On October 15, 1987, Thomas Sankara—Burkina Faso's charismatic, Marxist revolutionary president—was overthrown and executed in a coup led by his former close friend and comrade Blaise Compaoré. Sankara, celebrated for anti-colonial and anti-corruption reforms, was buried in an unmarked grave; Compaoré would rule the country for the next 27 years.
Thomas Sankara was 33 when he seized power in Upper Volta in 1983, a young army captain who played guitar, rode a bicycle to meetings and spoke of the poor with a directness that unsettled the region's older leaders. A year later he renamed the country Burkina Faso, "the land of upright people," and set about remaking it. His government vaccinated some 2.5 million children in a matter of weeks, planted millions of trees to hold back the Sahel, outlawed female genital mutilation and forced marriage, and named women to senior posts. He sold off the government's fleet of Mercedes limousines and made the modest Renault 5 the official ministerial car. When he died, his declared possessions amounted to a car, four bicycles, three guitars, a refrigerator and a broken freezer.
The austerity that won him admirers abroad bred resentment at home among civil servants, traditional chiefs and fellow officers, and relations with France and neighboring governments grew strained. The most consequential rift was with Blaise Compaoré, his closest friend and the comrade who had helped bring him to power. In 1987 soldiers loyal to Compaoré burst into a meeting at the Conseil de l'Entente compound in Ouagadougou and gunned down Sankara along with twelve aides. The bodies were hastily buried, and an official death certificate later recorded that he had died of "natural causes." Compaoré announced a "rectification" of the revolution and quietly dismantled much of it.
Compaoré governed for 27 years until a popular uprising, its crowds carrying Sankara's portrait, drove him from office in 2014 and into exile in Côte d'Ivoire. Sankara's remains were exhumed in 2015, and a military tribunal eventually tried those accused of the killing. In 2022 it convicted Compaoré in absentia of complicity in the murder and sentenced him to life in prison. By then Sankara had long since become one of Africa's most enduring political icons, often called the continent's Che Guevara.
Key people: Thomas Sankara, Blaise Compaore