On the 75th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Sankara, our West African correspondent writes about his revolutionary life and legacy

Thomas Sankara was the revolutionary former President of Burkina Faso, a land-locked country in West Africa. Sankara became a hero of the African left due to his implementation of bold, imaginative policies designed to transform the lives of workers and peasants in his country, but also to overcome the terrible plague of underdevelopment, which was a legacy of French Colonialism.

His assassination by his close comrades on 15 October 1987 was a massive loss to the progressive forces in Africa. Never, since the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961 by imperialist forces, was an African president openly mourned by progressive public opinion and the ‘street’ in Africa.

Living in Nigeria at the time of his assassination, l have vivid memories of the pain and anger displayed by ordinary working people when news of his assassination reached us. Not only had people lost a comrade who was determined to embark upon an independent path of development that eschewed implementation of the neoliberal policies of the IMF/World Bank, many felt they had lost a brother who spared no opportunity to champion the cause of African working people.

On a continent where the hope and confidence brought about by the struggles of working people to wrest independence from a recalcitrant imperialism in the early 1960s had given way to debt dictatorship and despondency, Sankara was a breath of fresh air, embodying the release of the creative powers of African youth and working people determined to build a new Africa that served them, not the African elite and the imperial powers with which many had forged relationships.

Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in what was then known as Upper Volta in West Africa, a land-locked country that suffered from all the ravages of the legacy of French colonialism.

It is rumoured that Sankara’s parents wanted him to be a Catholic priest, but he decided to join the army. Both professions were seen to be a means of social mobility in a nation where few such routes were available.

Sankara entered the military academy in 1966 at the age of seventeen and, whilst there, he witnessed the first military coup in post-independence Upper Volta, staged by Lt. Colonel Lamizana against the unpopular government of Maurice Yameogo.

In the military academy, trainee officers were taught by civilian lecturers in the social sciences. One of those lecturers, Adama Touré, had a great influence on the young Sankara. Touré invited some of his brighter students, which included Sankara, for informal discussions outside the classroom where they discussed world and African Liberation struggles, especially the Russian and Chinese revolutions.

In 1970, aged twenty, Sankara went for further studies at the military academy in Madagascar. Whilst there, he witnessed a popular uprising of students and workers that succeeded in toppling an unpopular and oppressive government.

In 1972, Sankara attended a parachute academy in France where he was further exposed to left-wing political ideologies.

In 1974, Sankara distinguished himself in a border war with Mali which later on, he candidly described as a waste of time, useless and unjust due to the unrealistic borders imposed on Africa by imperialism that served to divide communities and hold back development.

The maintenance of these artificial borders that assists in creating the balkanisation of the African continent remains an issue to this very day.

By the 1980s, Upper Volta, like many other African nations, was rocked by labour-union strikes and military coups, the result of the neocolonial form of development pursued by the Upper Volta ruling class. Neocolonial development, whilst delivering wealth to the elite and their French overseers, denied working people and peasants the resources required to live civilised lives.

Sankara’s charisma, leadership qualities and military achievements made him a popular choice for political appointments, but his personal and political integrity made him ‘difficult’ to deal with and put him at variance with various military governments that came to power, often leading to his arrest.

In January 1983, Sankara was selected as the prime minister in the government of the military-led Council for the Salvation of the People (CSP) led by Jean Baptist Ouédraogo. This position gave Sankara a platform to engage in international politics and meet with leading members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) like Fidel Castro of Cuba, Maurice Bishop of Grenada and Samora Machel of Mozambique.

However, Sankara’s grassroots popularity with workers and peasants, and his anti-imperialist politics made him unpopular with the more reactionary members of the CSP. Sankara was dismissed as prime minister and arrested.

On 4 August 1983, Blaise Compaoré, then Sankara’s close friend and army colleague, organised a group that freed Sankara. They then overthrew the CSP and formed the National Council of the Revolution of which Sankara became president.

This was a popular move that resonated with ordinary people but therein lay the Achilles heel of Sankara’s transformative project. Whilst well meaning, Sankara’s politics, no doubt good intentioned and undertaken in the name of the people, were carried out without the participation of the people. Yes, there was popular mobilisation, but working people had no control of the political process. Everything was decreed from above, leading to what John Markakis describes as ‘barracks socialism’.

Any radical political project for transformation must have, at its heart, the self-mobilisation, self-organisation of working people. It is the self-organisation of working people in everyday struggles that allows them to shrug off what Marx describes as the muck of ages and prepares them to shape, form and actively create the new society. Trotsky describes this process as bringing about a molecular change in consciousness that makes working people fit to govern.

Sankara’s use of the army as the instrument for transforming society was also problematic. The army is hierarchical, based on order and command, and brooking no opposition, which makes it unfit for building the new society. This authoritarian bent of the Sankara regime often led to the incarceration of its critics in the trade unions and on the left.

This is despite the formation of Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) which were meant to be organs of popular power controlled from below, but ended up being transmission belts for policies decreed from above and handed to the people.

It is no surprise that when difficulties arose in the government clique of the revolution, it was solved by guns, which led to Sankara’s untimely death.

Despite this, Sankara’s policies on health care, agriculture, women’s liberation, ecological awareness, education, decolonisation by changing the name of the country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (land of upright people), and infrastructural development were genuinely popular and brought real benefits to the mass of working people and the peasantry. Unfortunately, they came up against the limitations of the lack of resources contained in the national boundaries of a nation milked dry by imperialism in its colonial-capitalist form. This could only be overcome by the spread of the revolution to other West African countries, especially the more advanced ones like Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire by working people collapsing the colonial boundaries and pooling resources to negate underdevelopment and poverty.

It is one of the misfortunes of radical politics in Africa that Sankara’s project did not have this perspective of ‘Revolution in Permanence’.

Be that as it may, the life and politics of Thomas Sankara continues to inspire the youth and working people in Africa in their struggle to dispense of the rotten waste that is bourgeois rule in Africa and create a new society that would mark the beginning of peace, progress and prosperity for the African people.

We must note, however, that the Burkinabe experiment may serve as an inspiration but it cannot be a model for the revolution that working and oppressed people desperately need.

That can only be undertaken by the application of the ideas of genuine Marxism made into a material force by working and oppressed people in Africa linking up with the struggling mass of humanity globally in the quest to make this system of theft and robbery history.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet