Thomas Sankara

Thomas Sankara was a young army captain who led the West African state of Upper Volta from 1983 until he was killed in a coup in 1987, renaming it Burkina Faso along the way. A Marxist and pan-Africanist, he pursued an ambitious programme of self-reliance, public health, literacy, tree planting and women's rights, and he remains a widely admired figure across Africa, although his government also curbed unions and opponents.

Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 at Yako, in what was then a colony within French West Africa, the son of a Mossi gendarme and a Catholic family that hoped he would enter the priesthood. Instead he joined the first intake of the military academy in Ouagadougou in 1966. From 1970 he trained as an officer at Antsirabe in Madagascar, where he witnessed popular protests against the government and read Marx and Lenin, as well as studying agriculture. Back home he won a reputation in a brief 1974 border war with Mali, a conflict he later called useless and unjust. In 1976 he took command of the commando training centre at Pô, and with fellow officers, among them Blaise Compaoré, he formed a secret political group within the army.

Upper Volta went through repeated military coups. Sankara became information minister in 1981, cycling to work and loosening press censorship, but resigned in April 1982. After yet another coup he was made prime minister in January 1983, only to be dismissed and arrested in May. On 4 August 1983 a coup organised by Compaoré made Sankara, then 33, president.

Exactly a year later he gave the country its new name, Burkina Faso, usually rendered as "land of upright people", along with a new flag and an anthem he wrote himself. His government nationalised land, pushed farmers towards irrigation and food self-sufficiency, and urged citizens to buy local cotton and grain instead of imports. Mass campaigns vaccinated some two million people between 1983 and 1985, built schools, clinics, housing and a railway with volunteer labour, and planted around ten million trees over fifteen months against the spread of the desert. Female genital mutilation, forced marriage and polygamy were outlawed, and women entered the cabinet and the army. Sankara cut officials' pay and perks, replaced the government's Mercedes cars with cheap Renaults, and refused a personality cult.

The revolution relied on Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, modelled on those of Fidel Castro's Cuba, which became tools of local control. People's Revolutionary Tribunals tried former officials for corruption under procedures that fell short of international standards. Striking teachers were dismissed in large numbers, trade union leaders were arrested, and in 1984 seven people linked to the former regime were executed after a summary trial. Traditional Mossi chiefs lost their powers.

Sankara denounced Western debt and aid, apartheid South Africa and the American invasion of Grenada, and he quarrelled openly with France, the former colonial power, and its ally Ivory Coast. A short war with Mali over the Agacher Strip in December 1985 went badly for Burkina Faso and weakened the regime at home.

On 15 October 1987 soldiers loyal to Compaoré killed Sankara and twelve others at a meeting in Ouagadougou. Compaoré ruled for 27 years and reversed most of Sankara's policies until popular protests drove him out in 2014. In April 2022 a military court in Ouagadougou convicted Compaoré in absentia of complicity in the murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Often called "Africa's Che Guevara", Sankara was proclaimed a hero of the nation in 2023, and in 2025 he was reburied in a mausoleum on the site of his killing.

Our 1945 map shows the French colonial federation where he was born, and our 1985 map shows Burkina Faso during his presidency.