Thomas Sankara, political leader of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, was born on December 21, 1949 in Yako, a northern town in the Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso) of French West Africa. He was the son of a Mossi mother and a Peul father, and personified the diversity of the Burkinabè people of the area. In his adolescence, Sankara witnessed the country’s independence from France in 1960 and the repressive and volatile nature of the regimes that ruled throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
From 1970 to 1973, Sankara attended the military academy of Antsirabe in Madagascar where he trained to be an army officer. In 1974, as a young lieutenant in the Upper Volta army, he fought in a border war with Mali and returned home a hero. Sankara then studied in France and later in Morocco, where he met Blaise Compaoré and other civilian students from Upper Volta who later organized leftist organizations in the country. While commanding the Commando Training Center in the city of Pô in 1976, Thomas Sankara grew in popularity by urging his soldiers to help civilians with their work tasks. He additionally played guitar at community gatherings with a local band, Pô Missiles.
Throughout the 1970s, Sankara increasingly adopted leftist politics. He organized the Communist Officers Group in the army and attended meetings of various leftist parties, unions, and student groups, usually in civilian clothes.
In 1981, Sankara briefly served as the Secretary of State for Information under the newly formed Military Committee for Reform and Military Progress (CMRPN). This was a group of officers who had recently seized power. In April 1982, he resigned his post and denounced the CMRPM. When another military coup placed the Council for the People’s Safety in power, Sankara was subsequently appointed prime minister in 1983 but was quickly dismissed and placed under house arrest, causing a popular uprising.
On August 4, 1983, Blaise Compaoré orchestrated the “August Revolution,” or a coup d’état against the Council for the People’s Safety. The new regime which called itself the National Council for the Revolution (CNR) made 34-year-old Thomas Sankara president. As president, Sankara sought to end corruption, promote reforestation, avert famine, support women’s rights, develop rural areas, and prioritize education and healthcare. He renamed the country ‘Burkina Faso,’ meaning, “the republic of honorable people.”
On October 15, 1987, Thomas Sankara was killed with twelve other officials in a coup d’état instigated by Blaise Compaoré, his former political ally. He was 37 at the time of his death.
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Ever since the Panini started i've been thinking about the Bene Gesserit Death/Alternative test. How much suffering would you, could you, endure to avert death? For many people the breaking point was spending a few weeks at home, or wearing a fiber mask.
I've talked about this with other people with severe disabilities, be they mental illness or physical handicap, and there's sort of a wide amazement about how little it took to break all the "normal" people. "If you had what i have you'd be dead" has been thrown around flippantly for a long time, but through the lense of the pandemic it seems frightfully real.
I'm wearing a whole ass p100 respirator bc i'm feeling better and alive after years of horrifying depression and i don't want to suffer anymore or die. And i'm surrounded by people, coughing people, old people, young people, sick people, disabled people, many or most of whom have had covid at least once, wondering what they think is happening right now, and why they think that. People have talked about being sick after flying my whole life. You go on a trip, you pick up a rhinvirus or something while you're sitting in the plague-recirculation-anti-gravity-tube, and you're miserable for a week when you get back. Nothing to do with the "rona. Just boring old cold or whatever. And no one ever wore masks then. They could have, but no one did. It's so strange. Just a little preparation, a short period of, for most people, mild discomfort, and you could avert a week of suffering.
What to make of this? What to think of it? I don't know. Much of what I believed about humans have burned in the crucible of pandemic but i have not yet ascertained what the purififting flame will reveal. What metal will be found among the dross of my false beliefs?