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a country which cannot feed itself inevitably risks losing its independence and dignity. Sankara famously questioned: ‘Where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat. The imported rice, maize and millet; that is imperialism.’ To avoid this, Sankara insisted: ‘Let us try to eat what we control ourselves.’

Today, at the United Nations, the most conservative states are loudly celebrated for their ‘liberation’ of women, a liberation which is often more illusory than real. The struggle for the liberation of women has become a common one, with the creation of UN Women, parity laws and other measures aimed at women’s economic, social and political emancipation or empowerment. Once again, history demonstrates the prescience and strategic vision of Sankara, who was far ahead of his time.

This kind of movement is alien to the revolutionary ideal of August and those who display it demonstrate their flaws as petty bourgeois opportunists and dangerous counter-revolutionaries.

It is true that Sankara tried to instill a different mentality in the petty intellectual bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, they were quicker to repeat revolutionary slogans than to change their behaviour and lifestyle. In fact, this is one of the major challenges to any economic and socially transformative movement in African countries. Indeed, a number of intellectual ‘revolutionaries,’ once in power, tend to turn their backs on people and almost everywhere, they engage in the pursuit of money and privilege at the expense of the struggle for the decolonisation of the mind and the transformation of economic and social structures inherited from colonialism.

Sankara was a communist and had a great admiration for socialist regimes, including Cuba, which filled him with respect and pride. He recognised that the state was central to successful transformations in these countries. He also knew that a state just emerging from the long and terrible colonial darkness could not rebuild without active and committed leadership. So, for him, the state must be central in the process of economic, social and cultural transformation. It was under the leadership of the state and its institutions that the masses were mobilised to participate in the first PPD.

That is why Sankara, participating in his last summit in Addis Ababa in July 1987, had shouted at African leaders asking them to form a united front to demand the cancellation of illegitimate African debt. Because, he said, ‘debt in its current form is a cleverly organised re-conquest of Africa, that its’ growth and development conform to standards and levels which are totally foreign. It ensures that each of us becomes a financial slave, meaning a slave for those who had the opportunity, cunning, and deceit to invest their funds in us with the obligation that we repay. The debt can never be repaid since if we refuse to pay it our lenders will not die. Of that we can be certain. Yet if we do pay it is us who will die. Of that we can be equally certain.’

Sankara embraced the ideas and struggles of his illustrious predecessors, while others are in the process of adopting his ideas and struggles, which are more relevant than ever, since, ‘you cannot kill ideas,’ as he said in a speech in memory of Che Guevara, a week before his assassination.

Thomas Sankara was one of the few African leaders, if not the only, to have criticised and rejected the adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF, which have increased the debt burden and impoverished African countries. His government refused any form of collaboration with these institutions and rejected their ‘help.’ He developed and implemented his own self-adjustment program, which had been supported by the people who understood the merits of his policies and the sacrifices required of all, both citizens and leaders.

One of the pre-eminent theoreticians of endogenous development, Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo, states, ‘If we develop ourselves, it is by drawing from the elements of our own development.’ To put it in another manner, ‘We do not develop. We develop ourselves.’

Relying on one’s own strength also means accepting to live within one’s means and make the best use of available resources. This guarantees dignity and freedom. President Sékou Touré of Guinea had the audacity and temerity to state this in front of General de Gaulle in 1958 in his famous phrase: ‘We prefer freedom in poverty to slavery in opulence.’

As Sankara states: ‘Of course, we encourage everyone to help us eliminate aid. But in general, aid policies leave us disorganised, by undermining our sense of responsibility for our own economic, political and cultural affairs. We have taken the risk of borrowing new ways to realise our own well-being.’

This is the fundamental objective of Thomas Sankara. But he encountered the forces of inertia, such as the Westernised petty bourgeoisie, which constitutes an obstacle to any political rupture aimed at changing society, and the structures inherited from colonialism. It is this inertial force which explains in part the failure of the leftist parties in Africa, notably in ‘francophone’ countries. It is this obstacle which finally undermined the revolution in Burkina Faso and helped to create the conditions which led to the assassination of Thomas Sankara on 15 October, 1987.

Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.

Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar.

Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.

The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.

He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.

Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders.

He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices.

US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms.

First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.

Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.

Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.

A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.

Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.

The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.

Sankara was more than a visionary national leader - perhaps of most interest to us today is the way he used international conferences as platforms to demand leaders stand up against the deep structural injustices faced by countries like Burkina Faso. In the mid 1980s, that meant speaking out on the question of debt.

