The Myth and Appeal of Thomas Sankara
Moses Ebe Ochonu
The Myth and Appeal of Thomas Sankara
by Moses E. Ochonu
I have been teaching Thomas Sankara and his short-lived "revolution" in Burkina Faso for several years. My American students, most of them teenagers who were born after his assassination, take to him every time.
Even my conservative-leaning students who have reservations about some of Sankara's revolutionary policies and rhetoric praise him for daring to do something new and radical--something that they say needed to be done and which few if any African leaders had done up to that point.
Today, in class, one of of them even contrasted Sankara with Nyerere, concluding that Sankara was more practical and aggressive than Nyerere. They appear very willing and eager to forgive Sankara's "mistakes" and magnify his successes.
Even students who say Sankara failed or was naive or overdid things, praise his foresight and his ability to correctly diagnose the problem of his country. They also say events since his assassination have vindicated him.
Why do these kids love Sankara so much?
I think much it is his youthful, handsome charm. Youth is often drawn to youth.
Even when the students say he was exuberant, they quickly add that, as young people, they can understand and relate to the youthful impatience that characterized his government's reforms.
The other thing is Sankara's coolness, represented most notably by his military fatigues and his general sartorial militancy.
I also think Sankara enjoys enormous posthumous sympathy for being cut down so young. Some of my students say he was assassinated before he had a chance to complete the revolution he started, although others argue that at the time of his death, the revolution had already run its course and was atrophying.
For others, Sankara's assassination and the involvement of imperialist forces in demonizing and then sponsoring the coup that toppled him proves that he was right about imperialism and the external enemies of Africa and their internal lackeys.
They say Sankara stood no chance from the beginning, given the plethora of imperialist and sub-imperialist forces massed against him, and given the hostility he courted among his peers on the continent. Many people tend to sympathize with lone rangers who prefer to buck the crowd and risk their own lives doing so than conform. My students can empathize with Sankara's rebellious, anti-conformist streak.
Yet other students sympathize with him on a personal level, seeing his assassination and overthrow by his best friend as the worst form of human betrayal because he had remained loyal to and trusting of Compaore to his death, dismissing the advice of his own aides to have the coup plotters arrested before they struck. Sankara was a true friend who was betrayed in the worst possible way, they say.
The final factor in my opinion is Sankara's charisma. I believe that when it comes to charisma, some people just naturally have it. Sankara was one of those people.
He gave great speeches and had the ability to fill a room, draw emotional reactions from people, and impress an audience. People were drawn to him then. They are drawn to him even now, many years after his death.
When my students watch the Sankara documentary, they are mesmerized and captivated by his charisma, even if they quibble with some of his actions.
The social and political myths of Sankara endure because he has come to embody for many people the roads not taken, spawning many counterfactuals of what might have been had he he lived and had other African leaders done what he did.
There is a great deal of idealistic projection at work. Nowadays, Sankara is projected as the archetypal pan-African, Afrocentric, and self-sacrificial leader, the very embodiment of Ubuntu. He has been remade as a martyr of the African radical socialist tradition, along with Amilcar Cabral and others.
So malleable and usably versatile has Sankara's image become that nowadays anyone who formulates or subscribes to any ideology of African reclamation and radical revolutionary change can project those ideals onto Sankara retrospectively, whether or not that projection is faithful to what Sankara was and did.
Sankara's image now has a life of its own, animated by Africa's continuing sociopolitical and economic dysfunction. Such dysfunction only stokes the nostalgia for figures such as Sankara and their efforts to create a uniquely African developmental state.
The ongoing debate around such efforts and "revolutions", the inconclusiveness of such reforms, the open-ended question of their failure or success, and the reactionary reversal of such paths by the forces of neoliberalism mean that the stories of such eras can be endlessly and continuously re-written and revised to accommodate new aspirations, anxieties, nostalgias, and myths.
Such is the power of the Sankara myth, which has now transcended generations and geographies and made its way into the realm of popular culture.
Vusi Gumede, Prof
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Links to my books on South Africa:
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http://www.codesria.org/spip.php?article2625
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
Agreed, he had energy and charisma. He initiated reformatory policies and generally meant well for his country.
CAO.