By Geraldina Colotti on October 15, 2026.
Thomas Sankara
Every October 15, people commemorate the assassination of Thomas Sankara. Much has been written about this pan-Africanist revolutionary—the leader of the August Revolution in Upper Volta, renamed Burkina Faso (“The Land of Honest Men”) in 1984—often reducing his legacy to that of a pop icon of the Third World left: the “anti-imperialist president on a bicycle,” the austere military man who rejected privileges, the brilliant orator capable of challenging Western heads of state on the stages of the UN and the OAU. However, this hagiographic and purely label-driven narrative risks sterilizing the Marxist and strategic scope of his political praxis, transforming a radical revolutionary into a harmless T-shirt symbol.
Sankara was not a “moralist” who came to lead the state by some sentimental accident, but a military and political leader who lucidly understood how the formal decolonization granted by the French metropolis was a neocolonial myth: a transition in which the flag and the national anthem changed, but the plunder of resources, the yoke of foreign debt, and economic subordination remained intact. The original distinctiveness of Sankarist thought lies in having simultaneously attacked three pillars of structural oppression: imperialist dependence, through the outright rejection of international public debt, defined as a “neocolonial instrument of reconquest and the economic assassination of peoples”; the internal class structure and bureaucratic rent, through the dismantling of the privileges of the parasitic state bourgeoisie—nourished by French aid funds and disconnected from the material needs of the peasant masses; and patriarchal oppression.
It is on this last point—in the realm of women’s liberation—that the August Revolution (1983–1987) expressed its most radical and theoretically advanced break with nearly all other African revolutionary experiences of the 20th century. Sankara did not view women’s emancipation from a welfare perspective or as a legal concession bestowed from on high by bourgeois democracy; he analyzed it through the categories of historical materialism in these terms: The revolution and women’s liberation go hand in hand.
Let us not speak of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or a wave of human compassion, but rather as a fundamental necessity for the triumph of the revolution itself. Women bear the burden of double oppression: that of imperialism and that of the male patriarchy within the family and society.”
Under the leadership of the National Council of the Revolution (CNR), the Sankarist government passed a series of sweeping material reforms that dismantled centuries of patriarchal and feudal domination, outlawing oppressive institutions. Female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and the payment of bride price (dolo/dowry)—instruments used to objectify women’s bodies—were prohibited by law.
Above all, efforts began to promote women’s economic independence through the implementation of agrarian reform and land control. For the first time in the country’s history, rural women were granted title to land and guaranteed direct access to agricultural loans and collective machinery, freeing them from economic subjugation by household heads and local patriarchs.
They were guaranteed equal access to the state and military apparatus. The government promoted the massive incorporation of women into the ranks of the civil service, the judiciary, and the popular self-defense militias, breaking the male monopoly on the armed forces and political leadership. Another important step was the socialization of domestic work. Through a radical critique of the gendered division of labor, the revolution promoted the creation of community kitchens, collective daycare centers, and community markets to lighten the burden of reproductive labor that had fallen exclusively on the shoulders of women in villages and urban peripheries.
This program was not without pain: it clashed violently with resistance from the rural gerontocracy, traditional chiefs, and the sexist urban petty bourgeoisie, demonstrating that the transformation of gender relations requires revolutionary coercion against old relations of production and customs.
The disruptive force of Sankaraism did not end at Burkina Faso’s borders but became part of a dense network of international solidarity and alliances that directly challenged the Western imperialist bloc. In the 1980s, while the African continent suffered the brutal imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Sankara sought to forge a regional and transcontinental bloc of resistance.
At the international level, the strongest strategic and fraternal alliance was established with Cuba. Sankara saw in the Cuban Revolution—and in the figure of Fidel Castro—not only a model of anti-imperialist emancipation capable of withstanding Washington’s siege, but also a concrete ally. Under his presidency, high-level Burkinabé delegations traveled repeatedly to Havana, sealing agreements on medical, educational, and technical cooperation. Havana sent doctors, teachers, and volunteers to Burkina Faso to support large-scale mass literacy campaigns and national pediatric vaccination programs, while activists from Burkina Faso’s revolutionary committees were also trained based on the experience of Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
This internationalist outlook led Sankara to forge deep ties with the liberation movements of the time: from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa—where he bluntly denounced Western governments’ complicity with the Pretoria regime—to the progressive movements of Latin America and the Caribbean. The culmination of this global challenge came in the famous speech delivered at the UN in October 1984, in which Sankara proposed the creation of a united front of Third World debtor nations to collectively refuse payment of the foreign debt, denouncing it as a financial mechanism of plunder directly inherited from colonialism. This autonomous political line, which rejected subordination to both the Western and Soviet blocs, isolated Burkina Faso from the African regimes aligned with Françafrique, but ignited the consciousness of the masses across the entire continent.