Of course not everything Sankara tried worked. Most controversially was his response to a teachers strike, when he sacked thousands of teachers, replacing them with an army of citizens teachers who were often completely unqualified. Sankara’s system of revolutionary courts were abused by those with personal grievances. He banned trade unions as well as political parties.

But in general, welfare and aid policies have only ended up disorganizing us, subjugating us, and robbing us of a sense of responsibility for our own economic, political, and cultural affairs. We chose to risk new paths to achieve greater well-being.”

“Those who led us into debt were gambling, as if they were in a casino.. there is talk of a crisis. No. They gambled. They lost... We cannot repay the debt because we have nothing to pay it with. We cannot repay the debt because it is not our responsibility.”

Given the extent of chiefly collaboration with the French authorities, it was little surprise that the chiefs found themselves at odds with the country’s new rulers. In 1962, Maurice Yaméogo, Upper Volta’s first president, cancelled state payments to chiefs and forbade their replacement in case of death or removal from office; the following year, his government abolished the cantons, placing chefs de canton on the same level as the previously subordinate village chiefs.

Sankara was no democrat. He had come to power in a military coup, and was unforgiving towards those he considered to be counter-revolutionaries. His government banned political parties and trade unions, and fired striking teachers. Seven people linked to a plot to overthrow him were executed in 1984. The cdrs (Comités de Défense de la Révolution), which had been set up to mobilize the population behind Sankara’s revolutionary agenda, were widely accused of abuses against those who got in their way. Naturally, the president was unpopular with those whose privileges he attacked, especially the chiefs, whose role he denounced as feudal, ‘retrograde and obscurantist’. [12]

He tried to get Burkina Faso’s donors to co-operate with one another and to fund parts of his programme. The donors, more used to dictating conditions themselves, boycotted his regime—although they would come back for Compaoré.

The Reagan administration had asked to see his un speech in advance, and insisted that certain passages be deleted; when Sankara refused, and declared his solidarity with the Palestinians and with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, he was denied permission to visit Atlanta at the invitation of its African-American mayor Andrew Young. [15] Harsch, Thomas Sankara, pp. 113–5. He also attacked Mitterrand for his complicity with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Compaoré dismissed his old friend in blunt terms: ‘His success in the international press had so spoiled him that he found it dishonourable to pull back. He preferred to get rid of us. He played the game. He lost.’ [18]

Then as before, there were widespread complaints of fraud, with three-quarters of the population illiterate, and 13 per cent of ballots spoiled. Some voters had been told they were taking part in a test to identify the incumbent. [25] ‘Disbelief Suspended’, Africa Confidential, 18 November 2005. But foreign observers applauded the lack of violence, and La Francophonie, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ecowas) all endorsed the outcome. In an open letter to Compaoré, Chirac praised the ‘dynamism’ of his campaign and expressed his hope for ‘the enrichment, with your help, of the strong and amicable partnership that unites our two countries’. [26]

Compaoré had no such inhibitions: the first loan agreement was signed in 1991. Liberalization and privatization proceeded apace, while social expenditure was pared back; the maternal mortality rate for women registered at health clinics rose from 350 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 492 in 1995.

His allegory, in which the heron was decked out in borrowed ‘democratic finery’, suggested that a façade of democracy could be more pernicious than none at all. The tale was equally damning about the heron’s sycophantic friends, who approved of him because he appeared to look like them. In the end, the friends betray the heron, taking back their loans and leaving him naked ‘before the eyes of the entire world, a hideous spectacle of brutality and cruelty’. [35] Zongo in Wise, ed., The Desert Shore, p. 166. In the light of recent events, Zongo’s story now seems most prophetic.

The crisis of 2011 differed from that of 1998–99 in two important ways. First, it was less concentrated, in both political and geographical terms. Discontent was not channeled by any organization; the protests developed spontaneously, without leaders or demands; moreover, ‘demonstrations began in the periphery and not the centre’. [45]

This drove a wedge between the rsp and the army; the fact that rsp mutineers escaped punishment, while hundreds of regular soldiers were imprisoned, did nothing to ease tensions. This would prove to be a factor of some importance when the President finally overreached himself.

Africa Confidential suggested that much of the rsp’s anger was directed towards Zida, Diendéré’s former deputy: Diendéré had—wrongly—calculated that Zida would be the instrument by which he could get the transitional government to do his bidding. However, Zida turned out to have a mind of his own and began arguing for the rsp to be dismantled. The coup was, first and foremost, a settling of scores between Zida and his former comrades-in-arms, who felt betrayed by their old second-in-command. [48] ‘The people take on the putschists’, Africa Confidential, 25 September 2015.

