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BOOKS A model African revolutionary

ANGUS REID recommends a new biography of Thomas Sankara, the inspirational leader of Burkina Faso in the 1980s

Thomas Sankara: A revolutionary in Cold War Africa
by Brian J Peterson
(Indiana University Press, £26.99)

THE revolution led by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987 might only have lasted four years, but it achieved unparalleled advances in healthcare, women’s rights, literacy, ecological policy, infrastructure, action on Third World debt and nation-building in post-colonial west Africa.

Sankara himself was charismatic and eloquent. His brief appearance on the world stage cast a vivid light on the racism, the inequalities and exploitation that underlay the post-colonial world order during the cold war and the dawning era of neoliberal economics of Thatcher, Reagan and Mitterrand.

He dazzled and alarmed the status quo not just because he was a soldier with the brain of a revolutionary but because of his steadfast incorruptibility.

It is extraordinary that Brian Peterson’s excellent biography is the first to appear in English in the 34 years since Sankara was murdered but this merely underlines the racial and political censorship that governs the Anglophone relationship to Africa.

But the combination of political change in Burkina Faso and Black Lives Matter is lifting the veil and today Sankara’s legacy is more relevant than ever.

Peterson’s compelling and well-researched narrative suggests that Sankara’s mixed-clan heritage and Catholic upbringing accounted for his self-discipline, his moral rectitude and his ability to overstep traditional ethnic loyalties and move towards a reinvented national identity.

Exploring Sankara’s gift for improvised political speaking on the domestic and international stage contextualises and traces the development of his thinking and Peterson demonstrates his class awareness and prescient understanding of the likely dangers of a petty-bourgeois leadership.

Most valuable and shocking is the careful account of the inner workings of the revolutionary leadership — how the military and left-wing alliance that brought Sankara to power was undermined by alienating the main trade union group and by false alliance with far-left splinter groups. This allowed Blaise Compaore’s takeover to pose as revolutionary but to result in the opposite.

Sankara knew that the revolution was vulnerable to a military coup and was attempting to form a patriotic progressive party to politicise the military and accommodate it within a broad left-wing alliance.

But he was too late. Compaore simply murdered the leadership, established a 27-year reign of terror and reverted to the neocolonial exploitation demanded by his European and African paymasters.

But Sankara had changed millions of lives and millions of minds. You can’t erase a revolution and Peterson’s book is an important recognition of that. Sankara remains an inspiration, whose policies, values and political style give hope. His successes and failures demand careful attention.

In Britain, Sankara is little known. Thus, this superb account is essential reading for anyone on the left and it provides a fascinating historical context for the many films of Sankara online.

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