Description:

As Africa looks desperately for leaders of integrity and vision, the life and ideals of the late Thomas Sankara seem more and more relevant and exemplary with the passage of time. Though largely forgotten in the United Satates, Sankara is still venerated in Africa as a legendary martyr like Patrice Lumumba or Amilcar Cabral. With a gun in one hand and Karl Marx's works in the other, Sankara became president at the age of 34 and served from 1983 to 1987. He immediately set out to shake the foundations of the country that he renamed from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, “Land of Upright Men.”

Determined to break away from the clutches of the French government with its post-colonial networks in Africa, he fashioned a revolutionary program for African self-reliance as a defiant alternative to the neo-liberal development strategies imposed on Africa by the West. He immediately launched an ambitious program for social and economic change by reducing the salaries of all public servants, including himself, and forbade the use of chauffeur-driven Mercedes and 1st class airline tickets. Under revolutionary conditions, he banned unions, a free press and anything that stood in the way of his plans for the immediate and radical transformation of society.

Among his accomplishments, Sankara appointed women to major cabinet positions and recruited them actively for the military. He outlawed forced marriages and encouraged women to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant. He launched a nation-wide public health campaign, vaccinating over 2½ million people in a week, a world record. He was also one of the first African environmentalists, planting over 10 million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel. He promoted local cotton production and even required public servants to wear a traditional tunic, woven from Burkinabe cotton and sewn by Burkinabe craftsmen. He redistributed land from the feudal landlords and gave it directly to the peasants causing wheat production to triple in just three years, making the country food self-sufficient. He embarked on an ambitious road and rail building program to tie the nation together, eschewing any foreign aid by relying on his country’s greatest resource, the energy and commitment of its own people.