The 15 October 2022, about a month from now, will mark exactly 35 years since Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabe revolutionary, was murdered. It is another opportunity for Pan-Africanists, socialists and admirers of Sankara to commemorate and reflect on his legacy. This is necessary, at a time when the continental problems he illuminated are particularly devastating to the majority-poor. It is also a time when his radical solutions to these problems are no longer seen as fringe utopian theories but are increasingly being championed by radical movements across the world as not only necessary but inevitable.
The first paragraph on Thomas Sankara’s Wikipedia page notes that he is commonly referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara”, a characterisation I mildly resent. To paraphrase Mona Eltahaway in her tribute of the late Egyptian feminist Nawal El Sadaawi to whom the western liberal media liked to refer as the “Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world”, our revolutionaries are not local versions of other figureheads. Nevertheless, it is clear reading and listening to Sankara that he drew a lot of inspiration from the Cuban revolution and had a lot of reverence for both Fidel Castro and Earnesto Che Guevara. Like both revolutionaries, Sankara’s legacy is complex and is both a beacon of light for modern movements and thinkers as well as a caution on the inherent undemocratic character of a militant revolution.
I recently read Thomas Sankara Speaks: A Pathfinder book collection of Sankara’s speeches and interviews during the Burkinabe revolution of 1983 to 1987, a timely companion to this reflection for me.
Like his Cuban comrades, Sankara is credited with many pro poor policies in Burkina Faso during the four years of the revolution. He led mass literacy and vaccination campaigns that substantially reduced illiteracy and infant mortality rates, oversaw an infrastructure development and irrigation schemes largely made from organised peasant labour and at a time when the climate crisis had not entered popular parlance, he clearly understood the need for people-centred environmental justice initiatives that would preserve agricultural land and contain the advancing desert.
Regionally and globally, Sankara was at the forefront of efforts to extend Pan-African and Burkinabe solidarity with occupied, colonised and exploited peoples not only in Africa (Black South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique and other countries) but also outside of Africa in Nicaragua, Black America, the Middle East, Cuba and around the world wherever an anti-imperialist struggle was waged.
However, and just like the Cuban revolution that much inspired his own, the Burkinabe revolution was famously hostile to criticism. Sankara’s government summarily executed at least seven so-called counter-revolutionaries and largely showed contempt to trade unions. Towards the end of his life, in 1986, he summarily fired over 2,500 striking teachers protesting the revolution.
While the book highlights many issues that Sankara cared about and that are gravely relevant today, I thought it is necessary to put a spotlight on two key ones as a prelude to some of the essays I have lined up for this blog.
Sovereign Debt
In the early 1980s through 1985, Zambia became yet another country to adopt comprehensive Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in a bid to stabilise the economy. At the time (and in many ways to-date), SAPs were broad sweeping reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as conditionalities against debt packages issued to developing countries. The much written about SAPs were effectively a coercive tool for developing countries to adopt the neoliberal agenda of the rich countries that control the IMF. The core tenets of the neoliberal agenda are deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation of trade. SAPs were characterised by neoliberalism and government austerity i.e., cuts to public investment, removal of subsidies, increasing taxes, liberalisation of the market to reduce barriers to trading with foreign firms and privatisation of key industries.
In a bid to comply with this IMF dictate, Kenneth Kaunda’s government during these years significantly devalued the Kwacha, increased interest rates, relaxed price controls, and liberalised foreign trade. By December 1986, at a time when these programs had already escalated the price of commodities and significantly raised the cost of living for the poor and working class, the government lifted the maize subsidies, leading to the doubling of the price of maize flour, Zambia’s staple. Bitter protests across the country ensued, and as often happens when the masses rise against economic oppression, the state deployed the police force to suppress discontent, killing at least 15 people and injuring many others. By May 1987, it was clear that the IMF-sanctioned austerity measures were not working, and President Kaunda announced that he would be rescinding the IMF reforms in favour of a domestic economic recovery plan.
It was shortly after this fiasco, in late July 1987, at the height of Zambia’s tensions with the IMF, that the 24th conference of the member states of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia, chaired by none other than the newly elected Kenneth Kaunda. It is during the last day of this summit on 29 July 1987, that the 37-year-old Sankara made one of his memorable speeches, calling for an African united front against debt. Sankara argued, persuasively, that Africa’s over $200B foreign debt burden could be traced to colonial plunder and that debt was neo-colonialism, a tool for the reoccupation of Africa. Debt default was barely even reparative, because the creditor countries owed Africa something greater: the very blood of Africans. According to Sankara, Africa’s default on its foreign debt had nothing to do with morality or honour, after all poor people could not and cannot share the same morals as their rich oppressors.
