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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.

In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.

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.

BRICS is not a mirage, because even if a new $50 billion extraction-oriented BRICS Bank is behind its start-up schedule, there are growing interrelationships between Johannesburg-based accumulation and high-volume Chinese and Indian land-grabbing, along with Brazilian mineral exploitation – such as next door in Mozambique where thousands of peasants are resisting the Rio-based Vale Corporation’s coal grab – with Russian energy firms pounding on the doors.

Adding to the complications, Pretoria’s neoliberal coordination activities have been disappointing by all accounts. For example, George W. Bush’s State Department labeled Mbeki’s 2001 continental strategy known as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) ‘philosophically spot-on,’ and yet there was precious little to show for the subsequent dozen years of African appeals for Western foreign investment and increased aid, beyond the super-exploitative extractive industries.

Mbeki had requested a quintupling of annual Western donor aid, and that it flow through an intermediary Nepad office near Pretoria. Fat chance. To illustrate, G8 and International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt relief in 2005 left the poorest African countries repaying old loans at a rate 50 percent higher in relation to export revenues than before, according to the IMF. (Africa’s unrepayable loan principal was ‘forgiven,’ to be sure, yet the poorest countries were squeezed even harder as a result, to pay overdue interest.)

In 2009, while helping prepare Obama’s speech about good governance in Accra, Clinton asked eleven of Washington’s embassies in Africa to collect fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, email passwords, credit card account numbers, frequent flyer account numbers and work schedules of local political, military, business and religious leaders, including United Nations officials. Since then, Obama has been criticized for military interventions in oil-soaked Libya and AfriCom’s fight against Islamic fundamentalists in Somalia, for mercenary support and torture-rendition activities in several African countries, and for gifts of drones and US troop deployment in authoritarian Uganda.

In the Central African Republic in March, just three days before the BRICS gathered, a firefight with the Chad-backed Seleka rebel movement left 13 South African army troops dead. They were defending not only the resident tyrant, François Bozizé, but also Johannesburg businesses, including some with crucial links to leaders of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

Speaking at a University of KwaZulu-Natal seminar last week, leading Congolese intellectual Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja condemned both South Africa and the Western re-occupation of the DRC, reminding of Frantz Fanon’s assessment of the neighbourhood: ‘If Africa were a revolver, the Congo would be its trigger.’

But it is the US corporate record in many African countries that, most remarkably, left Obama offhandedly uttering one of his most hypocritical-ever remarks, during Saturday’s honorary doctoral degree ceremony at the University of Johannesburg in Soweto: ‘When we look at what other countries are doing in Africa, I think our only advice is make sure it’s a good deal for Africa. Somebody says they want to come build something here: Are they hiring African workers? Somebody says that we want to help you develop your natural resources: How much of the money is staying in Africa?’ Good question! The answer is absolutely critical for the South African economy, because our balance of payments has been demolished by the late 1990s’ overseas flight of Anglo, De Beers, Old Mutual (the biggest financial institution), South African Breweries (now the world’s second largest after a merger with Miller), the largest IT firm Didata, the bank Investec, the pulp-and-paper corporation Mondi and others which relisted on the London and New York stock markets. (Earlier in the decade, one of the founding firms behind the world’s largest mining house, BHP Billiton, had escaped South Africa, as had the luxury goods company Rembrandt and the insurer Liberty Life.)

These firms left with Mandela’s permission. Along with his 1996 World Bank-designed structural adjustment policy featuring trade and financial liberalization, corporate capital flight caused South Africa to be far more unequal, with far higher unemployment, a foreign debt five-fold bigger, and far worse ecological conditions than in 1994.

This background makes Obama’s next remark all the more spiteful: ‘I do think that it’s important for Africans to make sure that these interactions are good for Africa.

As the Heritage Foundation has argued, AGOA aims to ‘encourage governments to open their economies and build free markets’ – which, translated by Michael Besha of the Organization of African Trade Union Unity, means ‘coercing African countries into total trade and financial liberalization.’ Remarks Riaz Tayob of the Southern and East African Trade Institute, ‘standard US policy to debtor countries is to open financial markets, which increases South African vulnerability.’

The situation is even worse in other settings because US-backed dictators – such as Obama allies Kagame and Museveni – take no prisoners. Terrible conflagrations will probably continue in Central Africa; in the resource-cursed Great Lakes region a conservatively-estimated five million people have died over the last two decades.

In two press releases published on Tuesday 8 February, 2011, the unofficial opposition Gabonese government accused the United States' ambassador in Gabon of keeping a guilty silence on violations by Ali Bongo and his regime against civil liberties.