Why Africans Should Celebrate Thomas Sankara
True heroes of Africa often lie in unmarked graves. Their achievements are only celebrated by a minority of dissidents who are sparsely located around the continent and throughout its diaspora. Stifled by the fabricated feats of the African neo-colonialist aristocracy, the legacy left by our unsung heroes is more endangered than the mountain gorilla.
The African press expediently exhumes their contributions during national holidays, only to bury them again once the celebrations are over. The global media is fixated on despots and warlords. The recent sensation about Joseph Kony should be a lesson to all Africans that if we don’t select the narratives that we would like to universalize, someone else will. And we won’t like it.
Thomas Sankara may not be a household name, yet to many Africans, he was a leader almost of equal stature to Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah. Born in 1949 in a country formerly known as Upper Volta, Sankara embarked on a military career, quickly rising in the ranks. Sankara became his country’s head of state in 1983 after leading a coup d’état against the then current government. He renamed his country Burkina Faso, meaning “Land of Upright People.”
For a man referred to as “The African Che Guevara,” it is no surprise that he is still widely unknown in the West. Profoundly influenced by the work of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, he committed his presidency to eradicating poverty and to uplifting the common man. As a Pan- Africanist, he sought to end the political ventriloquism practiced by former African colonial rulers as well as the continent’s dependency on foreign aid. “He who feeds you, controls you”, he argued.
A leader ahead of his time, Sankara was also dedicated to seeing the status of women in his country improve. Under his government, female genital mutilation,
Category: Africa News
