Thomas Sankara renamed his country Burkina Faso and wrote its anthem himself
In 1984 Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, land of the upright people, and its young president Thomas Sankara personally wrote the new national anthem. He also planted more than 10 million trees against desertification, sold off government luxury cars, and refused to switch on his office air conditioning.
Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako, French Upper Volta, third of ten children of a Mossi gendarme and his wife. As the son of one of the few Africans employed by the colonial state, he grew up in relative comfort in a brick house on a hill above Gaoua. A diligent pupil strong in mathematics and French, he was encouraged by priests toward the seminary, but he chose the secular lycée in Bobo-Dioulasso and, despite his Catholic parents' hopes, the army.
He joined the first intake of the Kadiogo military academy in Ouagadougou in 1966, aged 17, and as a cadet saw Upper Volta's first coup unfold. A history teacher, Adama Touré, drew him into informal discussions of imperialism, socialism and African liberation movements, and he played guitar in a band called Tout-à-Coup Jazz. At Antsirabe in Madagascar, from 1970 to 1973, his training extended to agriculture and raising farm yields, and he later counted the economist Samir Amin as a major influence and friend.
Named prime minister in January 1983, he clashed with the government and was put under house arrest; later that year a coup brought him to power at 33. His programme included land reform, suspended rural poll taxes, a literacy drive and vaccinations against meningitis, yellow fever and measles for millions of children. His government banned female circumcision, forced marriage and polygamy, and turned down IMF loans while accepting some foreign aid.
Critics pointed to Popular Revolutionary Tribunals and Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and Amnesty International cited arbitrary detention of opponents. His policies also alienated traditional chiefs, France and the Ivory Coast. On 15 October 1987 troops led by Blaise Compaoré killed him, and Compaoré ruled until a 2014 uprising; in 2021 a military tribunal found him guilty of Sankara's murder.
Source: Thomas Sankara
