The Global Partnership Network (GPN) is a group of universities and civil society organisations in 12 countries, including Burkina Faso. The network aims to take a critical look at international partnerships and their (neo)colonial baggage. In theory and practice, the GPN is committed to rebuilding the concept towards a partnership based on mutual recognition and solidarity, adapted to the multipolar and postcolonial 21st century.

In this spirit, the GPN has decided to name its doctoral scholarships after Thomas Sankara, an outstanding figure of the global South, whose ideas and practices of resistance to neo-colonialism and promotion of independent paths for the countries of the South are considered a source of inspiration for the work of the GPN doctoral school. The GPN awards 18 grants exclusively to doctoral students from the South, among them 16 at universities of the South in order to support especially the knowledge production in higher education in the global South.

Research topics of Thomas Sankara scholars are for example:

• The economic stakes of the post-1986 cycle of political crises in Haiti: neocolonial economic development programs and power struggles (Képler Aurélien, Université d’État d’Haiti)
• Ideology for food security? The Contest between Genetically Modified (GM) crops and Organic Farming as pathways to food security in Uganda (Victoria Kiboneka, Makerere University, Uganda)
• Territorial governance and gender: challenges and perspectives in Burkina Faso and Togo (Oladjigbo Katchoni Georges Koba, Université de Kara, Togo)

The GPN is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the Higher Education Excellence in Development Cooperation programme (exceed) of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Applications for Thomas Sankara Doctoral Fellowships are currently closed, but if the project is extended, there will be a call for applications for new Thomas Sankara Doctoral Fellowships in 2025.

Follow this link to read the press declaration on the naming of the stipends after Thomas Sankara:

https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/files/Global_Partnership_Network/Downloads/Press_release_Sankara_scholarships.pdf

Fiona Faye, former GPN graduate school coordinator, current PhD associated fellow at the GPN with the research topic: ‘Learning from Thomas Sankara: Food self-sufficiency politics as resistance against the neoliberal trade regime now and then.’

The post The Global Partnership Network names its doctoral scholarships after Thomas Sankara first appeared on My Blog.

The post The Global Partnership Network names its doctoral scholarships after Thomas Sankara appeared first on My Blog.

Long revered by radical youths and activists across Africa, Thomas Sankara finally also achieved a measure of government recognition in his country, Burkina Faso, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of his assassination in a military coup. For years, the commemorations of the late president’s death were organized by civil and political groups inspired by his revolutionary achievements and ideas. But on October 15, 2023, Burkina Faso’s governing military regime, keen for more popular support, made the anniversary an official event for the first time. Sankara was named a “hero of the nation,” the day was proclaimed an annual national holiday, President Ibrahim Traoré laid flowers at his memorial site, and one of the capital’s main thoroughfares was renamed for Sankara—from its previous designation as Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, the French president when the country gained its independence from France.

Burkinabè, as the citizens of that West African nation are known, have a keen sense of their history. For them, Sankara’s brief period at the helm, from 1983 to 1987, was a time when many changes came to their poor, landlocked country, and simultaneously transformed it from the little-know ex-colony called Upper Volta (Haute Volta in French) into the re-born Burkina Faso, “land of the upright” from two African languages. Many embraced the new name as unapologetically African and took pride in their charismatic young president, who audaciously challenged some of the most powerful countries on the world stage. While Burkinabè were most aware of his government’s domestic accomplishments, people elsewhere in Africa and beyond were attracted by Sankara’s frequent expressions of solidarity with oppressed people across the global South.

For a time, the replacement of Sankara’s government by a brutal authoritarian regime made it exceedingly difficult for Burkinabè to openly affirm his legacy. But pan-African networks of activists helped preserve and circulate his speeches and ideas outside Burkina Faso’s borders. As popular musicians in West Africa incorporated Sankara quotes and images into their videos, some inevitably reached a Burkinabè audience as well. Researchers and scholars also helped disseminate the history of Burkina Faso’s “Sankarist” revolution. Collections of Sankara’s speeches and interviews were published in their original French and in English translation, as well as in various editions in Germany and South Africa, among other countries. A major website provided access to many original documents, analytical articles, news, commentaries, and reminiscences by Sankara’s colleagues. A number of books recounted the history of Sankara and his revolution, among them Bruno Jaffré’s pioneering biography in French. In English there have been this author’s two books (from which parts of this article are drawn), a short, popular biography of Sankara and a political history of Burkina Faso that devoted several chapters to the revolution. As well, a major recent historical work by Brian Peterson drew on new archival research and extensive interviews with Sankara’s contemporaries. And an edited collection provided numerous analyses and critiques of the Sankara era and its legacies.

An unlikely revolution

Before 1983, no one would have predicted that the country would have such a lasting a revolutionary experience. Decades of colonial rule by France had left the territory one of the poorest, least-urbanized, and least-developed in Africa. From the perspective of Paris, Upper Volta was a minor possession, with few exploitable resources beyond land to grow cotton or the labor of its people—hundreds of thousands of whom were conscripted to work on roads, railways, and plantations in other French colonies. Little was invested in infrastructure, economic development, or the health and education of the people. Independence in 1960 brought little change, except for political instability and a succession of coups.

To some observers, the August 1983 seizure of power by Sankara’s National Council of the Revolution (CNR) was just another military takeover. Certainly, Sankara was an army captain, and a number of key colleagues were officers as well. But they overthrew a previous military junta as part of a broad political coalition that included several leftist political groups, some trade unions, the student movement, and other civilian activists. The CNR and its cabinet were hybrid institutions that drew from various sectors of society and attracted strong and active support from the young, the poor, and others marginalized by the old order.

Like several other military-led revolutions in Africa (at different times, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana, Libya, Madagascar, Somalia, and Sudan), the process initiated in 1983 could be considered a “revolution from above.” But it also had significant engagement from below. The young leaders of the CNR (Sankara was just thirty-three at the time) made it clear from the outset that they were not interested in making just a few minor modifications at the top. They wanted to fundamentally transform the country, symbolizing that rupture by changing the country’s name from its old French colonial designation to one that asserted an unambiguous African identity. Besides restructuring the judiciary, military, and other state institutions, the governing council attacked corruption and conspicuous consumption by the nation’s elite. Government ministers had their salaries and bonuses cut and their limousines taken away. Sankara publicly declared all his assets (and insisted his comrades do the same), kept his own children in public school, and rebuffed relatives who sought state jobs.

Sankara was open about his ideological beliefs: Marxist, but non-dogmatic. He refrained from calling the revolutionary process “socialist” or “communist,” often framing it instead as “anti-imperialist.” That entailed countering external domination, constructing a unified nation, building up the economy’s productive capacities, and addressing the population’s most pressing social problems, such as widespread hunger, disease, and illiteracy. Particularly in such an arid country, environmental sustainability became a central priority. Hundreds of new wells were dug, and reservoirs built to better conserve the little water the country had. Farmers were taught how to combat soil erosion and improve their yields without chemical fertilizers. Millions of trees were planted across the countryside. In recognizing the importance of environmental issues, Burkina Faso was well ahead of many other African countries at the time.

It also was a forerunner in stressing improvements in women’s conditions and rights: women’s literacy classes, maternity training in rural villages, support for women’s cooperatives and market associations, and a new family code that set a minimum age for marriage, established divorce by mutual consent, recognized a widow’s right to inherit, and suppressed the bride price. Some women were appointed as judges, provincial high commissioners, directors of state enterprises, and even cabinet ministers.

‘A troublesome man’

On the external front, Burkina Faso’s policies and alignments took a sharp turn: away from France and other Western powers and toward anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and radical nationalist movements and governments across the global south. Few outside Africa had previously heard anything about the country, given its relatively small population (about 8 million at the time), miniscule economic weight, and location on the edge of the Sahara. But by speaking out at various international gatherings on behalf of many other countries and peoples, Sankara’s voice projected more strongly than some might have expected.

In part, that was because his messages echoed widely. But also because of the audacity with which he often presented them. A 1986 visit to Burkina Faso by French President François Mitterrand provided a dramatic illustration. Sankara departed from the host’s customary diplomatic niceties by challenging his visitor to a “duel” of ideas: a plea for the rights of the Palestinian people, defense of Nicaragua then under attack by US-backed “contras,” and criticism of the French authorities for their policies in Africa and toward African immigrants at home. Mitterrand set aside his prepared remarks and responded to Sankara point by point. He praised the Burkinabè president for his frank talk about such serious questions, and admitted that with Sankara, it was not easy to maintain a calm conscience or to “sleep peacefully.” Mitterrand quipped, “This is a somewhat troublesome man, President Sankara!”

Several overarching foreign policy goals emerged from Sankara’s speeches, declarations, and interventions at international meetings, including those of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of African Unity (OAU, now the African Union), and other bodies. First, as exemplified by his interchanges with Mitterrand, he sought to establish as clearly as possible that Burkina Faso no longer followed direction from Paris, Washington, or other Western capitals (even though his government continued to welcome their financial aid). Second, Burkina Faso would assert its sovereignty by establishing relations with any state in the world, including those considered hostile to the West (Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc.). Third, in accord with its revolutionary ideals, it would solidarize with—and sometimes directly assist—oppressed peoples and liberation movements across the globe. And fourth, it would press for genuine pan-African unity, to be expressed through concrete action by African governments and peoples, not just with occasional declarations.

In 1984 in Harlem, this writer first witnessed Sankara’s ability to connect with far-flung audiences. That year, the Burkinabè president set off to address the UN General Assembly. On the way he first stopped off in Havana, where he was awarded Cuba’s highest honor. Displeased, the conservative US government of President Ronald Reagan did not allow him to accept an invitation by Atlanta’s mayor, a prominent African-American civil rights figure, to visit that city on his way to the UN. Limited to New York City, Sankara instead addressed a public meeting at a high school in Harlem, where he spoke to a largely African-American crowd of some 500. In an animated talk that included call-and-response exchanges with the cheering audience, Sankara praised Harlem as a center of Black culture and pride and asserted that for African revolutionaries, “our White House is in Black Harlem.”

The next day Sankara spoke at the UN General Assembly. Among a range of other international topics, he touched on a number of US policies, including US support for Israel against Palestinian rights and its own military invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada the year before. He affirmed solidarity with Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolutionaries, who were then fighting against US-backed rebels. The next year, Sankara visited Nicaragua itself (following another stop in Cuba). There he spoke to a crowd of 200,000 on behalf of all foreign delegations attending a celebration of the Sandinistas’ twenty-fifth anniversary. It was not surprising, therefore, that the government of a small Sahelian country would arouse notable enmity from Washington, as Sankara biographer Peterson confirmed when he uncovered previously classified US diplomatic cables.

Although a strong advocate of pan-Africanism, at the time Sankara had only a few allies among other African heads of state, some of whom he severely criticized for not doing more to build African unity or lessen the suffering of their people. At annual summit meetings of the OAU and during his frequent trips in Africa, he urged Africans to give much more support to the continent’s liberation movements, specifically the struggles in South Africa and Namibia against the white minority apartheid regime. One of his final acts, just a few days before the coup that would end his life, was to host a pan-African anti-apartheid conference in Ouagadougou, the Burkinabè capital. Participants focused on practical ways to assist Southern Africa’s liberation fighters and castigated African governments that collaborated with the apartheid authorities.

Seeing that Africa’s development prospects were being crippled by its crushing foreign debt to Western creditors, Sankara, at a July 1987 summit of the OAU, urged African leaders to simply refuse to pay. Acknowledging that individual African countries were too weak to do so on their own, he proposed that African countries create a “united front” against the debt. The OAU never followed Sankara’s advice. While a number of African leaders were annoyed or irritated by Sankara’s chidings and criticisms, a handful were more openly hostile. In December 1985, the better-armed government of neighboring Mali provoked a brief border war with Burkina Faso, which some analysts saw as partly motivated by fear that Sankara’s popularity among some sectors within Mali could contribute to domestic opposition to that regime. The dictatorship in Togo, another neighboring state, actively supported dissident Burkinabè exiles hostile to Sankara.

Relations with the government of neighboring Côte d’Ivoire were especially tense. Historically, large numbers of Burkinabè migrants lived and worked there, causing the authorities some anxiety over possible loyalties to Sankara and his fellow revolutionaries. The Ivorian government was one of France’s closest allies in Africa and its conservative president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, was leery of the Burkinabè government’s anti-imperialist stance. He also was well-positioned to influence Burkina Faso’s political course: in 1985 an adopted daughter of Houphouët-Boigny managed to marry the second-highest Burkinabè leader, the minister of defense, Captain Blaise Compaoré.