A program so profoundly subversive to the balance of power maintained by transnational capital and French neocolonialism could not be tolerated. The U.S. and French diplomatic apparatuses themselves viewed Burkina Faso as a dangerous hotbed that had to be eradicated at its roots.
The reaction of French imperialism—guided at that time by François Mitterrand’s administration and coordinated regionally by the puppet regimes of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast and Togo—relied on the quintessence of counterrevolution: internal betrayal. On October 15, 1987, a bloody military coup d’état ended the lives of Thomas Sankara and twelve of his comrades, who were massacred at the Council of Ministers in Ouagadougou.
The man who physically led the assassination squad was Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s comrade-in-arms, right-hand man, and co-founder of the revolution—corrupted and manipulated by the French and Ivorian secret services. With the establishment of Blaise Compaoré’s twenty-seven-year regime, Burkina Faso was immediately steered down the path of neocolonial subjugation: nationalizations were revoked, rampant privatizations devoured public assets, and the memory of Sankara was banished from the public sphere, silenced by a domestic terrorist regime.
While the coup sought to physically eliminate Thomas Sankara, the counterrevolution also methodically targeted his family, ushering in an ordeal of persecution, death threats, and psychological violence aimed at severing any political continuity. Immediately after the assassination, Sankara’s wife, Mariam Sankara, along with her two young sons (Philippe and Auguste), was forced to flee Burkina Faso in haste to escape the new regime’s hitmen. Thus began an extremely harsh political exile that lasted more than twenty years, spent mainly in France. Under constant surveillance by the secret services and protected only by the solidarity of international committees and the European militant left, Mariam never succumbed to the blackmail of silence.
For decades, Mariam Sankara’s struggle has followed a two-pronged path. First, the legal battle and the demand for justice. In 1997, once the formal statute of limitations provided for by local law had expired, Mariam filed the first formal complaint with the courts in Ouagadougou regarding her husband’s murder and the forgery of the death certificate (which the regime’s doctors had falsely filled out, attributing the death to “natural causes”). Faced with systematic cover-ups by the judiciary under Compaoré’s control, her legal action extended to international bodies, ultimately bringing the case before the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
At the same time, Mariam dedicated herself to preserving the memory of the struggle. She became a living symbol of African women’s resistance against the impunity of Western-backed dictators, traveling tirelessly and transforming the demand for the truth about Sankara into a global political platform for anti-imperialist struggle.
Two of Sankara’s sisters, Blandine and Odile—who were also persecuted—were highly active in the public sphere. The first, an activist for food sovereignty and women’s rights, is the founder and coordinator of the Yelemani (Change) association, which is committed to promoting the economic and social emancipation of rural women. The second, a well-known actress, theater director, and prominent figure in the African cultural scene, promotes the historical memory of the Burkinabe revolution through theater and the visual arts.
The tenacious resistance in the face of the persecution suffered by the Sankara family found its first historic moment of political and judicial catharsis thanks to the popular struggles that swept through Burkina Faso in the 21st century. In October 2014, a massive popular uprising—fueled directly by historical memory and ideological appeals to the legacy of Thomas Sankara—toppled Blaise Compaoré’s 27-year regime, forcing him to flee to Ivory Coast. The dictator’s downfall finally paved the way for a radical review of the judicial proceedings.
Between 2021 and 2022, the historic trial for the assassination of Thomas Sankara was held in Ouagadougou, an event that Mariam Sankara herself returned to her homeland to attend. The military tribunal handed down life sentences in absentia to Blaise Compaoré himself and to the key leaders of the 1987 conspiracy, dealing a devastating symbolic blow to the culture of neocolonial impunity.
Today, in the contemporary geopolitical context of the Sahel, Thomas Sankara’s legacy has returned with force to the center of political debate and practice. The entire region finds itself at a crossroads amid a profound crisis, marked by the historic failure of neocolonial security policies (such as the French military presence, which has been formally expelled from several states in the region), by the devastating spread of jihadist terrorism, and by the desperate quest for new state sovereignty and food security on the part of the new military juntas and popular movements in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
In this complex scenario, rife with unprecedented imperialist tensions, the figure of Sankara—constantly invoked in public squares, official speeches, and anti-imperialist demands—represents much more than a monument to the past: he is the theoretical and material benchmark against which to measure social justice, women’s liberation, and the definitive end to the plundering of African resources. The story of Thomas Sankara, preserved and revitalized by Mariam’s resistance and the sacrifice of her comrades, remains the irrefutable proof that the emancipation of African peoples is not achieved by begging for charity from the rulers, but by breaking the chains of capital with the organized strength of the masses.