Thomas Sankara (21 December 1949-15 October 1987) was President of Burkina Faso from 4 August 1983 to 15 October 1987, succeeding Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo and preceding Blaise Compaore.
Biography[]
Thomas Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako, French West Africa to a family of Catholic Mossi people in present-day Burkina Faso. Sankara was originally supposed to become a Catholic priest due to his religious thoughts, as he was familiar with the Qur'an, but he instead joined the Upper Volta Army at the age of 19. He was influenced by the works of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, so he became an adherent of Marxism. In January 1983 he was made Prime Minister of Upper Volta after a military coup installed Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo in power, but on 4 August 1983 Sankara seized power in a coup d'etat backed by Blaise Compaore. In 1984 Sankara renamed Upper Volta to "Burkina Faso" ("the Republic of Honest Men") and rid the country of imperialism, following the beliefs of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He shifted the country into food self-sufficiency, produced cotton to clothe the people of the country, and vaccinated 2,500,000 Burkinabes to stop polio, measles, and meningitis. Sankara banned female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy to increase women's rights, while he also expelled lazy workers from their jobs and set up tribunals to try former politicians that were abusive of their power. In 1985 he fought a brief war with Mali over the Agacher Strip that left 100 people dead around Christmas time, most of them in a Malian Air Force bombing of civilians in a market. On 9 October 1987 he gave a speech eulogizing his role model Che Guevara, who died twenty years earlier; just a week later, Sankara would be dead.
Sankara's poor relations with the neighboring Cote d'Ivoire and with the former colonial power France led to Blaise Compaore plotting against him, as he wanted to restore Burkina Faso's relations with other countries. Sankara and twelve other officials were assassinated on 15 October 1987 by a group of gunmen loyal to Compaore, and his body was dismembered and buried. Compaore undid all of Sankara's policies, effectively destroying all traces of his rule as he reigned as a dictator until his 2014 overthrow by popular protests.