Thomas Sankara

Biography

Thomas Sankara was born in 1949 in Yako in French Upper Volta, the son of a gendarme. He chose a military career over the priesthood his Catholic parents had hoped for, entering the military academy in Ouagadougou in 1966 and then training as an officer at Antsirabe in Madagascar, where he read Marx and Lenin and studied agriculture. He gained fame in a border war with Mali in 1974 and in 1976 took command of the commando training centre at Pô.

Under the military government of Saye Zerbo he became secretary of state for information in 1981, but resigned the following year. After another coup he was made prime minister in January 1983, was dismissed and arrested in May, and was brought to power by a coup led by his allies, including Blaise Compaoré, on 4 August 1983.

As president he pursued a Marxist and pan-Africanist programme he called the democratic and popular revolution. He renamed the country Burkina Faso in 1984, nationalised land, launched mass vaccination and literacy campaigns, planted millions of trees against desertification, and banned female genital cutting and forced marriage, while rejecting IMF loans and cutting official privileges. His government also set up Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and popular tribunals, and was criticised for detaining opponents.

On 15 October 1987 Sankara was killed in a coup that brought Compaoré to power. In 2022 a military tribunal in Ouagadougou convicted Compaoré in absentia of his murder.