Thom Sank

Though previous entries of these ramblings swore never to engage in any sort of discussion regarding African cultural and historical matters, one towering figure in the history of Burkinabè (the fairly nifty adjective denoting something from Burkina Faso) politics demands mention: Thomas Sankara. No trip to the capital Ouagadougou can be complete (at least for those who have a love for politics) without a visit to the garbage-strewn cemetery in the city’s Sector 29. In a graveyard despoiled by thousands of discarded plastic bags, rotting garbage, refuse fires, itinerant ne’er-do-wells, and chipped graves, there is the freshly repainted tomb of Comrade Captain Thomas Sankara (Thom Sank) and several of his ministers.

Depending on who’s counting, Burkina Faso is the world’s second or fourth poorest country (really, you can find data to support both) – how they have contrived to fall behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a mystery to me, yet the fact remains that the country is desperately poor. The country’s former colonial rulers, the erstwhile French, tended to make a hash of it in most of their African countries (well, I shouldn’t single the French out, what country actually benefited from the civilizing mission of the European imperialists?), but at least successor states like Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire tended to inherit a bit more infrastructure. Burkina, on the other hand, had little on the ground at independence; like most countries in Africa, the nation contains a highly homogenous ethnic mix (an outcome of the “rational and enlightened” Western countries’ drawing of irrational lines in the sand to create artificial and illogically conceived African states) that militates against effective nation building.

Duly, it came as little surprise that the fledgling state suffered coup after coup in the decades following independence. Most newly installed military administrations made soothing noises about a quick return to civilian rule and an end to wanton corruption (Pervez Musharraf, anyone?), only to join the parasitical class they sought to eliminate. The man who bucked this trend and became a hero to a generation of African youth was the ambitious young military man, Thom Sank.

Sankara’s revolution was only four years old when the “rectification” came, an overly optimistic and euphemistic term that sanitizes the fact that the Captain was overthrown by his former friend and ally, Blaise Compaoré, and received a bullet in the back of the head for his trouble. Despite the somewhat inglorious end (although such ends always tend to immortalize those that would have remained extremely mortal had they not walked the path of martyrdom), his policies earned him the title of the “Che Guevara of Africa.” His ascetic, populist, industrious, and charismatic approach drew adoration from the poorer sections of Burkinabè society: He succeeded in a mass vaccination campaign for children nationwide, championed women’s rights, encouraged literacy, and kept his word about stamping out corruption. Long a believer that economic colonialism was continuing even if official French occupation had ended, Sankara sought to redirect the country’s economy along a more autarkist path in an effort to encourage domestic industry.

But while such efforts were wildly popular among the lower strata of society, other measures tended to grate against more privileged sections of the country (calling rich people thieves probably was not conducive to cross-class bridge-building). Sankara slashed civil service wages, and sold the ministerial fleet of Mercedes in favour of more modest Renaults. Echoing Mao, he also “encouraged” ministers to go out and help in the countryside, lest such paper-pushers get too comfortable in their white collar jobs. Alas, such policies proved too much both for the country’s traditional elite and the state’s former colonial powers: Sankara, along with several of his ministers, were deposed, gathered together, and shot in Compoaré’s “rectification of the revolution.”

Though undoubtedly a man of certain excesses, Sankara remained true to his anti-corruption principles in the end: A survey of his personal effects revealed a beat-up Renault, a bicycle, a few guitars, and a couple hundred dollars. Fittingly, then, one of the superstars of 1980’s African politics rests not in a great mausoleum (those deposed in coups rarely are mind you, Adnan Menderes notwithstanding), but in a rubbish-strewn cemetery that has become a place of discreet pilgrimage for newer generations appalled by current levels of corruption and elitist excess. In dying so early, Thom Sank guaranteed his own immortality.