The Inevitable Revolutionary

Sankara sought to forge a national identity that transcended ethnic, class and gender differences which had been exacerbated by the exploitation of indigenous Burkinabè society. He hoped that by transforming national consciousness, the Burkinabè would be able to become materially self-reliant. Sankara’s rhetoric and pedagogy effectively placed the small, landlocked country on the international stage and ultimately unsettled France (and the United States). Ironically, the educational and cultural experiences that would inform Sankara’s approach to decolonization were afforded to Sankara as the son of a colonial guard and a descendant of the dominant ethnic group, a direct result of the colonization of Burkina Faso—it was the colonial machine that equipped Sankara with the tools to be employed in service of the Burkinabè revolution.

The works of Martinican philosopher, Frantz Fanon, offer opportunities to take more critical look at Sankara’s upbringing. From a ‘Fanonian’ perspective, considering how Sankara’s upbringing impacted his ideological tools in forging national consciousness reveals the contradictory nature of the colonial system. It exposes the inevitability of a humanist uprising, not unlike Sankara’s in the 1980s, against a system which exists on the perpetual and evolving subjugation of a people.

Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako, Burkina Faso. The first son of WWII veteran and gendarme, his father’s place in the colonial administration created opportunities for Sankara to receive extensive military training and rank. According to Michael Prairie, the military was, ‘one of the few avenues for young people of his generation in sub-Saharan Africa to receive a higher education.’ In his biography of Sankara, Brian J. Peterson notes that Sankara’s father was on the ‘conservative side of politics’, and ‘supported maintaining close ties to France and was wary of young leftists.’ Moreover, Peterson writes that during the emerging African liberation movements, ‘the French army and its African soldiers played imp­­ortant roles in controlling political processes. As veterans took up positions as colonial guards and gendarmes, they served as “political agents,” tasked with monitoring leftists.’