There is a cruel and neat symmetry to events unfolding Burkina Faso. It speaks to the paradoxes of people’s uprising in Africa and elsewhere else, and the virtual impossibility of having a popular revolution in the very society that appears to need it most. In all probability, the more harshly authoritarian a society is the less likely it is to have a revolution leading to immediate and automatic democratic emancipation of the people.
In Burkina Faso, it all began in October and has ended in late October. If one were to put a sheen of revolutionary optimism on this, one can as well say that it all cruelly terminated in October 27 years ago but has resumed in another October 27 years after.
It was on October 15, 27 years ago that Blaise Compaore cruelly terminated the quaint revolutionary experimentation of his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara, in a broad daylight putsch the like of which had never been seen in Africa. At the end of it all, the Ouagadougou Presidential Palace was a site of Homeric bloodletting. Several officers and many socialist cadres lay dead. Sankara himself, sensing the end, had brushed aside all efforts to shield him and the proud descendant of Mossi warriors had gone out to meet his assailants with service pistol blazing.
It is the heroic people of Burkina Faso themselves who have found a name for their revolutionary uprising against a consummate tyrant. They have named their own version of the Arab Spring after a local bird. The Lwili is the common name for bird in the Moore language that is most widely spoken in Burkina Faso. But in the past fortnight, the bird has been invested with the mythical aura of a voice that cannot be caged by a monstrous despot. Maya Angelou would be smiling. Twenty seven years after, the Burkinabes have found their voice again. It is the return of the repressed.
But we must caution incurable revolutionary romantics against false hopes and futile optimism. The original Sankara revolution was not the product of a popular uprising. Sankara himself was hardly a natural democrat. Belonging to the most elite and elitist of military formations, he merely enlisted the people in his revolutionary project. It was a drama of military giants; a bye product of an intense power struggle among the old Upper Volta military aristocracy. Once in power, Sankara knew where he wanted to take his people and nation, no matter the objective material and historical circumstances.
It would seem in retrospect that Sankara deliberately courted revolutionary martyrdom. There was something about him which hinted at the holy martyr. For him, the life of the individual leader does not really matter as long as he could cultivate the cult of heroic example. His was a fundamental intellectual assault on the bastion of military reaction and authoritarian privileges; and on the cherished ideals of African post-colonial armies originating from colonial rapine and predation.
They all noted. Calm, cool, intensely cerebral and immensely self-possessed, Sankara was a master of the soaring revolutionary rhetoric which did not take hostages whether old imperialist or new internal colonialist. In a moment of exasperation and frustration, Francois Mitterand, the late French president, wryly described him as a cutting edge that cuts too sharply.
Thomas Sankara was arguably the greatest son of Burkina Faso and one of the greatest sons of Africa ever. He gave his people a new name, a new identity and helped them to find their voice. It was too good to be true. The Burkinabe leader became a revolutionary poster boy for good governance and accountability all over the continent. Sharp, witty, quick on his feet and eternally swapped in paratroopers’ combat fatigues, Sankara was a walking reproach to the corrupt and dissolute post-colonial military oligarchy that held post-colonial Africa by the jugular.
The good people of Africa noted. There was something mesmerising and electrifying about this new type of military rule. On a typical weekend, the Burkinabe leader could be seen in shirt and shorts personally coating the walls of the presidential villa. He had openly boasted that all his worldly possessions, including an old fridge, could be packed into the boot of his old Renault jalopy.
Panache and self-assurance, intellectual rigour and revolutionary asceticism is not the kind of combination expected of an African leader, particularly in the nascent epoch of global capitalism. The noose began to tighten round Sankara internationally, continentally and nationally. From Equatorial Guinea to Zaire, military despots dominant on the continent saw him as a dangerous advertisement for a more humane mode of governance and a source of inspiration to revolutionary wannabes in the post-colonial military.