The immediate political winners from the uprising had been (very) late arrivals to the party. Kaboré and his ally Salif Diallo had been part of Compaoré’s inner circle until shortly before his ouster. Kaboré, a former banker, served as president of the National Assembly, prime minister and cdp chairman under the old regime; Diallo also held several prestigious portfolios. Their break with Compaoré was triggered by his plan to change the constitution, of which Kaboré had been openly critical for a long time.

An academic (and former Sankara ally), Valère Somé, had published a book charging Diallo with complicity in acts of torture on himself and other prisoners.

Diallo naturally denied everything. The real question, he insisted, was how much Somé had been paid to write such ‘insanities’; it was best not to pay any attention to a man who deserved the ‘Nobel Prize for lying’. [56]

He has recently become an Ivorian citizen in order to stave off the threat of extradition. [58] ‘Burkina Faso ex-leader Blaise Compaoré becomes Ivorian’, bbc News, 24 February 2016. The Abidjan villa where Blaise and Chantal live belongs to the Ivorian Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko—also, among other things, a good friend of Roch Kaboré. [59]

The ugeb advanced similar criticisms, emphasizing the importance of activism and dissent in creating social change. Four days before the election, they released a statement urging their members to free themselves from ‘electoral illusions’ and remain organized to press demands on the government. The students’ union pointed out that no candidate had proposed a break with the Bretton Woods institutions and the ‘criminal policies of structural adjustment’—indeed, Diallo and Kaboré were ‘the very people who were in business when structural adjustment programmes were introduced’—and warned that ‘students have nothing to hope for from the elections of 29 November 2015.’ [62]

‘Democracy is what happens between elections,’ says Aziz Sana, national co-ordinator of the Mouvement Ça Suffit. ‘It’s the manner of governing and using power. To be always with the people.’ [64]

While Burkinabè trade unions have historically been central players in the country’s politics, they were divided on the overthrow of Compaoré; instead, young people mobilized by musicians like Smockey, as well as social movements and even politicians from the official opposition, played a leading role.

Civil servants and public-sector workers are the most important social base for trade unionism in Burkina Faso, as in many African states. The elimination of public-sector jobs as a result of imf programmes has weakened unions, which now often rely on government subventions and ilo support in order to survive. Furthermore, the unions remain a predominantly urban and middle-class phenomenon, in a country where the vast majority of the workforce earns its living either through subsistence farming or the informal economy: recent estimates suggest that just 2 per cent of informal-sector workers have been unionized. [72]

The year before that album came out, huge protests had stopped Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade from extending his twelve-year reign. Awadi and his fellow musicians were instrumental in leading the charge against Wade. A movement of younger rappers and journalists called Y en a Marre gathered momentum, and helped bring thousands of young people onto the streets of Dakar. In March 2012, Wade was defeated at the ballot box; it was a triumph in the face of entrenched power. Next came the victory in Ouagadougou. Like Y en a Marre, Balai was founded by musicians, and initially relied upon their financial support—though the organization soon had its own self-financing branches throughout the country. [74]

It is clear that the space for change which emerged in 2014–15 is already beginning to contract. In his investiture speech, Kaboré cast himself as spokesman for ‘the nation’: ‘the nation is grateful to the brave sons and daughters, fighters for freedom and democracy these past years and especially during the popular uprising.’ He led a minute’s silence for the deceased, saluting Burkina Faso’s young people and the victory of democracy over dictatorship. But the new president went on to rail against ‘incivility, the undermining of the authority of the state’, and insisted that ‘order and discipline must prevail’—‘I am the first to know that the return to normality won’t be easy, but it’s the price we must pay if we don’t want to continue living in a Burkina Faso that runs at different speeds, with an uncertain future, where the gap is widening every day between a dwindling number of the wealthy, who have rights, and the broader masses doomed to poverty and exclusion.’ It sounded as if Kaboré was worried that too much unrest would put off the foreign investors

There is every reason to be wary of this characterization of state power as an individual, a man, an elder, someone who knows better than the Burkinabè people themselves—and of the framing of ‘normality’ as a time when ‘order’ and ‘unity’ must prevail, given that the most forceful expressions of popular sovereignty in Burkinabè politics have come when dissent has managed to hold its head above the parapet.