Quebec forum discusses Burkina Faso Revolution, Thomas Sankara
https://themilitant.com/2021/12/18/quebec-forum-discusses-burkina-faso-revolution-thomas-sankara/
BY JOE YOUNG
Vol. 85/No. 48
December 27, 2021
Volunteers at Pathfinder stall at Montreal Book Fair helped build Nov.
27 forum on Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87.
Inset, Michel Prairie, editor of book, speaking on Burkinabé revolution.
MILITANT PHOTOS/ABOVE, MARY ELLEN MARUS; INSET, JOHN STEELE
Volunteers at Pathfinder stall at Montreal Book Fair helped build Nov.
27 forum on Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87.
Inset, Michel Prairie, editor of book, speaking on Burkinabé revolution.
MONTREAL — Thomas Sankara was the central leader of the 1983-87
revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso, Michel Prairie,
the editor of Thomas Sankara Speaks and a leader of the Communist
League, told 25 people at a Nov. 27 meeting here to discuss the book,
Sankara’s legacy and the Burkinabe Revolution.
“The revolution took place in one of the poorest countries in the world,
an overwhelmingly agricultural country with a tiny industrial working
class,” Prairie said. Upper Volta, as the country was called then, was a
former French colony still very much dominated and exploited by French
imperialism.
In August 1983, after months of popular unrest, an uprising brought a
revolutionary government to power, with Sankara at its head.
In the following four years, Prairie explained, “Sankara led the
revolutionary government in mobilizing working people to improve their
conditions.”
The event was organized in a partnership of Pathfinder Books and the
Racines bookstore, and took place while the Montreal Book Fair was on.
Panelists included Prairie; Tidiane Diallo, a refugee-rights activist
from Guinea; and Emmanuel Adigun, who read a statement from Kenneth
Adetola, a West African political refugee scheduled to speak but too ill
to attend.
Published in 1988 in English and 2007 in French by Pathfinder Press, the
book contains 30 speeches and interviews given by Sankara.
After the revolution came to power in a country facing hunger and
ongoing encroachment of the Sahel desert, Sankara led workers and
peasants to come together, Prairie said. They mobilized to build dams,
irrigate valleys, plant trees and increase the production and
distribution of food.
The revolutionary government organized massive literacy and immunization
drives, he said. It nationalized the land and mobilized peasants to
confront centuries-old exploitative relations in the countryside.
Sankara also took demonstrative steps toward involving women in the
revolution and educating working people on the need to combat women’s
oppression. One key speech in the book is “The Revolution Cannot Triumph
Without the Emancipation of Women.”
“Sankara was an internationalist,” Prairie said. The Burkina Faso
Revolution fought imperialist domination and extended solidarity to
other peoples fighting for their rights.
“What distinguishes Sankara among other revolutionaries who led
courageous struggles against colonial and imperialist domination in
Africa,” he added, “is that he was a revolutionary Marxist, a communist.
He had total confidence in the capacity of workers and peasants to
transform their lives and become new human beings with new proletarian
values in the process.
“It is not an accident that the revolution forged links with the Cuban
Revolution, and that Cuba sent 450 volunteers to help.
“Sankara explained,” said Prairie, “that the revolution in Burkina Faso
was a popular and democratic one. Its task was not to expropriate the
capitalists and open the road to socialism. The country was too
underdeveloped economically and socially. The revolution’s task was to
mobilize working people in solving their most immediate needs and, in so
doing, create the conditions for the development of the country’s
economy and of a modern working class.
“Sankara fought till his last day to press this revolutionary course,
whatever the obstacles,” Prairie said.
‘Learned of Sankara from book’
“I was born two years after Sankara was killed,” Diallo told the
meeting. “I really learned about him when I read Pathfinder’s collection
of his speeches after coming to Canada as a political refugee.
“Sankara explained the fight for the trees and the forests is an
anti-imperialist struggle because the imperialism is the arsonist of our
forests and our plains,” he said. “Comrade Sankara also understood that
within Burkinabe society there was a certain exploitation of one layer
by another, the exploitation of women by men.
“I was struck how as a child, Sankara said he used to spend his days
playing outdoors with other boys while his young sisters had to stay
home helping their mother do the chores,” he said. “This was something
the Burkina Faso Revolution addressed, organizing days when men had to
go to the market in order to buy food for the family.
“Sankara said that the revolution needs a convinced, not a conquered
people,” Diallo said. “There were some in the government who wanted to
utilize force against the people, but comrade Sankara stressed the need
for pedagogy.”
Adetola’s statement explained he was a student in Nigeria at the time of
the Burkina Faso Revolution. “The accomplishments in the health sector
under the Thomas Sankara-led government,” he said, “are impressive,
giant strides that saw vaccination in just two weeks of over 2.5 million
children.
“When he came to power, the literacy level in Burkina Faso was only 12%.
By dint of hard work and determination, his government drove the level
up to 22% in just under two years,” Adetola wrote. “You will notice his
passion and zeal not only to educate the mind of his people, but also
educate their hearts and rescue their consciousness from mental slavery.”
A revolution overthrown
In the discussion Prairie addressed Sankara’s fight in the last months
of the revolution to build a revolutionary party, a party “that could
regroup the best and most devoted fighters in order to lead the
revolution forward, those involved with the peasants growing food and
planting trees, not giving orders from an air-conditioned office in the
capital city Ouagadougou.”
There was no such party in Burkina Faso that united all revolutionaries
in its ranks. Many of those who agreed with Sankara’s course were either
killed in the coup that overthrew the revolutionary government or broken
by the decadeslong brutal repression under Blaise Compaore that followed.
Peter Thierjung, from the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. who
attended the meeting, took part in the discussion, addressing the
current trial in Burkina Faso of 14 individuals, including Compaore, who
are charged with being involved in the assassination of Sankara.
“For four years imperialism was unsuccessful in toppling the revolution
from the outside because of Sankara’s leadership,” Thierjung said. “The
counterrevolution came from inside, led by Compaore and his cronies who
claimed to be revolutionaries but were not. They used thuggery, torture
and murder to take power.
“Sankara’s political course and example are indispensable for working
people in North America and other countries to read and study,” he said.
Maya Berger, a University of Montreal student, was one of three
participants who had learned of the meeting from the Pathfinder Books
booth at the Montreal Book Fair. In her opinion, the meeting and
discussion, “clearly encouraged me that there are answers for workers’
struggles and liberation struggles today.”
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