reviewsWar

The Soldier Who Named it Burkina Faso

In Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, Ernest Harsch provides a biography of an African leader who must be understood if one is to understand West Africa and radical left-wing politics across the continent. Thomas Sankara, “Africa’s Che Guevara,” ruled Burkina Faso after seizing power in a 1983 coup with the help of Blaise Compaoré and was president until he was killed in 1987 in a coup which was also backed by Compaoré who went on to rule Burkina Faso until overthrown in a 2014 coup. However, the real story of Burkina Faso, as this book points out, is Sankara – a man who quite literally left his mark on the country as it was Sankara who changed the name of this nation from “Upper Volta” to “Burkina Faso.”

The book is short, clear and concise and at just 152 pages it is a quick read. The author’s portrait of Sankara is sympathetic, which the author concedes in the opening of the book –

“I knew Sankara. I spoke with him directly on half a dozen occasions, a couple of times at length. I was also able to observe him giving public addresses and in other interactions while I was covering developments in Burkina Faso as a journalist. This limited familiarity has led me to highlight certain aspects of his personality and style. It may as well introduce some subjective bias.”

This book is useful for scholars as one of the few English language books on Thomas Sankara’s life. Harsch’s sources are his own writings on Sankara and numerous press clippings on Sankara’s rule; there are few critical sources in the book and this also lends itself to a romantic view of Sankara. Indeed, a romantic view of Sankara is de rigeur among those who see him as Africa’s Che Guevara – an image Sankara himself sought to cultivate. Sankara died a year younger than Che Guevara and shared his same panache for wearing berets. Despite his romantic image, we cannot ignore the fact that Sankara was a military dictator who imposed authoritarian one party rule on his country.

Harsch notes that the area was of what was to become Burkina Faso was not considered “pacified” by the French until 1916 and it was only in 1919 that the French formalized the borders of “Upper Volta.” It was a region that was to remain an afterthought of the French Empire and beyond.

A military career for Sankara, according to Harsch’s telling, was probably pre-ordained

Sankara was born in on the 21st December 1949 and his family was part of the minority Mossi Silim ethic group. His father converted to Catholicism from Islam while serving in the French Army during World War II. There is little in Sankara’s early life as presented in Harsch’s book that is worth comparing to other revolutionaries of the 20th century. There is no hint in the book of the father-son clash that we find in the lives of Mao and Castro (both Sankara and his father were soldiers), nor was there a revolutionary older sibling as in the lives of Lenin and Trotsky. If anything, Sankara played this r