On 15 October 1987, Thomas Sankara and twelve of his comrades were assassinated in Ouagadougou. Thirty-nine years later, remembering the Burkinabè revolutionary means returning to the project he defended: making African independence a source of power to transform everyday life, rather than a flag flying over a dependent state.
Marxism rooted in African realities
Sankara came to power through the revolution of 4 August 1983. His outlook was socialist and anti-imperialist. The Political Orientation Speech, delivered on 2 October, examined class exploitation and the alliance between foreign interests and privileged local groups. It called for workers, peasants, women and young people to organise to transform those relationships.
Sankara’s Marxism connected political sovereignty with economic power. How independent is a people unable to decide what it produces, how wealth is distributed or who has access to land?
On 4 August 1984, Upper Volta became Burkina Faso. A colonial name gave way to an expression combining Mooré and Dioula, usually translated as “land of upright people.” Formal independence had come in 1960; the new name expressed a determination to give it deeper substance.
Schools, healthcare and an economy organised around need
The revolution encouraged communities to build schools, dispensaries and small water projects. Sankara’s August 1985 assessment describes collective work directed towards practical needs. Schooling and literacy were intended to strengthen people’s ability to shape their own future.
The November 1984 vaccination campaign reached more than two million children, according to the testimony of health minister Abdoul Salam Kaboré. Primary healthcare posts and community health training expanded. Bringing prevention closer to villages challenged an inequality that made treatable illness a death sentence.
Food sovereignty required stronger peasant production, water storage and soil restoration. In his 4 October 1987 interview, Sankara discussed dams, reforestation and locally manufactured tools. These measures made food sovereignty a practical programme of production, water management and ecological restoration.
The 1984 land reorganisation declared land state property and established use rights, challenging the treatment of land as private wealth. Promoting Faso Dan Fani, cloth woven from local cotton, aimed to support production and employment within the country. Processing raw materials, rather than simply exporting them, was part of the struggle for economic independence.
Women’s emancipation at the heart of revolution
In his 8 March 1987 speech, Sankara connected women’s subordination with economic exploitation and unpaid domestic labour. Emancipation required material independence and political participation. A revolution that left women subordinate would reproduce within the household the domination it claimed to fight.
His government appointed women to ministerial positions and campaigned against forced marriage and female genital mutilation. These policies placed women’s emancipation within the transformation of society itself.
Freedom with a material foundation
Freedom has a material foundation. Access to education makes knowledge a collective resource; healthcare challenges the idea that survival should depend on income; food sovereignty gives a people greater control over its future. Read together, these commitments express a socialist understanding of emancipation: people need the means to exercise power over their lives. Sankara’s programme invites us to judge independence through the everyday possibilities it opens for workers, peasants and women.
Africa’s wealth and the struggle over debt
Land and mineral resources belonged within the struggle for emancipation. Burkina Faso has gold, zinc, manganese and phosphate deposits, among other resources documented by the EITI. For an emancipatory politics, the decisive question is who controls those resources and the wealth they generate.
At the Poura gold mine in October 1984, Sankara contrasted miners’ conditions with the privileges of those running the business. Asking who benefited from the gold placed class conflict at the centre of the anti-colonial struggle.
On 29 July 1987, he urged the Organisation of African Unity to form a united front against debt. He saw debt as an instrument of subordination. His call was for collective refusal to pay: an isolated country would be vulnerable to retaliation. His appeal made African solidarity a strategy for resisting the power of creditors.
Challenging France
His internationalism challenged the hierarchies through which former colonial powers maintained influence after independence. In 1986, speaking in front of François Mitterrand, he condemned France’s reception of figures such as Pieter Botha, the representative of South African apartheid. The confrontation was public and specific.
His project challenged the neocolonial order by insisting that African peoples should determine their own priorities. Control of production, resources and development was at stake: the material foundations of imperial power.
Assassination and the questions about French intelligence
Sankara was killed during the coup that brought Blaise Compaoré to power. The April 2022 verdict sentenced Compaoré, Gilbert Diendéré and Hyacinthe Kafando to life imprisonment. Establishing responsibility among Burkinabè actors did not settle every question about possible international complicity.
Researcher Bruno Jaffré has highlighted testimony alleging that French personnel erased intercepted telephone recordings. Such allegations underpin demands to investigate possible French intelligence involvement. The sources consulted do not establish a judicial finding that those services ordered the killing, or conclusively identify all the alleged participants.
Macron’s promise and the disputed archives
In November 2017, Emmanuel Macron promised to declassify and transfer French documents concerning the case. Transfers took place between 2018 and April 2021. In November 2023, the French government said it had fulfilled that commitment.
The Justice pour Sankara, justice pour l’Afrique network disputed this. Citing the families’ lawyers, it said documents from the former secret défense classification were missing. In 2025, Jaffré continued to argue that the promise remained unfulfilled. Almost nine years after the promise, the dispute concerns the completeness of the material supplied, rather than a total absence of transfers.
The enduring force of a revolutionary example
Sankara matters because he makes it possible to imagine independence as a transformation of social relationships. His legacy asks who controls wealth, who sustains everyday life and who bears the cost of decisions made by those in power.
Remembering him means recovering his revolutionary programme and demanding the full truth about his assassination. His memory gains political force when it inspires people to organise and determine their own future.