While Sankara acknowledged brave decisions made by countries such as Tunisia and Zambia to rescind the SAP policies, he recognised that individual boycotts would not only fail to yield the wide-ranging outcome that would free Africa as a whole, but they would also make individual countries and leaders vulnerable to retaliatory attacks, including assassinations. He joked that were Burkina Faso to stand alone in refusing to pay its debts, he likely would not make it to the next conference.
The OAU postponed taking a position on the debt question to an extraordinary conference to be held three months later in November 1987. At the time of the conference, Sankara was already dead.
Kaunda’s OAU shied away from calling for the unilateral declaration of intention to default that Sankara had urged, calling instead for the wealthy countries to provide relief to struggling economies. Adopting this disempowered position meant that over the next 35 years to this day, creditor institutions and the countries that control them would dictate whether debt relief or write offs were warranted, and the conditions precedent.
I singled out Zambia as a placeholder for the African death debt trap because it seems to be the best illustration of how hardly anything has changed in the intervening years. At the time of Sankara’s speech the smoke had still not cleared on Zambia’s bitter condemnations of the IMF and today it is still trapped in the same character of crippling debt. Just two weeks ago, the IMF announced that it was extending a $1.3B Extension Credit Facility to Zambia so as to re-structure and stabilise the impact of the existing debt. The conditions of the debt are not very different from those many years ago, Zambia is now required to reduce public investment, increase VAT and electricity tariffs, lift fuel subsidies and “restructure” agricultural programs.
I hope to write about this in more detail in the near future, but it is safe to say 35 years later, the debt trap diplomacy Sankara warned against is alive and well.
The Criminal Justice System
In 1983, Burkina Faso’s Council of the Revolution formed perhaps one of their most radical institutions: Tribunaux Populaires de la Révolution or The Popular Revolutionary Tribunals (TPRs), the Revolution’s answer to the civil law court system inherited from the French colonialists.
During the TPRs first session in January 1984, Thomas Sankara gave an inaugural speech hailing the democratic character of the tribunals and indicting the colonial law court systems that preceded them as corrupt, classist, formalist and obsessed with procedure at the expense of true revolutionary justice. It was a system, he asserted, that purported to be an equaliser and to have the exclusive mandate to employ force and deliver justice but allowed the rich to buy lawyers and judges. It employed esoteric and unnecessarily complicated language in a country where over 90% of the population was illiterate so as to be inaccessible and to go unquestioned in its unrelenting protection of the oppressive rich and propertied classes.
As a critically important point of departure from these undemocratic and oppressive practices, therefore, the TPRs would draw its judges from the peasantry. To perform their role, these judges would not need to learn any codified law and were instead required to mete out punishment based on their “sense of popular justice”. According to Sankara, the TPRs would give the masses full control of the state justice apparatus, who could henceforth take action against anti-revolutionary action and rhetoric as they saw fit.
Today, the TPRs are unanimously acknowledged, including by Sankara himself, to have been a failure. Similar to the predecessor tribunals in the French, Cuban and other revolutions from whom the Burkinabe tribunals drew inspiration, the TPRs soon turned into excesses and were often used for spectacle and to settle personal scores.
The problems the TPRs aimed to solve, however, persist and Africa has so far largely failed to imagine a better model that would improve upon that of the Burkina Faso revolution. The rich still do not know justice. In a remarkable twist of irony, Blaise Compaore, Sankara’s deputy and the man that orchestrated the coup that killed Sankara was in 2021 sentenced to life in prison for the murder, but may never actually see the inside of a cell for it.
Here in Kenya, ascendancy to political power is the surest way for the rich to evade justice. There are currently a number of active and immediate former politicians who have allegedly committed murder and assault, sometimes in the broad glare of cameras, to say nothing of the many that are complicit in the looting of public coffers and whose cases suddenly disappear into thin air. There are even more others where there is no case at all. Meanwhile, people committing petty crimes of poverty are hauled into court with much fanfare where punishment is swiftly pronounced, unable to afford or denied the price of freedom extended to the rich.
Conclusion
The speeches in the book vary greatly in content, many are made at mass rallies and while they may have been good for rousing up crowds were repetitive anti-imperialism diatribes largely empty in intellectual content. All of them are great, however, in understanding Sankara as a thinker and leader and the ways he stood apart from today’s crop of African leaders, who at their best coddle to western neoliberal politics and at their worst are fascist, autocratic and genocidal.
It’s a shame that Sankara did not leave any first handwritten texts, but we are not lacking in his analysis. His interviews and speeches, many of which are freely available online, are an evergreen gift and continue to teach us what it means to be principled, incisive and unrelenting in critiquing imperialism. It is what he learnt from the movements before him and something today’s abolitionist movements, strapped for resources as many are, are building on, but we lack a principled political class to transform this critique into material benefits for the poor and working class. And that is the real shame.