Thomas Sankara and Burkina Faso's "Black Spring"
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- Published on Sunday, 08 February 2015 23:22
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1078 .... February 9, 2015
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Thomas Sankara and Burkina Faso's
"Black Spring"
Ernest Tate
A press report in 1983 that a popular uprising in Upper Volta, a small and poor land-locked country in Western Africa had led to an obscure, but charismatic army officer becoming head of state was truly inspiring news for all those looking for some kind of breakthrough against imperialism in that part of the world. It had come after the depressing news that Margaret Thatcher's Britain had defeated Argentina in the Malvinas and Ronald Reagan's America had crushed Grenada, a clear message to the world that, on a moment's notice, imperialism would brutally crush anything that threatened its power. But because the American empire had been taken by surprise by the Cuban revolution twenty-four years earlier,... many of us were then hopeful that maybe we were witnessing such a possibility again, in Africa.
And indeed it looked like our hopes were being realized. In a few short dramatic years, we saw the setting up, in what would become Burkina Faso, of the first "workers and farmers’ government" on that continent. (A political variant first envisioned by the early Communist Third International where the oppressed get governmental power but the state remains in the hands of the ruling classes, a highly unstable arrangement not envisaged to last very long.)
Ernest Harsch's short biography of Thomas Sankara (the first in English) who would become an icon of Africa's long struggle against neo-colonialism, helps us to understand the revolution that swept the small country of Upper Volta in the 1980s. It ended with Sankara's brutal assassination, along with six of his closest advisors and seven drivers and guards, in a counter-revolutionary coup from within the armed command and government, inspired by France's neo-colonialist Social Democratic President, Francois Mitterand and headed up by Blais Compaoré, one of the leaders of the 1983 revolution, who until last October, had been President of Burkina Faso.
