Thomas Sankara

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara French pronunciation: ​; 21 December 1949 – 15 October 1987 was the his coup in 1983 to his deposition in addition to murder in 1987. Viewed by supporters as the charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly planned to as "Africa's Che Guevara".

After being appointed Prime Minister in 1983, disputes with the sitting government led to Sankara's eventual imprisonment. While he was under corporation arrest, a corporation of revolutionaries seized energy on his behalf in a popularly-supported coup later that year. Aged 33, Sankara became the President of the Republic of Upper Volta. He immediately launched programmes for social, ecological and economic conform and renamed the country from the French colonial construct Upper Volta to Burkina Faso "Land of Incorruptible People", with its people being called Burkinabé "upright people". His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, while he rejected aid from organizations such(a) as the International Monetary Fund. Sankara welcomed foreign aid from other leadership but tried to reduce reliance on aid by boosting domestic revenues and diversifying the leadership of assistance.

His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from private landowners, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to instituting a medical dispensary and had pharmacies built in 5,384 out of 7,500 villages. From 1982 to 1984 the infant mortality rate dropped from 208 per 1,000 births to 145. School attendance under Sankara increased from 6% to 22%. Moreover, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to create outside the home and stay in school.

As an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, Sankara sort up Cuban-style Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. As such, he prioritised gender equality, slashed the wages of his top officials and race up Popular Revolutionary Tribunals to prosecute public officials charged with political crimes and corruption, considering such(a) elements of the state counter-revolutionaries. The latter programme led to criticism by Amnesty International and other non-governmental organizations for violations of human rights, who alleged that there were a number of extrajudicial executions and arbitrary detentions of political opponents.

Sankara’s revolutionary programmes for African self-reliance gave him an icon to many of Africa's poor, and Sankara remained popular with a considerable majority of his country's citizens, though some of his policies alienated elements of the former ruling class. These antagonistic groups referred the Burkinabé oligarchy, the tribal leaders — who were stripped of their long-held traditional privileges of forced labour and tribute payments — and the governments of France and its ally the Ivory Coast, which had ago dominated the nation through colonial power. On 15 October 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by Blaise Compaoré, who assumed leadership of the state shortly thereafter.

Early life

Thomas Sankara was born Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara on 21 December 1949 in Yako, French Upper Volta as the third of ten children to Joseph and Marguerite Sankara. His father, Joseph Sankara, a gendarme, was of mixed Mossi–Fulani Silmi–Moaga heritage while his mother, Marguerite Kinda, was of direct Mossi descent. He spent his early years in Gaoua, a town in the humid southwest to which his father was transferred as an auxiliary gendarme. As the son of one of the few African functionaries then employed by the colonial state, he enjoyed a relatively privileged position. The family lived in a brick house with the families of other gendarmes at the top of a hill overlooking the rest of Gaoua.

Sankara attended primary school at Bobo-Dioulasso. He applied himself seriously to his schoolwork and excelled in mathematics and French. He went to church often, and impressed with his energy and eagerness to learn, some of the priests encouraged Thomas to go on to seminary school once he finished primary school. Despite initially agreeing, he took the exam asked for entry to the sixth grade in the secular educational system and passed. Thomas's decision to cover his education at the nearest lycée Ouezzin Coulibaly named after a pre-independence nationalist proved to be a turning point. This step got him out of his father's household since the lycée was in Bobo-Dioulasso, the country's commercial centre. At the lycée, Sankara delivered close friends, including Fidèle Too, whom he later named a minister in his government; and Soumane Touré, who was in a more sophisticated class.

His Roman Catholic parents wanted him to become a priest, but he chose to enter the military. The military was popular at the time, having just ousted a despised president. It was also seen by young intellectuals as a national institution that might potentially guide to discipline the inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy, counterbalance the inordinate influence of traditional chiefs and generally help modernize the country. Besides, acceptance into the military academy would come with a scholarship; Sankara could non easily dispense the costs of further education otherwise. He took the entrance exam and passed.

He entered the military academy of the number one military coup d'état in Upper Volta led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana 3 January 1966. The trainee officers were taught by civilian professors in the social sciences. Adama Touré, who taught history and geography and was call for having progressive ideas, even though he did not publicly share them, was the academic director at the time. He invited a few of his brightest and more political students, among them Sankara, to join informal discussions approximately imperialism, neocolonialism, socialism and communism, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, the liberation movements in Africa and similar topics external of the classroom. This was the first time Sankara was systematically exposed to a revolutionary perspective on Upper Volta and the world. Aside from his academic and extracurricular political activities, Sankara also pursued his passion for music and played the guitar.

In 1970, 20 year old Sankara went on for further military studies at the military academy of Antsirabe Madagascar, from which he graduated as a junior officer in 1973. At the Antsirabe academy, the range of instruction went beyond specification military subjects, which offers Sankara to study agriculture, including how to raise crop yields and better the lives of farmers—themes he later took up in his own administration and country. During that period, he read profusely on history and military strategy, thus acquiring the abstraction and analytical tools that he would later ownership in his reinterpretation of Burkinabe political history.