On October 15, 1987, Compaoré led a coup against Sankara, assassinating him and a dozen aides that day (and more subsequently). A variety of factors played into the coup: infighting among the various political factions within the National Council of the Revolution, alarm that Sankara’s strenuous anticorruption measures might expose or hinder those engaged in illegal dealings, and pressures from abroad, including France and Côte d’Ivoire, to tone down the country’s anti-Western stance. Many Burkinabè believed that France, either directly or through their ally Houphouët-Boigny, helped instigate the coup. Although Compaoré initially claimed to be “rectifying” the revolution, his takeover led to its outright collapse. Burkinabè were shocked and terrified. The Compaoré regime eventually scuttled most of the progressive policies and programs of the Sankara era. Externally, relations grew close with the governments of Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, France, and other Western powers. The French authorities regularly welcomed Compaoré to Paris.

Thanks to significant financial aid from France and other powers and a readiness to use the most brutal force against domestic opponents, Compaoré was able to build a formidable machine capable of lasting twenty-seven years. Under French urging, Compaoré embellished his authoritarian regime with a veneer of multi-party democracy. Despite regular elections, he retained his political dominance through a mixture of electoral fraud, repeated constitutional manipulations, and the corruptions of an extensive patronage system.

The return of ‘Sankarism’

What Compaoré did not expect was that Sankara’s name and legacy would resurface—and loom large as popular discontent mounted. Despite the regime’s repression and success in suppressing formal opposition in the electoral arena, protest and rebellion began to erupt more frequently from the late 1990s onward. As I previously wrote, those challenges opened the way for more overt expressions of admiration for Sankara during the following decade. It was marked most visibly by periodic commemorations of the anniversary of Sankara’s assassination, as well as by the emergence of a variety of small political parties, student associations, and other groups that explicitly drew inspiration from the ideas, practices, and achievements of the revolutionary era.

Not all were drawn to Sankara’s example for the same reasons. Some admired his anti-imperialism and dedication to building national sovereignty. Others appreciated his practical ideas for economic and social development. Many cited his personal integrity and efforts to eradicate corruption. Some acknowledged that there had been human rights abuses during his presidency, but tended to blame those on hardliners and zealots within the CNR—some of whom were aligned with Compaoré. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Compaoré regime started to erode. After repeated manipulations of the constitution to enable him to stand for reelection beyond the constitution’s original term limits, he sought to do so once again in 2013. But that was a step too far. Already incensed by widespread poverty, rights abuses, and rampant corruption, people across the country reacted in anger and outrage, crystallized in their demand that Compaoré leave power after the end of his current term. When he pushed ahead anyway, unprecedented mass rallies, marches, and general strikes swept the country, the popular pressure impelling the fragmented opposition parties, activist groups, and trade unions to mount a coordinated struggle.

Most of those groups’ leaders did not particularly draw inspiration from Sankara. They simply wanted Compaoré out, to be replaced by a more genuine democratic system. Yet in the months leading up to Compaoré’s ouster, symbols of Sankara were virtually everywhere. Protesters carried his portrait. His recorded voice rang out over sound systems. Quotations from his speeches were featured in popular chants. Even politically moderate opposition leaders often concluded speeches with the emblematic slogan of Sankara’s revolutionary government: “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!” (Homeland or death, we will win!). One of the main activist groups was Balai citoyen (“Citizens’ Broom”), launched just a couple of years earlier by several musicians with wide followings among Burkinabè youths. According to one of them, the rap artist known as Smockey, they adopted Sankara as their symbolic patron. Smockey later told me that they admired Sankara’s “courage and determination to build a Burkina Faso of social justice and inclusive development,” as well as his personal “simplicity, modesty, and integrity … a model for anyone aspiring to manage public property.”

During the final week of October 2014, with Compaoré stubbornly refusing to abandon his efforts to violate the constitution, the demonstrations acquired an insurrectionary momentum. As several dozen protesters fell before the bullets of the security forces, the activists of Balai citoyen and other youth groups erected barricades, occupied the streets, and seized key government installations. Compaoré fled the country, under the protection of French special forces. Two weeks later, a transitional government was formed, with a mandate to conduct essential reforms and prepare new elections. The cabinet and interim parliament were politically diverse, including technocrats, intellectuals, army officers, civil society figures, and a few radical activists, among them several Sankarists. Following a failed attempt to retake power by a pro-Compaoré military faction, elections were ultimately held in November 2015. The winners had once been leading figures in Compaoré’s party, although they had broken with him before the final political showdown. Admirers of Sankara were influential in the realm of ideas, but much less in terms of practical politics, in part because they were fractured into numerous parties and associations.

Meanwhile, judicial prosecutors opened an inquiry into Sankara’s assassination, as well as several other political murders during the Compaoré era. They conducted forensic analyses, took testimony from witnesses, and were able to acquire some previously secret documentation from France. More than a dozen individuals were ultimately charged, including Compaoré, who was then living in exile in Côte d’Ivoire and could therefore be tried only in absentia. The trial began in October 2021 and lasted six months. Several were acquitted or received suspended sentences. The military tribunal sentenced others to varying prison terms—and Compaoré and two others to life. The court maintained an international arrest warrant against Compaoré (although the Ivorian government refused to respond and even afforded him citizenship). Activists also urged investigators to continue gathering evidence on the international aspects of the case, including the roles of Côte d’Ivoire, France, and any other government that might have been involved. Although the French authorities previously declassified some documents, they did not release any under a “national defense” designation, stoking suspicions that they had something to hide.

In the meantime, the elected government of President Marc Roch Christian Kaboré struggled with an Islamist insurgency initiated by groups affiliated with Al-Qaida and the Islamic State. Initially the insurgents struck into Burkina Faso from bases in neighboring Mali and Niger, but gradually took root within the country. By 2022 large parts of the border regions of the north and east had escaped effective government control, and the tolls of Burkinabè civilians killed or displaced from their homes mounted. The Kaboré government’s inability to ensure security triggered a military coup in January 2022, and when that junta foundered on the battlefield, another one in September. The new leadership, headed by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, took a more energetic approach, including through popular mobilizations. Both to strengthen that effort and to shore up their own political legitimacy, the authorities repeatedly invoked Sankara’s legacy.

Activists who had long advocated the ideals of Sankara’s revolutionary era welcomed that official support. But perhaps realizing that government backing might eventually fade or end, they also emphasized the need to maintain a grassroots momentum. Speaking on the anniversary of the late president’s assassination, Daouda Traoré, vice-president of the committee that initiated the Sankara memorial in Ouagadougou, vowed that he and his colleagues would not only expand the site, but also their educational activities. He said that promoting Sankara’s “memory and values”—and linking his vision to concrete actions—was important for the people of Burkina Faso and the rest of Africa.

Ernest Hasch (november 2023)

Ernest Harsch holds a PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently a research scholar affiliated with Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies. Throughout a professional career as a journalist, he wrote mainly on international events, most extensively on Africa. His recent books are Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, (Ohio University Press, 2014) and Burkina Faso: Power, Protest and Revolution (Zed Books, 2017), after earlier books on the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the Angolan civil war. He worked on African issues for 25 years at the United Nations Secretariat in New York, including as managing editor of the UN’s quarterly journal Africa Renewal.

Source : https://www.e-ir.info/2023/11/12/thomas-sankara-how-the-leader-of-a-small-african-country-left-such-a-large-footprint/

The post Thomas Sankara: How the Leader of a Small African Country Left Such a Large Footprint first appeared on My Blog.

The post Thomas Sankara: How the Leader of a Small African Country Left Such a Large Footprint appeared first on My Blog.

Thomas Sankara‘s short life, as we all know, is filled with inspirational and motivational lessons for today’s youth. And on his website – https://sankaraship.com/  – Joagni has made it a point to consistently provides his readers with invaluable life, leadership, and success lessons all drawn from Sankara’s life and leadership style. 

These are analyses based on well-researched anecdotes about Thomas Sankara which he has collected over the years from a diversity of credible sources, including books, documentaries, and interviews with close collaborators of Thomas Sankara. The goal is simple: to help his readers use Thomas Sankara as well as other great heroes of Africa to revolutionize many aspects of their own lives and accomplish what they believe to be their calling on earth. Enjoy his first article. 

[…] Immediately after becoming president of Burkina Faso on 4 August 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara famously initiated an unusual diplomatic tradition never heard of in Africa: at a time when most of his peers on the continent were preoccupied with hiding the reality of their dirty poor looking towns in order to impress foreign visitors and donors, the 33-year-old President decided that the presenting of credentials would no longer be carried out in the country’s Presidential Palace located in Ouagadougou. Instead, receiving credentials from new ambassadors would, from now onward, take place in the deep countryside, far away from the country’s big cities, amidst the village-based peasants.

Afraid that embracing this kind of diplomatic practice that disregards traditional diplomatic niceties would expose the country to ridicule and embarrassment, some of Sankara’s comrades in the National Council of the Revolution (CNR) begged him to reconsider. But Sankara would not relent.

“When we have to receive an ambassador who has to present his credentials,” Sankara insisted, “we no longer do so in this Presidential Office. We take him to the deep countryside, amidst the peasants. He’ll take chaotic roads; he’ll suffer from dust and thirst. Then and only then, can we welcome him by saying: ‘Your Excellency, Mr. Ambassador X, this is Burkina Faso as it is; and it is with this Burkina Faso that you have to deal, not with those of us who are seated in the cozy offices.’”

Following this newly established tradition, President Sankara formally received, in the fall of 1984, the diplomatic credentials of two ambassadors: their Excellences Mr. Michael Geier of Germany and Mr. Leonardo Neher of the United States. The ceremony took place in the little town of Boromo, under the shade of giant silk-cotton trees, with a huge crowd of peasants all around.

It was a marvelous scene, a scene of complete mass ecstasy: with their mouths wide open, children were jumping for joy and pressing each other in the crowd. Next to them, and unable to contain the happiness beaming in their eyes, were wrinkled and sun-tanned old villagers standing on toes and craning their necks in an effort to  catch a glimpse of their young leader.

Now it was time for Sankara to address a few introductory remarks to the assembly. The lean and red-beret-wearing president stood up, swept the giant trees with his eyes, then looked at the audience steadily for a few seconds, as if to say that they were about to witness a life-changing event.

The whole place became quiet in anticipation of what he was going to say. Then in a moving, confident, amicable tone sustained by well-crafted punchlines, Sankara broke the silence: “Brave men and women of Boromo, today you are receiving three great powers: the United States and Germany — their great powers, and Burkina Faso — our great power.”

Probably outraged by Sankara’s zeal and overconfident style (this remains to be proven), the newly appointed American ambassador packed up a few days later and returned to his country where no one was expecting him. After he had been fully and accurately briefed on what exactly had happened, US President Ronald Reagan ordered Mr. Neher to return to Burkina Faso. The matter was settled, and Leonardo Neher remained his country’s ambassador to Burkina Faso until he was succeeded by David H. Shinn on August 1, 1987.

Whether or not you like Sankara’s idea of receiving diplomatic credentials in the countryside is absolutely up to you; but the foregoing anecdote is worthy of thorough analysis and meditation, for it contains three invaluable success and leadership principles, the knowledge and application of which constitute the hallmark of all those who, throughout history, have attained to the great heights of achievement in their respective callings.

Principle 1: Never Think Less of Yourself

When Sankara became president in August 1983, Burkina Faso (known at the time as Upper-Volta) had a curriculum vitae that reads like this: A country covering an expanse of 274,000 square kilometers; a population of 7 million inhabitants over 6 million of whom were peasants; an infant mortality rate of 180 per 1000; a life expectancy of 40 years; an illiteracy rate of 98 percent (if we consider a literate person as someone who is able to read, write and speak a language); 1 doctor for every 50,000 inhabitants; a school enrolment rate of 16 percent; a gross domestic product of 53,356 CFA francs, that is, just over $100 per capita.

That was the truth about this landlocked West African country, and Sankara knew all these great facts. In fact he was the one who mentioned these statistics on 4 October 1984 in his speech at the thirty-ninth United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Needless to say, Sankara knew he was the leader of a small country with limited resources. And he was also aware of the fact that with limited resources, there were limits to what he and his comrades could do on the global stage. But not only that, he was also acutely conscious that his two guests were the representatives of two countries with dominant positions in world affairs.

Knowing all these truths, Sankara could have retracted by saying, “Well, I’d better keep my tail between my legs. There is not much I can do. I’m just the leader of a small and poor country, and poor countries must always behave like poor countries.”

But Sankara didn’t do that. Instead, he stood up in front of his Western guests and said with undisturbed confidence what I believe is worthy of repetition here: “Brave men and women of Boromo, today you are receiving three great powers: the United States and Germany — their great powers, and Burkina Faso — our great power.”

