According to the country’s junta, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, will be buried with 12 other comrades on Thursday at the location of their 1983 assassination.
Sankara, a fiery Marxist-Leninist who was 33 years old when he assumed power in August 1983 as an army captain, was known as Africa’s Che Guevara and criticised the West for its neo-colonialism and hypocrisy. The reburial, which was announced earlier this month, had no prior date.
Sankara pushed through a number of changes, including boosting immunisation and outlawing female genital mutilation, and changing the nation’s name from the colonial-era Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which means “the land of honest men.” Supporters of pan-Africanism and egalitarianism idolised him, but his presidency was brief.
A murder squad assassinated him and a dozen other officials during a meeting of the governing National Revolutionary Council in the capital, Ouagadougou. The assassinations occurred on the same day that Sankara’s comrade-in-arms, Blaise Compaore, won power.
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He went on to govern for 27 years, during which time the death of Sankara was strictly forbidden. Protests from the people forced his resignation in 2014.
Following Compaore’s demise, the 13 remains were unearthed from a cemetery on the city’s outskirts for an inquiry.
It resulted in a protracted trial that ended in April 2022 with life sentences in absentia for Compaore and the suspected hit squad leader, as well as a similar sentence for a jailed general who was army commander at the time.
The government had stated that the 13 should be buried “honourably” in light of this trial.
