Four years that proved what anti-imperialist revolution can achieve in the poorest conditions — and what imperialism will do to destroy it
Before 1983, the country now known as Burkina Faso was called Upper Volta — a name given by French colonialism. It was one of the poorest countries on Earth. Life expectancy was 44 years. The infant mortality rate was 280 per 1,000 live births. Literacy stood at 13%. There were fewer than ten doctors for a population of seven million. Over 90% of the population were subsistence farmers, dependent on unreliable Sahelian rains. The country had virtually no industry.
Upper Volta had gained formal independence from France in 1960, but this was independence in name only. The French franc zone (CFA) ensured that monetary policy remained under the control of the French Treasury. French companies dominated what little formal economy existed. The comprador bourgeoisie — a thin layer of bureaucrats, chiefs, and middlemen — served as agents of neo-colonial extraction. A succession of military coups replaced one set of imperialist puppets with another.
This was the classical pattern of neo-colonialism that Kwame Nkrumah described: the granting of formal sovereignty while retaining complete economic control. The flag changed, but the relations of production did not.
Neo-colonialism is the continuation of colonial exploitation under conditions of formal independence. The imperialist powers grant the flag but retain the economy. The CFA franc — still used by 14 African nations — is one of the most direct instruments of French neo-colonial control, requiring member states to deposit 50% of their foreign reserves in the French Treasury.
Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako, Upper Volta. His father was a gendarme of Mossi and Fulani heritage. Sankara received military training in Madagascar, where he witnessed the 1971–72 student uprising and first encountered Marxist literature. He returned to Upper Volta radicalised, convinced that the liberation of Africa required not merely political independence but a complete transformation of the relations of production.
Sankara distinguished himself as a military officer during the 1974 border war with Mali. He was popular among the ranks — a soldier who rejected the privileges of officer status, lived simply, and spoke plainly about the exploitation of the people. He was appointed Secretary of State for Information in 1981, but used his position to expose corruption and imperialism, leading to his dismissal and arrest.
On 4 August 1983, a group of radical young officers led by Sankara and Blaise Compaoré seized power in a popular uprising. Sankara became president of the National Council of the Revolution (CNR) at the age of 33.
“You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.”
— Thomas SankaraThe revolution Sankara led was not a mere change of government. It was a systematic attempt to break the structures of neo-colonial dependence and transform society in the interests of the working people and peasantry. In just four years, the achievements were extraordinary.
On 4 August 1984 — the first anniversary of the revolution — Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso, meaning “Land of the Upright People” (from Moré burkina, “upright”, and Dioula faso, “fatherland”). The rejection of the colonial name was not symbolic politics — it was an assertion of sovereignty over the country’s identity.
The revolution nationalised all land, transferring it from the feudal chiefs to the state and thence to the people who worked it. This was the single most transformative act. For centuries, the traditional chiefs had controlled land distribution, acting as intermediaries of exploitation. Land reform broke the material basis of feudal and comprador power in the countryside.
In a single week in November 1984, Sankara’s government vaccinated 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles. The World Health Organisation called it an unprecedented achievement. Before the revolution, vaccination coverage was below 2%. By 1987 it exceeded 60%. This was not charity — it was the application of centralised planning to public health.
The revolution planted over 10 million trees in the Sahel to combat desertification. This was decades before “climate change” entered the Western liberal vocabulary. Sankara understood that desertification was not a natural disaster but a product of colonial land use and imperialist extraction. He declared: “Where the desert advances, that is where we must fight.”
The government built roads, railways, and hundreds of schools and health clinics using volunteer labour organised through the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). Housing construction surged. In Ouagadougou, the slums that ringed the capital were replaced with planned housing. All of this was done without foreign aid or IMF loans.
Sankara was unequivocal: the revolution must liberate women, or it is no revolution at all. His government:
“The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph.”
— Thomas Sankara, 8 March 1987Sankara sold the government’s fleet of Mercedes-Benz cars and made the Renault 5 the official car for ministers. He reduced his own salary to $450 per month and forbade government officials from using first-class airline tickets or personal drivers. His personal possessions at the time of his death: an old car, a broken refrigerator, a guitar, and four bicycles. He was the poorest head of state in Africa — by choice.
By 1986, Burkina Faso had achieved food self-sufficiency for the first time in its history. Wheat production rose from 1,700 tonnes to 75,000 tonnes per year. This was achieved through land reform, irrigation projects, and the redistribution of resources from the cities to the countryside. Sankara refused food aid, declaring: “He who feeds you controls you.”
Food sovereignty — the right of peoples to define their own food systems — is inseparable from national liberation. Dependency on food imports is a weapon of imperialism. Sankara demonstrated that even one of the world’s poorest countries can feed its own people when the relations of production are reorganised.
Sankara was not merely a domestic reformer. He was a consistent anti-imperialist who used every international platform to denounce imperialism, neo-colonialism, and the debt trap.
At the Organisation of African Unity summit in Addis Ababa on 29 July 1987, Sankara delivered one of the most important speeches in African history. He called on all African nations to refuse to repay their foreign debt:
“Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa. It is a reconquest that turns each one of us into a financial slave. Those who lent us money are the same who had colonised us. They are the same who used to manage our states and our economies. The debt cannot be repaid. If we do not pay, the lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we pay, we will die. That is also for sure.”
— Thomas Sankara, OAU Summit, Addis Ababa, 29 July 1987Sankara proposed a united African front against debt repayment. He warned that if Burkina Faso stood alone in refusing to pay, he would not be at the next summit. He was right. He was assassinated three months later.
Burkina Faso was a firm supporter of the African National Congress and the struggle against apartheid South Africa. Sankara condemned Western governments — particularly the United States and Britain — for their support of the apartheid regime while lecturing Africa about “human rights.”
Sankara declared solidarity with the Palestinian people and compared their struggle to the anti-colonial struggles of Africa. He drew direct parallels between Zionist settler-colonialism and European colonialism in Africa.
Sankara refused structural adjustment programmes, which demanded privatisation, austerity, and the opening of markets to Western capital. He understood that these institutions were instruments of imperialist domination dressed in the language of economics.
On 15 October 1987, Thomas Sankara was murdered in a coup d’état led by his former comrade Blaise Compaoré. Sankara was shot along with twelve of his aides during a meeting at the National Council of the Revolution headquarters in Ouagadougou. He was 37 years old.
Compaoré immediately reversed the revolution. He restored relations with France and the IMF, reintroduced structural adjustment, and ruled as a neo-colonial puppet for 27 years until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in 2014. In 2022, a military court found Compaoré guilty of complicity in Sankara’s assassination and sentenced him to life imprisonment in absentia — he had fled to Côte d’Ivoire.
The role of France in the assassination has long been suspected. Compaoré was closely connected to French intelligence services and to Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the neo-colonial president of Côte d’Ivoire. Sankara’s anti-French stance, his rejection of the CFA franc system, and his call for African debt repudiation made him a direct threat to French imperial interests in West Africa.
The pattern is familiar: Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (1961), Amilícar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau (1973), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987). Imperialism assassinates those it cannot buy.
The assassination of Sankara confirms the Marxist-Leninist analysis: imperialism will not allow genuine independence. A revolution that threatens the material interests of the imperialist powers will face sabotage, economic warfare, and ultimately military intervention or assassination. This is why Marxism-Leninism emphasises the need for a disciplined party, a strong state, and international solidarity.
The Burkina Faso revolution, for all its achievements, lasted only four years. Its defeat was not inevitable, but it exposed real contradictions that Marxist-Leninists must study.
Sankara did not build a Leninist vanguard party. The CNR was a coalition of military officers and various left-wing groups, some of which were unreliable. The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), while popular, were not integrated into a disciplined party structure. When Compaoré struck, there was no organisational apparatus capable of defending the revolution. This confirms Lenin’s insistence on the necessity of the vanguard party as the leading force of the revolution.
Sankara was personally incorruptible, but personal virtue is not a substitute for the dictatorship of the proletariat as an organisational form. The revolution relied too heavily on Sankara as an individual. When he was killed, the revolution died with him. A revolution rooted in a mass party with democratic centralist organisation is far more resilient than one dependent on the life of a single leader.
Sankara called on Africa to unite against debt and imperialism, but no other African leader followed his lead. The isolation of the revolution made it vulnerable. This underlines the importance of proletarian internationalism and the building of anti-imperialist alliances. A single country, especially one as small and poor as Burkina Faso, cannot successfully defy imperialism alone indefinitely.
Despite these limitations, the Burkina Faso revolution demonstrated, in the most concrete terms, that:
“While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.”
— Thomas SankaraThomas Sankara remains the most popular political figure in West Africa. His face appears on murals from Ouagadougou to Dakar. In 2023, the military government of Ibrahim Traoré — which came to power after overthrowing another French-backed regime — explicitly invoked Sankara’s legacy and moved to expel French military forces from Burkina Faso.
The current wave of anti-French sentiment sweeping the Sahel — in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger — has deep roots in the contradictions that Sankara identified forty years ago. The CFA franc, French military bases, and the extraction of natural resources by French corporations remain the material basis of neo-colonial control. The peoples of West Africa are increasingly conscious that formal independence without economic sovereignty is meaningless.
Sankara’s revolution also stands as a powerful answer to those who claim that Marxism-Leninism is a “European ideology” inapplicable to Africa. Sankara applied Marxist-Leninist principles — land reform, centralised planning, anti-imperialism, women’s liberation, rejection of foreign debt — to African conditions and achieved results that capitalist development has never matched in any comparable country. The universality of Marxism-Leninism is demonstrated not in abstract theory but in concrete practice.
The history of anti-imperialist revolution is a history of courage, sacrifice, and the struggle for human liberation. Every victory and every defeat teaches us how to fight better.