By calling his country a great power, by inviting his people to see themselves as a great power despite all the signs of material poverty around, Thomas Sankara was not trying to be ironic or sarcastic. He was simply trying to teach us a vital success and leadership lesson: the importance of recognizing our true value or worthiness and conducting ourselves accordingly.

Lacking knowledge of our true value is the reason why so many of us go through life insecure and easily derailed by the storms of life. Lacking knowledge of our self-worth is what keeps too many of us from enjoying freedom, equality, and success today.

In fact, the root cause of our failures, including the social, political, physical, emotional, and spiritual problems that we experience today, is our failure to recognize and accept our self-worth as human beings made in the image of God. You see, when you don’t know your value, it’s easy to dismiss yourself, saying “I’m not valuable … I’m just average … I’m just an insignificant subatomic particle in the grand scheme of a complex Universe … or I’m just an inferior being with no past glory and probably nothing good in my future!” 

Yet whoever you are, and whatever your current position on the social ladder, there is an empowering truth about you that cannot be denied: you are far more valuable, far more powerful than you think you are. The difference between you and the other creatures of the universe is that you have been given the power to consciously shape your destiny and create the quality of life you truly believe you deserve. In Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, we are reminded of that divine power God has given to man through Adam:

“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature […]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.” 

Whether you consider yourself a descendant of Adam or not is absolutely up to you; but I believe that God is saying to each of us what He once said to Adam: You’re not an ordinary creature; you’re a superpower! You’re an unlimited, powerful creator of reality. And if you are going to leave your mark on this world, you must start embracing and living that undeniable truth. In other words, it’s high time you started conducting yourself as the superpower you’re meant to be.

History is filled with examples of men and women who not only excelled in their respective callings, but also succeeded in influencing the world as a result of their awareness of this vital principle. Queen Elizabeth I of England is one of them.

In 1588, the Spanish Armada was unexpectedly defeated by the British in what is still remembered today as one of the greatest naval battles in history. Prior to that historical battle, Queen Elizabeth I gave a speech rallying the British troops assembled at Tilbury near London. Many historians agree that the queen’s attitude, appearance, and self-image before and during that speech played a vital role in that victory over the Spanish. A role that some believe was even just at least as important as the actual battle.

Wearing a plumed helmet and a steel cuirass over a white velvet gown, Elisabeth I rode atop a grey gelding, passing like some Amazonian empress through the troops. A few minutes later, it was a queen exhibiting an unruffled demeanor “full of princely resolution and more than feminine courage” that was addressing the British troops:

“I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.”

I don’t know about you, but the first time I read this speech, I couldn’t help but say to myself, “You know what, it’s not just men who have balls! Perhaps women have bigger balls than most men do!” In fact, the world has been blessed with countless women whose level of courage and bravery help confirm that conviction of mine. Wangari Maathai—the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of her social, environmental, and political activism—is a very fine example.

In the 1980’s, at a time when their government would not tolerate dissent; at a time when Kenyans were so afraid of challenging their local government authorities that they preferred to whisper their concerns behind closed doors, this relatively insignificant Kenyan woman, armed with nothing but an unwavering determination to leave a greener environment to the next generation of Kenyans, decided to stand up against her country’s government to stop a large project that those in power wanted to see completed: the construction of a 60-storey skyscraper that would serve as a business complex in a downtown park known as Uhuru Park.

Wangari Maathai’s protest campaign immediately drew the wrath of the government, who labeled her “a mad woman” and “an ignorant divorcee” who had nothing but “insects in her head.” The government went so far as to unleash the riot police on Maathai and her supporters. The woman was clubbed in the head and knocked unconscious by the police. Arrested and beaten numerous times, Maathai had spent dark days in jail cells, which she described as “cold, dank, filthy, smelly and crowded, with no room to sit down, water was all over.”

Yet despite all these hardships, Wangari Maathai stood firm and unbowed through everything. Eventually, the powerful government backed off, and the 60-storey edifice project was dropped. After this spectacular victory over her country’s male dominated institutions, a man came over to congratulate Wangari Maathai with the following words: “You know what? You are the only man left standing in this country!”

Mathai’s reaction was, “Thank you my brother, but in reality, we [the women] have never been anything else but men in this world. It’s only in your [men’s] eyes that we are ‘just women.’”

The setting is very clear: whether it’s Dr. Wangari Mathaai calling herself “a man,” or Queen Elisabeth I calling herself “a king” or President Thomas Sankara calling his country “a great power,” the message is always the same: In life, as I explained in my recent book, the trick to reaching your full potential is not calling yourself what you are. The trick to reaching your full potential is calling yourself what you could become. The song “What the Lord Has Done in Me” by the Australian musical group Hillsong Worship captures so well this truth with its empowering lines:

“Let the weak say I am strong;

Let the poor say I am rich;

Let the blind say I can see.” 

Again, whoever you are, and whatever your current position on the social ladder, there is an empowering truth about you that cannot be denied: you are far more capable than you think you are. And not only that, but you are also far more capable than what other people think you are.

Where you were yesterday is not who you are. True, your past may influence your future, but it shouldn’t and cannot define it without your personal will. You might have lost a number of battles in your life, but that doesn’t make you a loser. You might have failed at some of your undertakings, but that doesn’t make you a failure.

In the same way, where you are right now, is not who you are. I’m sure you have weaknesses (we all do, don’t we?), but never call yourself weak. You may not be on the same plane of opportunity that is enjoyed by other people right now, or perhaps you were born to the poorest of the poorest families on earth. Yet in spite of all of that, you must do what Sankara did: See yourself as a great power! Do what Queen Elisabeth I and Wangari Mathaai did: instead of allowing yourself to be handicapped by your circumstances, look beyond your circumstances and see the potential in you.

You see, Wangari Maathai was a woman, yet she didn’t dwell on the fact that she was a woman; she felt a man at heart and believed she could do anything a man could do. Elizabeth I was a queen, yet deep down, she knew she was a king. And she called herself a king, a fearless king. These two women understood their real value, which goes far beyond what people could see or know about a woman.

As long as there’s breath in your body, that’s the kind of attitude you are commanded to cultivate. Just like Thomas Sankara, you must believe you are a great power. Just like Wangari Maathai, you must see yourself as the only man left standing on earth. And just like Elizabeth I, you must see yourself as a king. In other words, you must believe you are royalty.

The truth is, you are far more royal than all the royals the earth has ever borne. Why? Because you are not a descendant of an earthly king. You are a descendant of a heavenly king, the King of kings. All you need to convince yourself is to dig into what the Bible proclaims over you: “The Lord will hold you in his hand for all to see — a splendid crown in the hand of God.”

Did you hear that? You’re a splendid crown! That means there is royal blood running through your veins. In fact from the moment you were born, from the moment the Creator of the universe has breathed life into you, the angels of heaven fell down upon their knees to show you respect and honor. That’s exactly what the Holy Quran says about you: “Your Lord said to the angels: ‘I am creating man from clay. When I have fashioned him and breathed of My spirit into him, kneel down and prostrate yourselves before him.’ The angels all prostrated themselves except Satan, who was too proud, for he was an unbeliever.”

Here is my question: Do you see yourself as royalty? Do you accept yourself as a divine creation endowed with superpowers? In other words, do you know your own inalienable intrinsic value, or are you living a fake and an insecure life of pretense?

It’s sad to say, but too many of us have no idea what our true value is. We often mistake our net-worth for our self-worth. We constantly base our value on what we do, the things we wear, what kind of car we drive, how big a house we live in, how much stuff we have or can acquire, or what kind of title is behind our name.

Sometimes, I see people wearing expensive watches for the wrong reason. I know it’s for the wrong reason because they always make sure that everyone around can see what they are wearing. I know one guy like that who took a six-month’s salary to buy a luxury watch. At least that’s what he told me. That made me wonder a lot.

I mean, why would someone feel the need to buy and wear an extremely expensive watch? Will it make you more productive? No! Will it improve the quality of your daily hours? No! Will it provide you with extra hours in addition to the 24 hours we all have in a day? No! I mean, what is the point of wearing a luxury watch when you can simply glance at the cell phone that never leaves you?

None, except for the fact that we have bought into the erroneous belief that wearing one makes us more valuable, more respectable. They make us look like somebody. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, because I myself used to buy into that nonsense. But I know I’m not alone. The world is packed with highly educated people who have been brainwashed by marketers into believing that what they wear is who they are.

The truth, as I’ve learned, is that your value doesn’t come from what you wear or possess, it comes from who you are—a child of the Almighty God in whose image and likeness you’ve been created. In other words, you should never look at material things or riches as the reason to feel good about yourself. Why? Because these are things that can be acquired or lost, bought or sold. And as such, their values will also change over time.

That’s right! What you see as fashionable today will be outdated a few years from now. The new house you have now will go down in value a few years from now. From a financial perspective, the car you dream of buying will depreciate rapidly in value the moment you drive it off the dealer’s lot. Even the title behind your name is not an indication of your worth as a human being. Pope John Paul II understood this perfectly when, deflating all the ecclesiastical titles connected to the functions of the Pope, he said: “Expressions such as ‘Supreme Pontiff,’ ‘Your Holiness,’ and ‘Holy Father’ are of little importance.”

Now don’t get me wrong! I’m not against beautiful things. I’m not allergic to driving a nice car, living in a nicer house, wearing designer shoes, or having an influential title behind my name. There certainly is nothing wrong with wanting or having such things. But what I’m suggesting is that we should never derive our sense of value from such things. In other words, we shouldn’t look at those things as the reason to feel good about ourselves. Why? Because these are things that can be acquired or lost, bought or sold. And as such, their values will also change over time.

A title or tenure, a performance, a car or a house may reflect or even increase your net-worth, but not your self-worth. Our self-worth is the intrinsic value that the Creator gave to us at birth. It is immutable. Every one of us has been created in the image and likeness of God.

And when you accept the fact that you’ve been created in the image of God; when you accept the fact that you’ve been blessed with the same energy that runs through everybody else, and that with the right thoughts and attitude you can shape your own perceptions and make things work for you, then you will understand that your self-worth or intrinsic value does not depend on anything else. Not your title or occupation; not your income or material possessions; not your gender or skin color; not your birthplace or nationality; not even the circumstances of your life.

None of these can make you any more or less valuable as a human being. Whether you were born in Buckingham Palace like King Charles III or in a dirty manger like Jesus Christ, you are as valuable as anyone who has been given the gift of life.

I heard the story about a well-known speaker who started off his seminar by holding up a $20 bill. In the room of 200 people, he asked, “Who would like this $20 bill?” Hands started going up. He said, “I am going to give this $20 to one of you – but first, let me do this.” He proceeded to crumple up the 20 dollar note. He then asked, “Who still wants it?” Again, hands were up in the air.

“Well,” continued the speaker, “what if I do this?” He dropped the crumpled note on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. It was now crumpled and dirty. He picked it up and asked, “Now, who still wants it?” Still the hands went into the air. The valuable point that the speaker was trying to make is clear: No matter what he did to this 20-dollar bill, the audience still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20.

Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way. We feel as though we are worthless; but just like this 20-dollar bill, no matter what happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value. Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless in the eyes of the One that breathed life into you.” No one understood and put this principle into operation better than Jesus Christ did.

Jesus, as the Biblical story goes, was once led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days without eating anything. The Devil found this a golden opportunity to tempt him. First, he said to Jesus, “If you’re the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” Jesus simply refused, saying, “Man doesn’t live by bread alone.”

As someone who was clear about his own value, Jesus just didn’t see the need to do anything to prove who he was. His attitude was, “I know who I am. I know what my intrinsic value is, and I know it’s not defined by what I do or perform. I just feel good about myself the way I am.”

After his first failed attempt, the Devil took Jesus to a high place, showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and said to him in essence: “All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Again, Jesus refused to budge, saying he wouldn’t bow to anyone else but God. By refusing to obey the Devil’s proposal, I believe Jesus was saying in effect, “I know who I am. I am not lacking anything. And I don’t need to have or possess what you think is important in order to feel good about myself.”

The Devil tried one last trick. This time, he took Jesus to the highest point of the temple in Jerusalem. There was a big crowd below them. The Devil saw this as an opportunity to try Jesus with the popularity bait by getting him to show off, for with the big crowd below them as witnesses, he would gain instant popularity.

So once at the parapet of the temple, he said to Jesus, “If you’re the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. Your angels will protect you and stop you from dashing your foot against a stone.” Jesus, again, would not relent. His reply to the Devil was clear: “You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.” But in fact, all he was saying was, “I know who I am. And who I am is not determined by how famous or popular you think I am.”

In the same way, you must understand that your value is not based on what you do, what you have or how popular you are. Why? Because all these factors are always subject to change. When you base your value on your ability to perform and produce, then you will lose your value the moment you are no longer able to perform as before.

Sad to say, but the failure to recognize our intrinsic value as human beings has often led to what Martin Luther King, Jr. has called “the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man.” Indeed, a lot of the gender, racial or age discrimination in many countries today grows out of our distorted understanding of our intrinsic value as human beings.

For centuries, even the greatest philosophers and thinkers like Aristotle have considered women to be inferior beings. Slavery and colonization flourished because some people were convinced that their skin color ordained them to feel superior. And victims of this faulted belief had accepted it as an undeniable fact.

Today, old people in Europe and Asia are looked down on as valueless because …

https://sankaraship.com/sankaraship-1-never-think-less-of-yourself/

The post Thomas Sankara – Never Think Less of Yourself … first appeared on My Blog.

The post Thomas Sankara – Never Think Less of Yourself … appeared first on My Blog.

Abstract

Thomas Sankara, one of the most celebrated African idols, was president of Burkina Faso from 1983 until his assassination in 1987. The politics he realized with his government were vanguard in more than one regard: The country’s feminist politics queried patriarchy by promoting equal rights and duties for women and men in several different domains; along with the country’s citizens, migrants could participate in policy-making and thereby shape politics; redistribution was made a political goal aspiring to overcome class differences; protectionist economic policies led the country to food sovereignty and many more impressive projects were realized at the time. In a nutshell, the overall goal of the revolution was the pursuit of an endogenous African way of a good and dignified life. Thinking Thomas Sankara’s vision and politics together with Post-Development theory, the author explores whether Burkina Faso at that time can be considered an alternative to “development” and then likewise a post-developmental state. As a novel concept, the latter is extensively discussed and operationalized by the author, before being applied on concrete different policy fields of the case study. The research strives after understanding the potential transformation Post-Development could achieve on a state level, while simultaneously cautioning against along-going risks.

The post “Burkina Faso Under the Presidency of Thomas Sankara – A Post-Developmental State ?” a master thesis by By Fiona Faye first appeared on My Blog.

The post “Burkina Faso Under the Presidency of Thomas Sankara – A Post-Developmental State ?” a master thesis by By Fiona Faye appeared first on My Blog.

PRESS RELEASE

The news was made public on 21 December 2023. Élisabeth Borne, Prime Minister of the French government, cancelled the extradition decree signed by her predecessor Édouard Philippe in March 2020 and validated by the Council of State on 30 July 2021. This decision was shortly followed by the lifting of the judicial supervision order, thereby restoring François Compaoré’s complete freedom.

After the validation of July 2021, François Compaoré’s lawyers appealed to the ECHR (European Council of Human Rights). Its verdict, on 7 September 2023, stated: “The Court concludes that there would be a violation of Article 3 of the Convention [1] in its procedural aspect if the extradition decree were to be implemented without a prior review of the validity and reliability of the diplomatic assurances provided by Burkina Faso”. We emphasise the second part of this sentence, which is never quoted by most of the media in France, yet which sets out a condition before asserting a violation of Article 3. In the same press release, the Court asked France to re-examine the case, adding that the current government of Burkina Faso had not responded to the observations sent to it on 19 October 2022 by the ECHR. The CNPNZ (Centre national de presse Norbert Zongo) condemned this serious oversight in a press release, while the Burkinabe government defended itself in a statement by saying that it had not received any request from the French government.

In reality, France’s decision was due to a deterioration in diplomatic relations rather than a deterioration in the treatment of the detainees. There have been no exchanges between the French government and the Burkinabe government since this press release. For example, Gilbert Diendéré, convicted of an attempted putsch in 2015 and the assassination of Thomas Sankara, is being held in good conditions, as anyone familiar with Burkina Faso can easily see. According to our information, he is even sometimes granted leave.

Having removed Blaise Compaoré from the jurisdiction of Burkina Faso, the French authorities have now decided to remove François Compaoré from the jurisdiction of his own country. A country that calls itself democratic cannot allow a person charged with “inciting to murder” a journalist in the exercise of his profession to escape.

The International Network Justice for Thomas Sankara, Justice for Africa strongly protests against this decision, and calls on the press and democratic forces in France to do likewise.

Done on 8 January 2024 in Niamey, Lorient, Paris, Ottawa, Toulouse, Bamako, Banfora, Bobo Dioulasso, Ouagadougou, Barcelona, Turin, Las Palmas, Dakar, Grenoble, Sabadell, Ajaccio, Nîmes, Brussels, Liège.

The international network Justice for Thomas Sankara, Justice for Africa

Contact: contactjusticepoursankara at gmail.com

The post After Blaise Compaoré, it’s François’ turn to be shielded from his country’s justice system by the French authorities first appeared on My Blog.

The post After Blaise Compaoré, it’s François’ turn to be shielded from his country’s justice system by the French authorities appeared first on My Blog.

PRESS RELEASE

On 28 November 2023, Frédéric Maillot, Member of Parliament for the French overseas departement of the island of Reunion, took advantage of a question and answer session to pose the following question: “If the French State has declassified confidential defence documents, why have those covered by national defence secret not been returned? [1] (see https://www.thomassankara.net/affaire-sankara-depute-frederic-maillot-interpelle-gouvernement-a-lassemblee-nationale/ (in French)).

Olivier Becht, Minister Delegate for Foreign Trade, Attractiveness and French Nationals Abroad, who was responsible for responding on behalf of the government, said: “… France has therefore kept the promise made by President Emmanuel Macron in Ouagadougou in November 2017, to transmit all the documents, all the documents produced by the French administrations during Sankara’s regime and after his assassination, the promise has therefore been kept, the documents have been transmitted”.

However, we were able to contact the lawyers representing the families of the victims of the 15 October 1987 coup d’État, who confirmed that no secret defence documents had been provided by France, only confidential defence documents.

For the record, we recall once again the commitment made by Emmanuel Macron to a lecture hall of students on 29 November 2017 in Ouagadougou, in the presence of the then President of Burkina Faso, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré: “I have taken the decision, in response to requests from the Burkina Faso judiciary, that all documents produced by French administrations during the Sankara regime and after his assassination… covered by national secrecy will be declassified and consulted”. The French government avoided mentioning the clarification given by the MP, contenting itself with an evasive response that turns out to be just another State lie, this is the usual French authorities’ delaying tactic whenever they are pressed by a judge or by victims’ families. In reality, France very rarely declassifies secret defence documents. It has not done so, as promised, in the Sankara affair, declassifying only confidential defence documents.

The method consists of making occasional promises to satisfy a demand of the moment, even in the presence of the head of state directly concerned, and then not honouring the commitments. This reflects the profound contempt shown by Emmanuel Macron and the French authorities towards their African counterparts, the African populations, and the families of the victims of the assassinations of Thomas Sankara and his 12 companions on 15 October 1987. This is an attitude that France has paid for dearly in the sub-region, as we have seen in recent times.

We strongly protest against this new State lie about defence secrecy. These documents have not been declassified. Only confidential defence documents with a lower level of secrecy have been declassified.

We call on the members of the French Parliament to reject this contempt, to demand that President Emmanuel Macron keep his word, and to express their solidarity with the families of the victims of the 15 October 1987 coup d’État, who have been demanding the truth for so many long years.

The lies and prevarications of the French authorities regarding the delivery of the declassified archives in the Sankara affair only increase suspicion about the role that the French government may have played in the assassination of Thomas Sankara.

France must honour its promise and declassify all the secret defence documents relating to the assassination of Sankara and his companions and provide them to the Burkinabe justice system!

Signed in Paris, Ouagadougou, Ottawa, Bamako, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Toulouse, Nîmes, Rome, Dakar, Turin, Ajaccio, Banfora, Bobo Dioulasso, Niamey, Brussels, Liège, Barcelona, Berlin, Basel on 12 December 2023

The international network Justice for Thomas Sankara Justice for Africa

Contact: contactjusticepoursankara at gmail.com

The post The Thomas Sankara affair, Questioned by a Member of Parliament about the delivery of the archives, the French government responded with a State lie first appeared on My Blog.

The post The Thomas Sankara affair, Questioned by a Member of Parliament about the delivery of the archives, the French government responded with a State lie appeared first on My Blog.

The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women

Thomas Sankara March 8, 1987

It is not an everyday occurrence for a man to speak to so very many women at once. Nor does it happen every day that a man suggests to so many women new battles to be joined. A man experiences his first bashfulness the minute he becomes con scious that he is looking at a woman. So, sisters, you will understand that despite the joy and the pleasure it gives me to be speaking to you, I still remain a man who sees in every one of you a mother, a sister, or a wife.

I hope, too, that our sisters here from Kadiogo Province who do not understand French-the foreign language in which I will be giving my speech-will be patient with us, as they always have been. After all, it is they who, like our mothers, accepted the task of carrying us for nine months without a complaint. [Sankara then explains in the Moore language that these women would receive a translation.]

Comrades, the night of August 4 gave birth to an achieve ment that was most beneficial for the Burkinabe people. It gave our people a name and our country new horizons. Imbued with the invigorating sap of freedom, the men of Burkina, the humiliated and outlawed of yesterday, received the stamp of what is most precious in the world: honor and dignity. From this moment on, happiness became accessible. Every day we advance toward it, heady with the first fruits of our struggles, themselves proof of the great strides we have already taken. But this selfish happiness is an illusion. There is something crucial missing: woman. She has been excluded from this joyful procession.

Though our men have already reached the edges of this great garden that is the revolution, our women are still confined within the shadows of anonymity. Among themselves, in voices loud or soft, they talk of the hopes that have embraced Burkina-hopes that are, for them, still merely fine words. The revolution’s promise is already a reality for men. But for women, it is still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revoluiton depend on women.

These are vital and essential questions, because nothing whole, nothing definitive or lasting could be accomplished in our country, as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation-a condition imposed in the course of centuries by various systems of exploitation.

Starting now, the men and women of Burkina Faso should profoundly change their image of themselves. For they are part of a society that is not only establishing new social relations but is also provoking a cultural transformation, upsetting the relations of authority between men and women and forcing each to rethink the nature of both.

This task is formidable but necessary. For it will determine our ability to bring our revolution to its full stature, unleash its full potential, and show its true meaning for the direct, natural, and necessary relations between men and women, the most natural of all relations between people. This will show to what extent the natural behavior of man has become human and to what extent he has realized his human nature.

This human being, this vast and complex combination of pain and joy; solitary and forsaken, yet creator of all humanity; suffering, frustrated, and humiliated, and yet endless source of happiness for each one of us; this source of affection beyond compare, inspiring the most unexpected courage; this being called weak, but possessing untold ability to inspire us to take the road of honor; this being of flesh and blood and of spiritual conviction-this being, women, is you. You are our mothers and life companions, our comrades in struggle, and because of this fact
you should by rights assert yourselves as equal partners in the joyful victory feasts of the revolution.

It is in this light that all of us, men and women, must define and affirm the role and place of women in society. Therefore, we must restore to man his true image by making the reign of freedom prevail over differentiations imposed by nature and by eliminating all kinds of hypocrisy that sustain the shameless exploitation of women.

Posing the question of women in Burkinabe society today means posing the abolition of the system of slavery to which they have been subjected for millennia. The first step is to try to understand how this system works, to grasp its real nature in all its subtlety, in order then to work out a line of action that can lead to women’s total emancipation.

In other words, in order to win this battle that men and women have in common, we must be familiar with all aspects of the woman question on a world scale and here in Burkina. We must understand how the struggle of the Burkinabe woman is part of a worldwide struggle of all women and, beyond that, part of the struggle for the full rehabilitation of our continent. Thus, women’s emancipation is at the heart of the question of humanity itself, here and everywhere. The question is thus universal in character.

The class struggle and the worldwide status of women

We undoubtedly owe it to dialectical materialism for having shed the greatest light on the problem of the conditions women face, allowing us to lay out the problem of the exploitation of women in the framework of a general system of exploitation.

Dialectical materialism defines human society not as a natural, unchangeable fact, but as something working on nature. Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings and we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force.

What is more, woman’s consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and relations between classes. The importance of dialectical materalism lies in having gone beyond essential biological limits and simplistic theories about our being slaves to nature and having laid out the facts in their social and economic context.

From the first beginnings of human history, man’s mastering of nature has never been accomplished with his bare hands alone. The hand with the opposable thumb reaches out for the tool, which increases the hand’s power. It was thus not physical attributes alone-musculature or the capacity to give birth, for example-that determined the unequal status of men and women. Nor was it technological progress as such that institutionalized this inequality. In certain cases, in certain parts of the globe, women were able to eliminate the physical difference that separated them from men.

It was rather the transition from one form of society to another that served to institutionalize women’s inequality. This inequality was produced by our own minds and intelligence in order to develop a concrete form of domination and exploitation. The social function and role to which women have been relegated ever since is a living reflection of this fact. Today, her childbearing functions and the social obligation to conform to models of elegance determined by men prevent any woman who might want to from developing a so-called male musculature.

For millennia, from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age, relations between the sexes were, in the opinion of the most skilled paleontologists, positive and complementary in character. So it was for eight millennia! As Frederick Engels explained to us, relations were based on collaboration and interaction, in contrast to the patriarchy, where women’s exclusion was a generalized characteristic of the epoch. Engels not only traced the evolution of technology but also of the historic enslavement of women, which occurred with the appearance of private property, when one mode of production gave way to another, and when one form of social organization replaced another.

With the intensive labor required to clear the forests, cultivate the fields, and put the natural resources to best use, a division of labor developed. Self-interest, laziness, indolence-in short, taking the most for oneself with the least effort-emerged from the depths of the human spirit and become elevated into principles.

The protective tenderness of the woman toward the family and the clan became a trap that delivered her up to domination by the male. Innocence and generosity fell victim to deceit and base motives. Love was made a mockery of and human dignity scorned. All genuine human feelings were transformed into objects of barter. From this moment on, women’s hospitality and desire to share were overpowered by cunning and treachery.

Though conscious of this treachery, which imposed on her an unequal share of the burdens, the woman followed the man in order to care for all that she loved. For his part, the man exploited her great self-sacrifice to the hilt. Later; this seed of criminal exploitation was set in terrible social imperatives, going far beyond the conscious concessions made by the woman, historically betrayed.

Humankind first knew slavery with the advent of private property. Man, master of his slaves and of the land, became in addition the woman’s master. This was the historic defeat of the female sex. It came about with the upheaval in the division of labor and as a result of new modes of production and a revolution in the means of production. In this way, paternal right replaced maternal right.

Property was now handed down from father to son, rather than as before from the woman to her clan. The patriarchal family made its appearance, founded on the sole and personal property of the father, who had become head of the family. Within this family the woman was oppressed. Reigning supreme, the man satisfied his sexual whims by mating with his slaves or courtesans.

Women became his booty, his conquest in trade. He profited from their labor power and took his fill from the myriad of pleasures they afforded him. For their part, as soon as the masters gave them the chance, women took revenge in infidelity. Thus adultery became the natural counterpart to marriage. It was the woman’s only form of self-defense against the domestic slavery to which she was subjected. Her social oppression was a direct reflection of her economic oppression.

Given this cycle of violence, inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them. In fact, throughout the ages and wherever the patriarchy has triumphed, there has been a close parallel between class
exploitation and women’s inferior status. Of course, there were brighter periods where women, priestesses or female warriors, broke out of their oppressive chains. But the essential features of her subjugation have survived and been consolidated, both in everyday activity and in intellectual and moral repression.

Her status overturned by private property, banished from her very self, relegated to the role of child raiser and servant, written out of history by philosophy (Aristotle, Pythagoras, and others) and the most entrenched religions, stripped of all worth by mythology, woman shared the lot of a slave, who in slave society was nothing more than a beast of burden with a human face.

So it is not surprising that in its phase of conquest the capitalist system, for which human beings are just so many numbers, should be the economic system that has exploited women the most brazenly and with the most sophistication. So, we are told, manufacturers in those days employed only women on their mechanized looms. They gave preference to women who were married and, among them, to those with a family at home to support. These women paid greater attention to their work than single women and were more docile, having no choice but
to work to the point of exhaustion to earn the barest subsistence for their families. So we can see how women’s particular attributes are turned against her, and all the most moral and delicate qualities of her nature become the means by which she is subjugated. Her tenderness, her love for her family, the meticulous care she takes with her work-all this is used against her, even as she guards herself against any weaknesses she might have.

Thus, throughout the ages and throughout different types of society, women suffered a sorry fate, in a continually reinforced position of inferiority to men. Though her inequality was expressed in many and varied guises, she remained unequal.

In slave society, the male slave was looked upon as an animal, a means of production of goods and services. The woman, whatever her social rank, was crushed not only within her own class, but by other classes too. This was the case even for women who belonged to the exploiting classes. In feudal society, women were kept in a state of absolute dependence on men, justified by reference to women’s supposed physical and psychological weakness. Often seen as a defiled object, a primary agent of indiscretion, women, with a few rare exceptions, were kept out of places of worship. In capitalist society, the woman, already morally and socially persecuted, is also subjugated economically. Kept by the man if she does not work, even then she works herself to death.

We will never be able to paint an adequate picture of the misery women suffer, nor show too strongly that women share the misery of proletarians as a whole.

The specific character of women’s oppression

Woman’s fate is bound up with that of the exploited male. This is a fact. However, this solidarity, arising from the exploitation that both men and women suffer and that binds them together historically, must not cause us to lose sight of the specific reality of the woman’s situation. The conditions of her life are determined by more than economic factors, and they show that she is a victim of a specific oppression. The specific character of this oppression cannot be explained away by setting up an equal sign or by falling into easy and childish simplifications.

It is true that both she and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current economic system, the worker’s wife is also condemned to silence by her workerhusband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use as their pretext physical differences. It
is clear that the difference between the sexes is a feature of human society. This difference characterizes particular relations that immediately prevent us from viewing women, even in production, simply as female workers. The existence of relations of privilege, of relations that spell danger for the woman, all this means that women’s reality constitutes an ongoing problem for us.

The male uses the complex nature of these relations as an excuse to sow confusion among women. He takes advantage of all the shrewdness that class exploitation has to offer in order to maintain his domination over women. This is the same method used by men to dominate other men in other lands. The idea was established that certain men, by virtue of their family origin and birth, or by divine right, were superior to others. This was the basis for the feudal system. Other men have managed to enslave whole peoples in this way. They used their origins, or arguments based on their skin color, as a supposedly scientific justification for dominating those who were unfortunate enough to have skin of a different color. This is what colonial domination and apartheid are based on.

We must pay the closest attention to women’s situation because it pushes the best of them into waging a sex war when it’s a question of waging, at bottom and in a complementary manner, a clan or class war. We have to say frankly that it is the attitude of men that makes such confusion possible. It is men’s attiuude that spawns the bold assertions made by feminism, certain of which have not been without value in the war that men and women are waging against oppression. This war is one we can and will win-if we understand that we need one another and
are complementary, that we share the same fate, and in fact, that we are condemned to interdependence.

At this moment, we have little choice but to recognize that masculine behavior comprises vanity, irresponsibility, arrogance, and violence of all kinds toward women. This kind of behavior can hardly lead to coordinated action against women’s oppression. And we must say frankly that such attitudes, which can sink to the level of sheer stupidity, are in reality nothing but a safety valve for the oppressed male, who, through brutalizing his wife, hopes to regain some of the human dignity denied him by the system of exploitation. This masculine foolishness is called sexism or machismo. It includes all kinds of moral and intellectual feebleness-even thinly veiled physical weakness- which often gives politically conscious women no choice but to consider it their duty to wage a war on two fronts.

In order to fight and win, women must identify with the oppressed layers and classes of society, such as workers and peasants, etc. The man, however; no matter how oppressed he is, has another human being to oppress: his wife. To say this is, without any doubt, to affirm a terrible fact. When we talk about the vile system of apartheid, for example, our thoughts and emotions turn to the exploited and oppressed Blacks. But we forget the Black woman who has to endure her husband-this man who, armed with his passbook, allows himself all kinds of reprehensible detours before returning home to the woman who has waited for him so worthily, in such privation and destitution. We should keep in mind, too, the white woman of South Africa. Aristocratic, with every possible material comfort, she is, unfortunately, still a tool for the pleasure of the lecherous white man. The only thing these men can do to blot out the terrible crimes they commit against Blacks is to engage in drunken brawls and
perverse, bestial sexual behavior.

And there is no lack of examples of men, otherwise progressive, who live cheerfully in adultery, but who are prepared to murder their wives on the merest suspicion of infidelity. How many men in Burkina seek so-called consolation in the arms of prostitutes and mistresses of all kinds! And this is not to mention the irresponsible husbands whose wages go to keep mistresses or fill the coffers of bar owners.

And what should we think of those little men, also progressive, who get together in sleazy places to talk about the women they have taken advantage of? They think this is the way they will be able to measure up to other men and even humiliate some of them, by having seduced their wives. In reality, such men are pitiful and insignificant. They would not even enter our discussion if it were not for the fact that their criminal behavior has been undermining the morale and virtue of many fine women whose contribution to our revolution could be of the utmost importance.

And then there are those more-or-less revolutionary militants-much less revolutionary than more-who do not accept that their wives should also be politically active; or who allow them to be active by day and by day only; or who beat their wives because they have gone out to meetings or to a demonstation at night.

Oh, these suspicious, jealous men! What narrow-mindedness! And what a limited, partial commitment! For is it only at night that a woman who is disenchanted and determined can deceive her husband? And what is this political commitment that expects her to stop political activity at nightfall and resume her rights and responsibilities only at daybreak? And, finally, what should we make of remarks about women made by all kinds of activists, the one more revolutionary than the next, remarks such as “women are despicably materialist,” “manipulators,” “clowns,” “liars,” “gossips,” “schemers,” ”jealous,” and so on? Maybe this is all true of women. But surely it is equally true of men.

Could our society be any less perverse than this when it systematically burdens women down, keeps them away from anything that is supposed to be serious and of consequence, and excludes them from anything other than the most petty and minor activities!

When you are condemned, as women are, to wait for your lord and master at home in order to feed him and receive his permission to speak or just to be alive, what else do you have to keep you occupied and to give you at least the illusion of being useful other than meaningful glances, gossip, chatter, furtive envious glances at others, and the bad-mouthing of their flirtations and private lives? The same attitudes are found among men put in the same situation.

Another thing we say about women, alas, is that they are always forgetful. We even call them birdbrains. But we must never forget that a woman’s whole life is dominated- tormented- by a fickle, unfaithful, and irresponsible husband and by her children and their problems. Completely worn out by attending to the entire family, how could she not have haggard eyes that reflect distraction and absentmindedness. For her, forgetting becomes an antidote to the suffering, a relief from the harshness of her existence, a vital self-defense mechanism.

But there are forgetful men, too-a lot of them. Some forget by indulging in drink or drugs, others through the various kinds of perversity they engage in throughout life. Does anyone ever say that these men are forgetful? What vanity! What banality! Banalities, though, that men revel in as a way of concealing the weaknesses of the masculine universe, because this masculine universe in an exploitative society needs female prostitutes. We say that both the female and the prostitute are scapegoats. We defile them and when we are done with them we sacrifice them on the altar of prosperity of a system of lies and plunder.

Prostitution is nothing but the microcosm of a society where exploitation is a general rule. It is a symbol of the contempt men have for women. And yet this woman is none other than the painful figure of the mothet; sister, or wife of other men, thus of every one of us. In the final analysis, it is the unconscious contempt we have for ourselves. There can be prostitutes only as long as there are pimps and those who seek prostitutes.

But who frequents prostitutes? First, there are the husbands who commit their wives to chastity, while they relieve their depravity and debauchery upon the prostitute. This allows them to treat their wives with a seeming respect, while they reveal their true nature at the bosom of the lady of so-called pleasure. So on the moral plane prostitution becomes the counterpart to marriage. Tradition, customs, religion, and moral doctrines alike seem
to have no difficulty adapting themselves to it. This is what our church fathers mean when they explain that “sewers are needed to assure the cleanliness of the palace.”

Then there are the unrepentant and intemperate pleasure seekers who are afraid to take on the responsibility of a home with its ups and downs, and who flee from the moral and material responsibility of fatherhood. So they discreetly seek out the address of a brothel, a gold mine of relations that entail no responsibility on their part.

There is also a whole bevy of men who, publicly at least and in “proper” company, subject women to public humiliation because of some grudge they have not had the strength of character to surmount, thus losing confidence in all women, who become from then on “tools of the devil.” Or else they do so out of hypocrisy, proclaiming their contempt for the female sex too often and categorically, a contempt that they strive to assume in
the eyes of the public from which they have extorted admiration through false pretenses. All these men end up night after night in brothels until occasionally their hypocrisy is discovered.

Then there is the weakness of the man who is looking for a polyandrous arrangement. Far be it for us to make a value judgment on polyandry, which was the dominant form of relations between men and women in certain societies. What we are denouncing here are the courts of idle, moneygrubbing gigolos lavishly kept by rich ladies.

Within this same system, prostitution can, economically speaking, include both the prostitute and the “materialist-minded” married woman. The only difference between the woman who sells her body by prostitution and she who sells herself in marriage is the price and duration of the contract. So, by tolerating the existence of prostitution, we relegate all our women to the same rank: that of a prostitute or wife. The only difference between the two is that the legal wife, though still oppressed, at least has the benefit of the stamp of respectability that marriage confers. As for the prostitute, all that remains for her is the market value of her body, a value that fluctuates according to the size of the male chauvinist’s wallet.

Isn’t she just an object that increases or decreases in value according to the degree to which her charms wilt? Isn’t she governed by the law of supply and demand? Prostitution is a tragic and painful representation of female slavery in all its forms.

We should see in every prostitute an accusing finger pointing firmly at society as a whole. Every pimp, every partner in prostitution, turns the knife in this festering and gaping wound that disfigures the world of man and leads to his ruin. In fighting against prostitution, in holding out a saving hand to the prostitute, we are saving our mothers, our sisters, and our wives from this social leprosy. We are saving ourselves. We are saving the world.

Women’s reality in Burkina Faso

If society sees the birth of a boy as a “gift from God,” the birth of a girl is greeted as an act of fate, or at best, an offering that can serve in the production of food and the perpetuation of the human race.

The little male will be taught how to want and get, to demand and be served, to desire and take, to decide things without being questioned. The future woman, however, is dealt blow after blow by a society that unanimously, as one man-and “as one man” is the appropriate term- drums into her head norms that lead nowhere. A psychological straitjacket called virtue produces a spirit of personal alienation within her. A preoccupation with being protected is nurtured in the child’s mind, inclining her to seek the supervision of a guardian or drawing her into marriage. What a monstrous mental fraud! This child knows no childhood. From the age of three, she must be true to her role in life: to serve and be useful.

While her brother of four or five will play till he drops from exhaustion or boredom, she, with little ceremony, will enter into production. She already has a trade: assistant housewife. It is an occupation without pay since, as is generally said, a housewife “does nothing.” Do we not write “housewife” on the identity cards of women who have no income, signifying that they have no job, that they are “not working”? With the help of tradition and
obligatory submissiveness, our sisters grow up more and more dependent, more and more dominated, more and more exploited, and with less and less free time for leisure.

While the young man’s road is strewn with opportunities to develop himself and take charge of his life, at every new stage of the young girl’s life the social straitjacket is pulled tighter around her. She will pay a heavy price for having been born female. And she will pay it throughout her whole life, until the weight of her toil and the effects of her physical and mental self-negation lead her to the day of eternal rest. She is an instrument of production
at the side of her mother, who is already more of a matron than a mother. She never sits idle, is never left to her games and toys like her brother.

Whichever direction we turn-from the central plateau in the northeast, dominated by societies where power is highly centralized; to the west, where the powers of the village communities are decentralized; or to the southwest, the land of scattered collectives-the traditional form of social organization has at least one point in common: the subjugation of women. In our 8,000 villages, on our 600,000 plots of land, and in our million and more households, on the question of women we can see identical or similar approaches.

From one end of the country to the other, social cohesion as defined by men requires the subjugation of women and the subordination of the young. Our society, still too primitively agrarian, patriarchal, and polygamous by far, turns the woman into an object of exploitation for her labor power and of consumption for her reproductive capacity.

How do women manage to live out this peculiar dual iden tity, which makes them, at one and the same time, the vital knot that ties together the whole family by their presence and attention, guarantees its fundamental unity, and yet also makes them marginalized and ignored? The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equaled only by her own stoic endurance. In order to be able to live in harmony with the society of man, in order to obey his command, she envelopes herself in demeaning and self-effacing detachment.
She sacrifices herself to this.

Woman, you are the source of life, yet an object; mother, yet domestic servant; nurturer, yet pseudowoman; you can do the bidding of both soil and hearth, yet you are invisible, faceless, and voiceless. You are the pivot, the unifier, yet a being in chains, shadow of the male shadow.

The woman is the pillar of family well-being, the midwife, washerwoman, cleaner, and cook. She is errand-runner, matron, farmer, healer, gardener, grinder, saleswoman, worker. She is labor power working with obsolete tools, putting in hundreds of thousands of hours for a hopeless level of production.

Every day our sisters, fighting as they are on the four fronts of our war against disease, hunger, poverty, and degeneracy, feel the pressure of changes over which they have no control. For every single one of the 800,000 males who emigrate from Burkina, a woman takes on an additional load. The two million Burkinabe men who live outside the country thus exacerbate the sexual imbalance that puts women today at 51.7 percent of the total popu
lation, or 52.1 percent of the potentially active population.

Too overburdened to give the necessary attention to her children, too exhausted to think of herself, the woman continues to slave away-the grinding wheel, wheel of fortune, drive wheel, spare wheel, the big wheel. Broken on the wheel and bullied, women, our sisters and wives, pay for creating life, for sustaining life. Socially they are relegated to third place, after the man and the child-just like the Third World, arbitrarily held back, the better to be dominated and exploited. Subjugated, the woman goes from a protective guardian who exploits her to one who
dominates her and exploits her even more. She is first to work and last to rest. She is first to fetch water and wood, first at the fire, yet last to quench her thirst. She may eat only if there is food left and then only after the man. She is the very keystone of the family, carrying both family and society on her shoulders, in her hands, and in her belly. In return, she is paid with oppressive, pro-population-growth ideology, food taboos, overwork, and malnutrition. Society rewards her with dangerous pregnancies, self-effacement, and innumerable other evils that make maternal deaths one of the most intolerable, unspeakable, and shameful defects of our society.

Predatory intruders come to this bedrock of alienation from afar and foment the isolation of women, making their condition even more precarious. The euphoria of independence left women with all hopes dashed. Segregated off during negotiations, absent from all decisions, vulnerable, and at the mercy of all, she has continued to be victim to family and society. Capital and bureaucracy have banded together to maintain her subjugation. Imperialism has done the rest.

With an education level only half that of men and with little training in skilled trades, women are 99 percent illiterate, are discriminated against in the job market and confined to secondary jobs, and are the first to be harassed and fired. Yet burdened as they are by a hundred traditions and a thousand excuses, never seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, women have continued to rise to challenge after challenge. They have had to keep going, whatever the cost, for the sake of their children, their family, and for society in general.

Capitalism needed cotton, shea nuts, and sesame for its in dustries. Women, our mothers, in addition to all the tasks they were already carrying out, found themselves responsible for harvesting these too.

In the towns, where civilization is supposedly a liberating force for women, they have found themselves decorating bourgeois parlors, selling their bodies to survive, or serving as commercial bait for advertising. Women from the petty bourgeoisie no doubt live better on an economic level than women in the countryside. But are they really freer, more liberated, or more respected? Are they really entrusted with more responsibility? We must do more than ask questions in this regard. We must take a stand.

Many problems still persist, whether in the domain of jobs, access to education, women’s status in legal codes, or even just at the level of everyday life: the Burkinabe woman still remains the one who follows the man, rather than going side by side.

The different neocolonial regimes that have been in power in Burkina have had no better than a bourgeois approach to women’s emancipation, which brought only the illusion of freedom and dignity. It was bound to remain that way as long as only a few petty-bourgeois women from the towns were concerned with the latest fad in feminist politics-or rather primitive feminism-which demanded the right of the woman to be masculine. Thus the creation of the Ministry of Women, headed by a woman, was touted as a victory. Did we really understand
the situation faced by women? Did we realize we were talking about the living conditions of 52 percent of the Burkina be population? Did we understand that these conditions were the product of entire social, political, and economic infrastructures and pervasive backward conceptions, and that their transformation therefore could not rest with a single ministry, even if this were led by a woman? The answer is very clear. The women of Burkina
were able to ascertain after several years of this ministry’s existence that nothing had changed for them.

And it could not be otherwise, given that the approach to the question of women’s liberation that led to the creation of this pseudoministry refused to recognize, show, and take into account the real cause of women’s subjugation and exploitation. So we should not be surprised that, despite the existence of this ministry, prostitution grew, women’s access to education and jobs did not improve, their civil and political rights were ignored, and the general conditions of their lives in town and countryside alike improved not one iota. Female trinket, sham female
politician, female temptress, obedient female voter in elections, female robot in the kitchen, female frustrated by the passivity and restrictions imposed on her despite her open mind-wherever the female is placed in the spectrum of pain, whether she suffers the urban or the rural way, she continues to suffer!

But one single night placed women at the heart of the family’s development and at the center of national solidarity. The dawn that followed the night of August 4, 1983, brought liberty with it, calling all of us to march together side by side in equality, as a single people joined by common goals. The August revolution found the Burkina be woman in her state of subjugation, exploited by a neocolonial society deeply imbued with the ideology of backward social forces . She owed it to herself to break with these reactionary political views on women’s emancipation, so widely praised and followed until then. She owed it to herself to draw up with utmost clarity a new, just, and revolutionary political approach to her liberation.

Women’s emancipation and the Burkina revolution

On October 2, 1983, in the Political Orientation Speech, the National Council of the Revolution laid out clearly the main axis of the fight for women’s liberation. It made a commitment to work to mobilize, organize, and unify all the active forces of the nation, particularly women.

The Political Orientation Speech had this to say specifically in regard to womeri: “Women will be an integral part of all the battles we will have to wage against the various shackles of neocolonial society and for the construction of a new society. They will take part in all levels of the organization of the life of the nation as a whole, from conceiving projects to making decisions and implementing them. The final goal of this great undertaking is to build a free and prosperous society in which women will be equal to men in all domains.”

There can be no clearer way to conceptualize and explain the question of women and the liberation struggle ahead of us. “The genuine emancipation of women is that which entrusts responsibilities to them and involves them in productive activity and in the different struggles the people face. Women’s genuine emancipation is one that exacts men’s respect and consideration.”

What is clearly indicated here, sister comrades, is that the struggle to liberate women is above all your struggle to deepen our democratic and popular revolution, a revolution that grants you from this moment on the right to speak and act in building a new society of justice and equality, in which men and women have the same rights and responsibilities. The democratic and popular revolution has created the conditions for such a liberating struggle. It now falls to you to act with the greatest sense of responsibility in breaking through all the shackles and obstacles
that enslave women in backward societies like ours and to assume your share of the responsibilities in the political fight to build a new society at the service of Africa and all humanity.

In the very first hours of the democratic and popular revolution we said that “emancipation, like freedom, is not granted but conquered. It is for women themselves to put forward their demands and mobilize to win them.” The revolution has not only laid out the objectives of the struggle for women’s liberation but has also indicated the road to be followed and the methods to be used, as well as the main actors in this battle. We have now been working together, men and women, for four years in order to achieve success and come closer to our final goal. We should note the battles waged and the victories won, as well as the setbacks suffered and the difficulties encountered. This will aid us in preparing and leading future struggles.

So what tasks does our democratic and popular revolution have in respect to women’s emancipation? What acquisitions do we have, and what obstacles still remain? One of the main acquisitions of the revolution with regard to women’s emancipation was, without any doubt, the establishment of the Women’s Union of Burkina (UFB). This is a major acquisition because it has provided the women of our country with a framework and a solid mechanism with which to wage a successful fight. Establishing the UFB represents a big victory in that it allows for the mobilization of all politically active women around well-defined and just objectives, under the leadership of the National Council of the Revolution.

The UFB is an organization of militant and serious women who are determined to change things, to fight until they win, to fall and fall again, but to get back on their feet and go forward without retreating. This is the new consciousness that has taken root among the women of Burkina, and we should all be proud of it. Comrades, the Women’s Union of Burkina is your combat weapon. It belongs to you. Sharpen it again and again so that its blade will cut more deeply, bringing you ever-greater victories.

The different initiatives directed at women’s emancipation that the government has taken over a period of a little more than three years are certainly inadequate. But they have put us on the right road, to the point where our country can present itself as being in the vanguard of the battle to liberate women. Women of Burkina participate more and more in decision making and in the real exercise of popular power. They are present everywhere the country is being built. You can find them at every work site: in the Sourou [Valley irrigation project], in our
reforestation programs, in vaccination brigades, in Operation Clean Town, in the Battle for the Railroad, and so on.

Step by step, the women of Burkina have gained a foothold everywhere, asserting themselves and demolishing all the male chauvinist, backward conceptions of men. And this process will go on until women are present in Burkina’s entire social and professional fabric. For three and a half years our revolution has worked to systematically eliminate all practices that demean women, such as prostitution and related activity, like vagrancy
and female juvenile delinquency, forced marriages, female circumcision, 1 and their particularly difficult living conditions.

By working to solve the water problem; by building windmills in the villages; by assuring the widespread use of the improved stove; by building public nurseries, carrying out daily vaccinations, and encouraging healthy, abundant, and varied eating habits, the revolution has no doubt greatly contributed to improving the quality of women’s lives. Women, for their part, must commit themselves to greater involvement in the fight against imperial
ism. They should be firm in producing and consuming Burkinabe goods, and, as producers and consumers of locally produced goods, always strive to be a major factor in our economy.

Though the August revolution has already done much for the emancipation of women, this is still far from adequate. Much remains to be done. And in order to continue our work and do it even better, we must be more aware of the difficulties still to be overcome. They are many. At the very top of the list are the problems of illiteracy and low political consciousness. Both of these problems are intensified by the inordinate influence reac
tionary social forces exert in backward societies like ours. We must work with perseverance to overcome these two main obstacles. As long as women do not have a clear appreciation of the just nature of the political battle to be fought and do not see clearly how to take it forward, we can easily run around in circles and eventually slip backwards.

This is why the UFB must fully assume its responsibilities. Its members must strive to overcome their own weaknesses and break with the kind of practices and behavior traditionally thought of as female-behavior we unfortunately often still see today. I am talking here about all those petty meannesses like jealousy, exhibitionism, continual empty, negative, and unprincipled criticism, mutual defamation, supersensitive subjectivity, and rivalries. Revolutionary women must overcome this kind of behavior, which is particularly acute on the part of petty-bourgeois women. It jeopardizes all collective effort, while the fight for women’s liberation is one that must be organized, thus entailing the combined contribution of all women.

We must collectively remain alert to women’s access to productive work. It is this work that emancipates and liberates women by assuring them economic independence and a greater social role, as well as a more complete and accurate understanding of the world.

Our view of the economic power women need has nothing in common with the crude greed and crass materialism of certain women who are literally like stock market speculators or walking safes. These women lose all their dignity and self-control, not to mention their principles, as soon as they hear the clinking of jewelry or the snapping of bank notes. Some of them unfortunately push their husbands deep into debt, even to embezzlement and corruption. They are like dangerous, sticky, fetid mud stifling the revolutionary fervor of their husbands or companions. We find such sad cases where the man’s revolutionary flame has burned out, and where the husband’s commitment to the cause of the people has been abandoned for the sake of a selfish, jealous, and envious shrew.

The education and economic emancipation of women, if not well understood and channeled in a constructive direction, can be a source of misfortune for the woman and thus for society as a whole. The educated and economically independent woman is sought after as lover and wife in good times and abandoned as soon as bad times arrive. Society passes a merciless judgment on them. An educated woman “has trouble finding a husband,”
it is said. The woman with independent means is suspect. They are all condemned to remain single-which would not be a problem if being single were not the cause for general ostracism from society-innocent victims who do not understand their crime or their defect, frustrated because every day is like a depressant pushing them to become cantankerous and hypochondriacs. For many women great knowledge has been the cause ofheartbreak,
and great fortune has spawned many a misfortune.

The solution to this apparent paradox lies in the ability of these unfortunate rich and educated women to place their great wealth and knowledge at the service of the people. By doing this, they will be all the more appreciated and admired by the many people to whom they have been able to bring a little happiness. How could such women possibly feel alone in these conditions? How could they not know emotional fulfillment when they have taken
their love of themselves and turned it into love of others?

Our women must not pull back in the face of the many different aspects of their struggle, which leads them to courageously and proudly take full charge of their own lives and discover the happiness of being themselves, not the domesticated female of the male. Even today many of our women put themselves under a man’s cover as the surest solution to oppressive gossip. They marry without love or joy, just to serve some boor, some dreary male who is far removed from real life and cut off from the struggles of the people.

Often, women will simultaneously demand some haughty independence and at the same time protection, or, even worse, to be put under the colonial protectorate of a male. They do not believe that they can live otherwise. No. We must say again to our sisters that marriage, if it brings society nothing positive and does not bring them happiness, is not indispensable and should even be avoided.

Let us show them our many examples of hardy and fearless pioneers, single women with or without children, who are radiant and blossoming, overflowing with richness and availability for others-even envied by unhappily married women, because of the warmth they generate and the happiness they draw from their freedom, dignity, and willingness to help others.

Women have shown sufficient proof of their ability to manage the home and raise children-in short, to be responsible members of society-without the oppressive tutelage of a man. Our society is surely sufficiently advanced to put an end to this banishment of the single woman. Comrade revolutionaries, we should see to it that marriage is a choice that adds something positive, and not some kind of lottery where we know what the ticket costs us, but have no idea what we will end up winning. Human feelings are too noble to be subject to such games.

Another sure source of the problem is the feudal, reactionary, and passive attitude of many men who by their behavior continue to hold things back. They have absolutely no intention of jeopardizing the total control they have over women, either at home or in society in general. In the struggle to build a new society, which is a revolutionary struggle, these men place themselves on the side of reaction and counterrevolution by their conduct. For the revolution cannot triumph without the genuine emancipation of women.

So, comrades, we must be highly conscious of all these difficulties in order to better face future battles. The woman, like the man, has qualities and weaknesses-which undoubtedly proves that she is equal to man. Placing the emphasis deliberately on woman’s qualities in no way means we have an idealistic vision of her. We simply aim to single out her qualities and capacities that men and society have always hidden in order to justify her
exploitation and subjugation.

How should we organize ourselves to accelerate the march forward to emancipation?

Though our resources are ridiculously small, our goals are ambitious. The will to go forward, our firm conviction, is not sufficient to win. We must marshal our forces, organize them, and channel them all toward winning our struggle.

Emancipation has been a topic of discussion in our country for more than two decades now. It has been an emotional discussion. Today, we must approach the question in its overall context. We must not shirk our responsibility by failing to bring all possible forces into the struggle and leaving this pivotal question of women’s emancipation off to the side. We must likewise avoid rushing out ahead, leaving far behind those, especially the women, who should be on the front lines.

At the governmental level, guided by the directives of the National Council of the Revolution, a consistent plan of action to benefit women will be implemented involving all the different ministerial departments and assigning the short- and medium-term responsibility of each. This plan of action, far from being a list of pious wishes and other feelings of pity, should be a guide to stepping up revolutionary action, since it is in the heat of struggle that important and decisive victories are won.

This plan of action should be conceived by ourselves, for ourselves. Our wide-ranging, democratic discussions should produce bold resolutions that build our confidence in women. What do men and women want for women? This is what we will include in our plan of action. This plan, by involving all the ministerial departments, will be a sharp break from the approach of treating the question of women’s equality as a side issue, relieving of responsibility those who, through their daily activity, should have and could have made a significant contribution to solving this problem.

This many-sided approach to women’s emancipation flows directly from our scientific analysis of the origins and source of their oppression and the importance of this struggle to the building of a new society free from all forms of exploitation and oppression. We are not pleading for anyone to condescendingly do women a favor. We are demanding, in the name of the revolution-whose purpose is to give, not to take-that justice be done to women.

From now on, every ministry and the administrative committee of each ministry, in addition to the usual overall assessment we make, will be judged according to their success in implementing this plan. So our statistical analyses will necessarily include action taken of direct benefit or concern to women.

The question of women’s equality must be uppermost in the mind of all those making decisions, at all times, and in all the different phases of conceiving and executing plans for development. Conceiving a development project without women’s participation is like using only four fingers when we have ten. It is an invitation to failure.

On the level of ministries charged with education, we must be doubly alert to women’s access to education. Education constitutes a qualitative step toward emancipation. It is an obvious fact that wherever women have had access to education, their march to equality has been accelerated. Emerging from the darkness of ignorance allows women to transmit and use the tools of knowledge in order to place themselves at the disposal of society. All those different ridiculous and backward concepts that hold that only education for males is important and profitable, and that educating women is an extravagance, must be wiped out in Burkina Faso.

Parents must accord the same attention to the progress of their daughters at school as they do to their sons, their pride and joy. Girls have proven that they are the equals of boys at school, if not simply better. But above all they have the right to education in order to learn and know, to be free. In future literacy campaigns, the rate of participation by women must be raised to correspond with their numerical weight in the population. It would be too great an injustice to maintain such an important part of the population-half, in fact-in ignorance.

On the level of the ministries of labor and justice, texts should constantly be kept in line with the transformation our society has been going through since August 4, 1983, so that equality between men and women can be a tangible reality. The new labor code, now being debated and prepared, should express how profoundly our people aspire to social justice. It should mark an important stage in the work of destroying the neocolonial state apparatus, a class apparatus fashioned by reactionary regimes in order to perpetuate the system that oppressed the
masses, especially women.

How could we continue to accept that a woman doing the same work as a man should earn less? Can we continue to accept dowries and forcing widows to marry their brothers-in-law, which reduce our sisters and mothers to common commodities to be bartered for? There are so many medieval laws still imposed on our people, particularly women, that it is only just that, finally, justice be done.

In the ministries in charge of culture and family affairs, particular emphasis will be put on developing a new mentality in social relations. This will be done in close collaboration with the Women’s Union of Burkina. In the framework of our revolution, our mothers and wives have important and particular contributions to make to the revolutionary transformation of society. The education of our children, efficient management of the family budget, family planning, the forging of a family spirit, patriotism-these are all important attributes that should effectively contribute to the birth of a revolutionary morality and an antiimperialist life-style, all preludes to a new society.

In the home, women should take particular care to participate fully in improving the quality of life. As Burkinabe, living well means eating well and wearing clothes made in Burkina. It means keeping a clean and pleasant home, because this in itself has an important impact on relations within the family. Living in squalor produces squalid relations. Look at pigs if you don’t believe me.

And the transformation of our mentality would be incomplete if the new woman is stuck living with a man of the old kind. Where is men’s superiority complex more pernicious, yet more crucial, than in the home where the mother, a guilty accomplice, teaches her offspring sexist and unequal rules? Such women perpetuate sexual complexes right from the beginning of a child’s education and the formation of its character.

In addition, what use are our efforts to draw someone into political activity during the day if this newly involved comrade finds himself with a reactionary and demobilizing woman at night!

And what about housework, this all-consuming, brutalizing work that has a tendency to tum you into robots and leave no time or energy to think! This is why we need resolute action directed toward men and at implementing a large-scale network of social services such as nurseries, day-care centers, and cafeterias. This would allow women to more easily take part in revolutionary debate and action. Each child, whether rejected as the mother’s failure or doted on as the father’s pride, should be of concern to society as a whole, every one the object of society’s attention and affection. Men and women will, from now on, share all the tasks in the home.

The plan of action to benefit women should be a revolutionary tool aimed at the general mobilization of all our political and administrative structures for women’s emancipation. Comrades, I repeat, before it can correspond to the real needs of women, this plan must be subjected to a democratic discussion at every level of the UFB’s structures.

The UFB is a revolutionary organization. As such, it is a school for popular democracy, governed by the organizational principles of criticism and self-criticism and democratic centralism. It should dissociate itself from those organizations where mystification has won out over concrete objectives. Such a demarcation can be a permanent and effective acquisition only if the comrades of the UFB carry out a resolute struggle against the weaknesses that unfortunately still persist in some female milieus. We are not talking here about rallying women for appearance’ sake or for any other electoralist, demagogic, or otherwise reprehensible ulterior motive. We are talking about assembling women fighters to win victories.

We must fight in an orderly way and around a program of action decided democratically within the different committees, taking fully into account each revolutionary structure’s framework of organizational autonomy. Every leader of the Women’s Union of Burkina must be completely absorbed in the responsibilities she has in her particular structure in order to be effective in action. The UFB needs to carry out vast political and ideological educational campaigns among its leaders in order to strengthen its organization and structures on all levels.

Comrades, members of the UFB, your union, our union, must participate fully in the class struggle on the side of the masses. Those millions whose consciousness was dormant and who have now been awakened by the advent of the revolution represent a formidable force. On August 4, 1983, we Burkinabe made a decision to rely on our own resources, which means in large part on the resources that you, the women of Burkina, represent. In order to be useful, your energies have to be focused as one on the struggle to eliminate imperialism’s economic domination and every breed of exploiter. As a tool for mobilization, the UFB will have to work to forge a highly developed political awareness on the part of its members, so that they can throw themselves totally into accomplishing the different actions the government undertakes to improve the situation of women.

Comrades, only the revolutionary transformation of our society can create the conditions for your liberation. You are dominated by both imperialism and by men. In every male languishes the soul of a feudal lord, a male chauvinist, which must be destroyed. This is why you must eagerly embrace the most advanced revolutionary slogans to make your liberation real and to advance toward it more rapidly. This is why the National Council of the Revolution notes with great joy how intensely you are participating in the big national development projects and encourages you to give greater and greater support to the August revolution, which is above all your revolution.

By participating massively in these projects you are showing yourselves to be even more worthy, given that in its division of tasks, society has always sought to relegate you to the least important tasks. We can see now that your apparent physical weakness is nothing more than the result of norms of appearance and fashion that society has imposed on you because you are female.