It is instructive to note that after Sankara was murdered by his friend, Nigeria openly threw protocol to the dustbin by immediately welcoming Compaore’s envoys, Captain Henri Zongo and Major Boukary Lingani. This was at the same time when the veteran African nationalist, Kenneth Kaunda, was firmly shutting the door of the Zambian nation against the miserable pair. Two years later in a classic instance of poetic justice, Compaore rounded up the two officers and had them summarily executed for plotting against him.
With such friends and “revolutionary comrades” as the military bastion of the “revolution”, Sankara needed no enemy outside the national borders. Yet he had plenty of them. It is noteworthy that shortly after the ouster of his friend, “Beautiful Blaise” announced a sweeping programme of “rectification” which was nothing but a sly shorthand for rolling back the populist contents of the Sankara revolution. Yet for about a week after the “rectification” began, Compaore could not face the people he had “rectified” even on television, citing a historic bout of malaria. Some malaria indeed!
For Sankara, the last straw was probably the seminal rift with Moamar Ghaddafi, the deposed Libyan despot. Despite his radical posturing, Ghaddafi was a pan-Arabic racist and equal opportunity anarchist who took a petulant childlike delight in destabilising Black African regimes irrespective of ideological colouration. Sankara stoutly refused to allow Charles Taylor, Ghadaffi’s protégé, an access through Burkina Faso to launch his war against his country. Two years after the overthrow of Sankara, Compaore granted Taylor free access through Burkina Faso. The rest is history.
But the old native bird of Burkina Faso is not through with us yet. Twenty seven years after Sankara’s assassination and as Compaore fled the capital, the ghost of Sankara returned to the Burkina Faso capital for unfinished business. It was a much storied ghost. Irate protesters against Compaore were seen carrying huge banners bearing the portrait of the noble and iconic paratrooper. It was a historic trope for a return match. Nothing could have been more deeply symbolic of what is known as the cunning of history.
It was also a defining moment in Burkina Faso history. Twenty seven years ago and the very day after the murder of Thomas Sankara, Ouagadougou residents began arriving at the hurried makeshift grave that was fingered as Thomas Sankara’s last resting place, laying wreathes and tearing at their own body in a gesture of profound grief. It soon became a holy site. Soldiers forcibly dispersed them and then hurriedly uprooted Sankara’s remains for forcible relocation to an unknown and unmarked grave.
Last week and twenty seven years after, the army in Burkina Faso was still struggling with the ghost of Sankara as they fired shots to prevent the people who have succeeded in banishing a murderous tyrant from entering the premises of the television station. With such a deeply entrenched counter-revolutionary army, a democratic revolution may well be impossible.
Who needs a revolution, anyway? Given the recent experience of the so called Arab Spring where a popular revolt has led to the paradoxical consolidation of a counter-revolutionary military oligarchy and Libya’s precipitate lurch into radical anarchy, the civil leaders of Burkina Faso may have to lower their sight and cure themselves of romantic revolutionary delusions.
The Burkinabe army is too deeply complicit in the Compaore era to play the role of a change-driven nationalist institution. It is its instincts as a veritable spoiler that will more likely gain ascendancy in the coming weeks and months. It is instructive that the first pretender to the throne that Compaore hurriedly vacated was his former ADC who had risen to become a general. The second was the second in command of his Praetorian guard.
But even a badly wounded and badly compromised army knows when it is in need of a signal retreat. What the people of Burkina Faso have gained from their heroic struggle is the right to freely choose their own leaders. Not even the army can stop that. Many of the young people who rose in furious protest had not known any other leader apart from Blaise Compaore. But they know their history, and they know that there was another man called Thomas Sankara.
Even more in death, Sankara has turned out to be the greatest nemesis of corrupt oligarchies. As the great man himself would say, not even the mightiest of armies can stop an idea whose time has come. It is that dictum that has just played out in the land of upright people. Thus as Shakespeare would say, the whirligig of time has brought its sweet revenge. On the twenty seventh October of Blaise Compaore, Thomas Sankara can rest in peace. Burkina Faso must now move on.
