On 6 April 2022, a military tribunal in Burkina Faso found former president Blaise Compaoré and 11 other men guilty of ‘attacks on state security, complicity in murder and concealment of a corpse’. The trial that began on 11 October 2021 was centred around the assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara in 1987. Compaoré and his closest lieutenant, Hyacinthe Kafando, were tried in absentia as they are both living in Côte d’Ivoire. 34 years after the murder of Sankara, the narrative throughout the case has focused on the ‘internal plot’ to rid Africa of its ‘Che Guevara’. It deliberately obscures the role of French and US imperialism.
The coup
On 15 October 1987, on the way to a cabinet meeting, Sankara and 12 other government officials were ruthlessly murdered. Gunshots shook the halls of the presidential palace in which they met. The sole survivor recounted the moment in vivid detail, explaining that President Sankara stood up immediately, stating that it was him that they wanted, and began to walk outside with his hands held in the air. The autopsy report found that he was left ‘riddled with more than a dozen bullets’.
This followed a period of intense crackdown on governmental privileges and corruption: Sankara sold off an entire fleet of government Mercedes cars and replaced them with the official service car of the ministers, the humble Renault 5. He reduced the salaries of all public servants, including his own, and implemented a policy of civil servants having to pay one month’s salary to public projects.
Whoever feeds you, owns you
The real threat Sankara posed however, was the anti-imperialist politics he implemented throughout the country. On 4 August 1984, one year after his accession, he renamed Upper Volta, the colonial label given by France, to Burkina Faso, translating as: ‘the land of the upright people’. In the same year, Burkina Faso’s aggregate food production was 25% below the annual average for 1979-83, along with six other African countries at the time. Sankara showed this was the result of imperialist exploitation that not only comes with ruthless violent conquest in the form of the gun, but often rears its ugly head in more subtle ways, through loans or ‘food aid’.
In the ten years from 1980 to 1990, the total culmination of debt from Burkina Faso owed to the IMF was at CFAF94 billion, or £128m. Debt drained the economy, robbing resources from the working class and the poor. Alongside refusing aid packages from the IMF, Sankara called upon other African nations to refuse to pay the debts previously placed on them by their former colonisers. Throughout the entirety of his presidency, payment towards all foreign debt was frozen.
Before Sankara’s presidency, only 8% of land in Upper Volta in 1979 was used for cultivation. 15% of this land was devoted purely to producing cotton. SOFITEX, a French multinational, had large ownership of cotton production at the time, with 45% of shares in the country. Under Sankara’s land redistribution policy, land was placed directly into the hands of the peasants. In three years wheat production increased from 1,700kg per hectare to 3,800kg per hectare, giving the whole country full food self-sufficiency. No longer would Burkina Faso have to export crops to finance France and the IMF debts.
Further domestic policies prioritised the people’s needs: a nationwide campaign raised literacy rates from 13% to 73%, and public health was promoted. Within the first weeks of his presidency more than two million children were vaccinated for the first time, against measles, yellow fever and meningitis – saving the lives of 20,000 to 50,000 children each year.
Women and Cuba
‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold up half of the sky.’ – Thomas Sankara.
The banning of female genital mutilation, polygamy and forced marriage ensued under the direct goals of the government. So too did appointing women to high governmental positions and heavily promoting contraception to families within both urban and rural areas. Sankara was deeply inspired by the example of socialist Cuba. In 1986, 600 young people, mainly from orphaned backgrounds, were sent to Cuba for schooling and to further their professional training. On their return they were to serve their communities as doctors, engineers and scientists.
Sankara’s Burkina Faso threatened imperialist rule in Africa. That is why France orchestrated, and the US supported, his murder using Sankara’s former comrade, Blaise Compaoré. On 15 October 1987 Compaoré assassinated Sankara and became President of Burkina Faso. Under Compaoré and the Burkinabé bourgeoisie, public policies were reversed. This took place
in the context of a renewed offensive by imperialism to try to regain positions lost in the revolutionary movements of 1974-1979. Natural resources were privatised. A United Nations university study in 2014 stated that one of the main causes of poverty in Burkina Faso today is directly linked to the lack of rural productivity previously being confronted by Sankara’s land redistribution policy. The US built a military base in the country. Burkina Faso re-joined the IMF. National debt currently sits at $9.96bn and is set to rise to $12.93bn by 2026.
42% of teenage girls are out of school, higher than any other country in West Africa. Only 14% of the population has access to electricity, a figure that is 36% lower than any other country in the region. A harsh struggle for resources led to numerous extremist groups in the area seeking control, resulting in a coup in 2015. Since 2015, it is estimated that thousands of people have been killed and around 1.5 million displaced due to fear of attacks. There was another military coup in January 2022. The overdrawn narrative of ‘internal affairs’ surrounding the guilty verdict of Blaise Compaoré and his accomplices should not be regarded as a victory in the eyes of any anti-imperialist. A victory will be breaking the chains of imperialism in Africa.
Alex Scurr
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 288, June/July 2022
