Thomas Sankara was a freedom fighter and a man of the people, a legend that has inspired many.
Easily one of the greatest and most promising leaders of the 20th century, but was assassinated on this day, October 15th, 1987.
He was not only the President of Burkina Faso 🇧🇫 ...he gave it the name.
At Aged 33, Sankara became the President of the Republic of Upper Volta. He immediately launched programs for social, ecological and economic change and renamed the country from the French colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso ("Land of Incorruptible People"), with its people being called Burkinabé ("upright people"). His foreign policies were centred on anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalising all land and mineral wealth and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritising education with a nationwide literacy campaign and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles.
Other components of his national agenda included planting over 10 million trees to combat the growing desertification of the Sahel, redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents and establishing a road and railway construction programme. On the local level, Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities build schools with their own labour. Moreover, he outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed women to high governmental positions and encouraged them to work outside the home and stay in school, even if pregnant.
His revolutionary programmes for African self-reliance made him an icon to many of Africa's poor. Sankara remained popular with most of his country's citizens.
This, of course, caused the rich to loathe him and the West to fear him - sparking his murder at the age of 37.
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