As we go forward, our revolution must break from all those feudal conceptions that lead us to ostracize the unmarried woman without realizing that this is merely another form of appropriation, which decrees each woman the property of a man. This is why young mothers are looked down upon as if they were the only ones responsible for their situation, whereas there is always a guilty man involved. This is how childless women can come to be oppressed by antiquated beliefs, when there is a scientific explanation for their infertility, which science can correct.

In addition, society has imposed on women norms of beauty that violate the integrity of their bodies, such as female circumcision, scarring, the filing of teeth, and the piercing of lips and noses. Practicing these norms is of dubious value. In the case of female circumcision, it can even endanger a woman’s ability to have children and affect her emotional life. Other types of bodily mutilation, though less dangerous, like the piercing of ears and tattoos, are no less an expression of women’s conditioning, imposed by society if a woman wants to find a husband. Sisters, you make a great effort to win a husband. You pierce your ears and do violence to your body to be acceptable to men. You hurt yourselves so that the man can hurt you even more!

Women, my comrades-in-arms, I am addressing myself to you, you who lead miserable lives in town and village alike. In the countryside, you sag under the weight of the various burdens of dreadful exploitation that is ‘)ustified” and “explained away.” In the towns, you are supposedly happy, yet deep down you are miserable from one day to the next, laden down with tasks.

In the early morning, the woman turns round and round in front of her wardrobe like a spinning top, wondering what to wear-not so as to be dressed and protect herself against the weathe~ but in order to please men. Every day she is supposed to-obliged to-please men. You women, when it is time to rest, you have the sad look of one who has no right to rest. You are obliged to ration yourself, be chaste, and diet in order to maintain a figure that men will desire. At night, before going to bed, you cover yourselves with makeup, with those numerous products that you detest so much-we know you do-but that might hide an indiscreet wrinkle, an unfortunate sign of age always
considered to have come too soon, age that has started to show, or a premature plumpness. There you are-obliged to go through a two-hour ritual every night to preserve your best attributes, only to be ill-rewarded by an inattentive husband. Then you start all over again at dawn.

Comrades, yesterday in speeches given by the Directorate for Mobilization and Organization of Women, and in accordance with the statutes of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the National Secretariat of the CDRs successfully undertook to set up committees, subcommittees, and sections of the UFB. The Political Commission, which is in charge of organization and planning, will be responsible for completing the organizational pyramid of the UFB by setting up a national bureau of the organization.

We don’t need another apparatus led by women to bureaucratically control women’s lives, nor to have the occasional underhanded talk among functionaries about women’s lives. What we need are women who will fight because they know that without a fight the old order will not be destroyed and no new order can be built. We are not looking to organize the status quo but to definitively destroy and replace it. The National Bureau of the UFB should be made up of convinced and determined cadres who will always be available as long as our great task lies ahead. And the fight begins at home. These cadres should be conscious of the fact that in the eyes of the masses they represent the image of the emancipated, revolutionary woman and should conduct themselves accordingly.

Comrades, sisters and brothers, experience shows us more and more that in changing the classical order of things only the organized people are capable of wielding power democratically. Justice and equality are the basic principles that allow women to show that societies are wrong not to have confidence in them on the political and economic level. The woman, wielding the power she has gained among the people, is in a position to rehabilitate all women condemned by history. In undertaking to profoundly and qualitatively transform our society, the changes wrought by our revolution must include the aspirations of the Burkinabe woman.

Comrades, the future demands that women be freed, and the future, everywhere, brings revolutions. If we lose the fight to liberate women we will have lost all right to hope for a positive transformation of our society into something superior. Our revolution will then have no meaning. It is to wage this noble struggle that all of us, men and women, are summoned.

Let our women move up to the front ranks! Our final victory depends essentially on their capacities, their wisdom in struggle, their determination to win. Let each woman be able to train a man to reach the height of his fullness. To be able to do so, let each woman draw from her immense well of affection and love, let her find the strength and the know-how to encourage us when we are advancing and to replenish our energy when we flag. Let each woman advise a man and be a mother to all men, you who brought us into the world, who educated and made men of us. Let each woman continue to play the role of mother and guide, you who have guided us to where we are today. Let the woman remember what she is capable of, that she is the center of the earth; let each one remember that she lives in the world, for the world; let her remember that the first to cry for a man is a woman. Likewise it is said, and you will remember this comrades, that at the moment of death each man calls out with his last breath the
name of a woman-the name of his mother, his sister, or his companion.

Women need men in order to win, just as men need women’s victories in order to win. At the side of every man, comrades, there is always a woman. This woman’s hand that rocks the man’s child will rock the entire world. Our mothers give us life. Our wives give birth to our children, feed them at their breasts, raise them, and make them into responsible beings. Women assure the continuity of our people, the coming into being of humanity; women ensure that our life’s work will go forward; women sustain the pride of every man.

Mothers, sisters, companions, there can be no proud man without a woman at his side. Every proud and strong man draws his energy from a woman. The endless source of virility is the power of the female. The key to victory always lies in the hands of a woman. It is by the side of a woman, sister, or companion that our honor and dignity will flood back to us.

We all return to a woman to find consolation and the courage and inspiration to set out anew for the battle, to receive the advice that will temper our recklessness or some presumptuous irresponsibility. It is always at the side of a woman that we become men again, and every man is a child for every woman.

He who does not love women, who does not respect women, who does not honor women, despised his own mother. Thus, he who despises women destroys the very place from which he is born. He kills himself because he believes he has no right to exist, having come from the generous womb of a woman. Comrades, woe to he who despises women! Woe to all men, here and elsewhere, to all men of all social ranks, wherever they may come from, who despise women, who do not understand, or who forget what the woman represents: ”You have touched the women, you have struck a rock. You have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.”

Comrades, no revolution, beginning with our own, can triumph without first liberating women. Our struggle, our revolution will be incomplete as long as we understand liberation to mean essentially that of men. After the liberation of the proletariat, the liberation of women still remains to be won. Comrades, every woman is the mother of a man. I would not presume, as a man and a son, to give advice to a woman or to indicate which road she should take. This would be like giving advice to one’s mother. But I know, too, that out of indulgence and affection, a mother listens to her son, despite his whims, his dreams, and his vanity. And this is what consoles me and makes it possible for me to address you here. This is why, comrades, we need you in order to achieve the genuine liberation of all of us. I know that you will always find the strength and the time to help us save our society.

Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt. I await and hope for the fertile eruption of the revolution through which they will transmit the power and the rigorous justice issued from their oppressed wombs.

Comrades, forward to conquer the future.

The future is revolutionary.

The future belongs to those who fight.

Homeland or death, we will triumph!

The post The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women March 8, 1987 first appeared on My Blog.

The post The revolution cannot triumph without the emancipation of women March 8, 1987 appeared first on My Blog.

After François Compaoré’s extradition decree was signed on 5 March 2020, his lawyers lodged an appeal with the French Conseil d’Etat, which in turn validated the extradition decree on 30 July 2021. The lawyers then decided to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Two years later, the Court has just announced its decision.

In a press release published on 7 September 2023, the ECHR found that the expected assurances had indeed been given by the government preceding the first coup d’état, that the government following the first coup d’état had reiterated these assurances, but that the government following the second coup d’état had not done so, nor had it responded to the observations sent to it by the ECHR on 19 October 2022.

The ECHR recognises that the conditions for extradition were originally met, but asks only that they be re-examined and then reconfirmed in the light of the political changes that have taken place since then.

Referring to the political instabiliies and the deterioration in diplomatic relations, the Court considers it necessary to “verify that the ‘host State’ concerned here (Burkina Faso) is indeed the one that will be bound to respect the assurances given on the day of the applicant’s surrender (the original undertaking, therefore), and asks France to re-examine the case, expressing surprise that it has not yet done so.

The “Justice for Sankara, Justice for Africa” network points out that for the people of Burkina Faso, the journalist Norbert Zongo is as much a reference point as Thomas Sankara. His murder, and the ensuing demand for justice, is emblematic of the fight for quality and freedom of the press.

We therefore call on the current government of Burkina Faso to respond promptly to the requests of the ECHR, so that the extradition can take effect as soon as possible. And we urge the French government to take all necessary steps to confirm the extradition quickly and to carry it out without delay.

Since 1998, Norbert Zongo’s family, the people of Burkina Faso and their press have been demanding truth and justice.
It is high time that the trial of his murderers and their accomplices began, so that they can finally be judged.
This rather forced intervention by the ECHR is only delaying justice to the detriment of human rights.

Signed in Paris on 11 September 2023 in Ouagadougou, Banfora, Dakar, Bamako, Niamey, Paris, Ottawa, Las Palmas, Ajaccio, Montpellier, Nîmes, Toulouse and Lorient.

The International Network Justice for Sankara Justice for Africa

contact: contactjusticepoursankara@gmail.com

A press release from the Norbert Zongo press centre can be found at https://burkina24.com/2023/09/10/extradition-de-francois-compaore-le-centre-national-de-presse-norbert-zongo-exhorte-le-gouvernement-a-eclairer-les-burkinabe/

The post François Compaoré must be extradited first appeared on My Blog.

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The post Djibril Bassolet, putschist on the run after his conviction in Burkina Faso, invited to France to talk of peace! first appeared on My Blog.

The post Djibril Bassolet, putschist on the run after his conviction in Burkina Faso, invited to France to talk of peace! appeared first on My Blog.

By our letter of January 27, 2023, following the various meetings initiated around the burial of the remains of President Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions in misfortune (exhumed by decision of the examining magistrate of May 25, 2015), we said our wish to see the remains of Thomas Sankara reinterred elsewhere than at the Council of the Entente.

This for specific reasons that we had repeatedly pointed out to Garrison Colonel Coulibaly Sibiri mandated to take care of the funeral.

Indeed, we believed and continue to believe that it is fundamental to find a space that allows us to unite and appease hearts, and not to divide and increase grievances.

The Council of the Entente is not a proper place  to reflect and meditate.

We are therefore surprised to learn from a press release dated February 3, 2023 from the Ministry of Communication, Culture, Arts and Tourism (delete:, spokesperson for the Government) that a decision has been taken to proceed with the burial of the remains, in such a confrontational and controversial place: we quoted: “.. the present decision is the result of consultations within the armed forces (in particular the Garrison Office of Ouagadougou and Military Justice) extended to the families of the victims, to the Town Hall of Ouagadougou, to the traditional  and religious authorities as well as to the International Committee of the Thomas Sankara Memorial.)

Our aforementioned reasons have however been made very clear many times and that from when a transfer of the remains of Thomas Sankara to the Council of the Entente was first mooted a few years ago by the Thomas Sankara Memorial.

We have expressed ourselves several times on this  question, insisting instead on the relevance of preserving the Conseil de l’Entente as a place of remembrance of the gruesome event on  October 15, 1987 so that it is not obliterated  for present and future generations.

We appreciate the many ways by which the people of Burkina Faso keep the flame of remembrance alive  and protect the  history and memory of our country.

We are also sensitive to the fact that his comrades in arms through military institutions, administrative, religious and traditional authorities commit themselves for the celebration of their heroes. Our late son, husband, father, brother,  for  some, uncle, cousin, comrade or friend for others, certainly is a national hero. It is the same for his twelve companions who fell with him and whose  tragic fate is intimately linked to his.

The murders on October 15  remain a  moment of great significance in the recent history of our young nation.

A major trial which reverberated internationaly some thirty years later, has marked  a milestone on  the issue of impunity in Africa and showed that justice can prevail.

It seems essential to us that the events that accompany this cycle take place through mutual  agreement and consultation.

Taking the time to prepare is necessary, especially at this crucial juncture  in our history when we fight to preserve the integrity of the national territory.

We  hope that the reburial of the remains of President Thomas Sankara will take place in a calm and consensual manner, given that our friends, across Africa and the world are watching and feel committed  by what will be a major event in  our history.

The positions taken by those responsible for the organization of the burials are likely to sow confusion and disarray at a time when our country ought , more than ever,  to bring together its children.

We take national and international public opinion to witness that the place of burial of the remains of Thomas Sankara has  been imposed on us.

With regrets we inform you that we will not participate in  the  organization of ceremonies and we will not attend the burials  of the remains of Thomas Sankara and his comrades in-arms.

Nevertheless, we still  hope that a reasonable accommodation will be offered to this cause.

Ouagadougou on February 05, 2023

Members of the Family of the late Thomas Sankara

The post The family will not participate in the burial Thomas Sankara if it were to be done at the Conseil de l’Entente. first appeared on My Blog.

The post The family will not participate in the burial Thomas Sankara if it were to be done at the Conseil de l’Entente. appeared first on My Blog.