a month), refused to have his picture displayed
in public buildings, and forbade the uses of chauffeur-driven Mercedes and
first class airline tickets by his ministers and senior civil servants.
But Sankara was also
undemocratic. He banned trade unions and political parties, and put down
protests (most significantly one by teachers in 1986). Many people were the
victims of summary judgments by people's revolutionary tribunals, which
sentenced "lazy workers," "counter-revolutionaries" and
corrupt officials. Sankara himself would later admit on camera that the
tribunals were often used as occasions to settle private scores.
By 1987, he was
politically isolated. His enemies – a mix of the French political establishment
(he had humiliated President François Mitterand in public on a few occasions)
and regional leaders (like Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny) – began to
tire of him.
Compaoré is widely
suspected to have ordered Sankara's murder in order to do the French and
regional dictators a favour. Though Compaoré publicly grieved for Sankara and
promised to preserve his legacy, he quickly set about purging the government of
Sankara supporters.
In contrast to the cool
reception given Sankara earlier, Compaoré was welcomed by western governments
and funding agencies. Within three years, Compaoré had accepted a massive IMF
loan and instituted a structural adjustment programme (largely seen as one of
the major causes for the ongoing economic crises in Africa). Compaoré also
reversed most of Sankara's reforms. (Not surprisingly this included the
insistence that his portrait hang in all public places as well as buying
himself a presidential jet.)
For the last 20 years,
Burkina Faso's government has proved reluctant to investigate Sankara's death
fully. It wants to "move on". And Compaoré is in a hurry to do so.
Compaoré – whose regime has been implicated in the civil wars in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia – is having a makeover as a
"democrat" and is now a key ally of the US. In November 2005, he was
re-elected. That means Compaoré will have held power, uninterrupted, from 1987
to 2012.
Sankara's short four-year
reign – for all its faults – as Shuffield's film show, pointed briefly to the
potential of different political futures for Africans.
