An Interview with the Thomas Sankara Center in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Note: Continuing the Miami Institute’s forum, “Reckoning with Empire,” T.D. Harper-Shipman now shares with us a summary in English of a conversation that took place in French between herself and founders and collaborators at the Thomas Sankara Center in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on March 15, 2024. The French-language recording is available below, following the English-language summary authored by Harper-Shipman. Throughout this forum, Harper-Shipman has continued to bring to our community interviews with “academics and activists who are thinking actively with and against empire from different vantage points.”
The Thomas Sankara Center is an exemplary institution of anti-colonialism and anti-French imperialism. In this month’s post, I speak with founders and comrades at the Thomas Sankara Center: Inem Richardson, Fatou Balora and Wendlassida Simporé.
Based in Ouagadougou, the center takes its name from the fallen Burkinabe leader, Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara. Sankara is best known as the anti-imperial revolutionary who governed Burkina Faso from 1983 until 1987. For four years, he and his compadres led a popular revolution that placed Burkinabè culture and consumption at the forefront of national politics. A substantial amount of righteous ink has been spilled detailing the life and politics of Thomas Sankara. In his first speech at the United Nations (UN)General Assembly in 1984, he made clear the connection between exploitation in the newly-named Burkina Faso and anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. An almost clairvoyant proclamation, he called for the suspension of Israel and South Africa from the UN because of their shared apartheid regimes. The aftermath of this speech did not yield the suspension of either country, but it did garner the suspicion and ire of imperial centers, especially France. One of the more overlooked facets of Sankara’s anti-imperial strategies was the creation of L’Institut des Peuples Noirs in Burkina Faso in 1986. Unrealized in its totality, the Institute marked an effort to dismantle the epistemic components of European domination in the country and beyond by creating alternate structures of knowledge production for Black people in Africa and the diaspora. It is only fitting that a center for political education be erected in Burkina Faso to continue his work.
In this interview, members of the Thomas Sankara Center discuss their Pan Africanist approach to anti-imperialism, their flagship programs, and the complexities of financing a popular revolution.
We discuss the Center’s relevance for a shifting political landscape in Burkina Faso and West Africa, more broadly. Beginning in 2020, the region experienced a series of military-led coups that ushered in anti-French governments, in some ways institutionalizing a popular sentiment that had been brewing since 2009. Burkina Faso joined the string of anti-French coups that dotted the region in 2022. The current president, Ibrahim Traoré, led the country’s second putsch in eight months, vowing to bring long-awaited stability to the country. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS,) France, and the United States inter alia demanded that Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, and the other West African countries restore liberal democracy or face sanctions. Tension between the military regimes and pro-Western actors grew when the West African countries aligned themselves with Russia. Niger did face extreme sanctions that wrecked the already-exploited country. In response, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger left ECOWAS. International media immediately narrated the coups as anti-democratic and populist—few mentioned how many of the coup leaders (with the exception of Traoré) were trained under the United States Africa Command in Germany (AFRICOM) and the French-led Operation Barkhane. Suffice it to say that pro-Western media coverage of the region reflected a long-held bias towards such dissident behavior.
I returned to Burkina Faso after Traoré’s regime came to power. I had already heard from Burkinabè friends in the country about the popular support that Traoré had amassed. It was a different thing to see it. Since roughly 2010, Burkina Faso began experiencing unprecedented terrorist attacks in the Northern part of the country. By 2014, insecurity had become a feature of Burkinabè life. There was widespread internal displacement and rampant vigilante groups filling the security void left by the French-backed state. Traoré came to power in a beleaguered country—a country that once prided itself on being “the land of the upright people”. My experience visiting friends in Ouagadougou, Koudougou, and Zabré was that there was undeniable support for the Traoré government. The 163km stretch of road between Ouagadougou and Zabré was adorned with Burkinabè, Malian, Russian, and Nigerien flags. Anti-French sentiment was palpable. As you will hear in the interview with the founders of the Thomas Sankara Center, pro-Russian support is grounded in, what for many Burkinabè, feels like an expression of national interests, while recognizing the realities of the international economic order. People are not oblivious to the self-interested reasons for Russia’s assistance in the country or the region for that matter. But for the first time since the death of Sankara, many people feel that it is the first time that they’ve had a choice in who the country partners with and how the partnership is leveraged. I heard these sentiments from people of different class, ethnic, gender, regional, and educational backgrounds. One example worth noting was from my time in Koudougou. While in Koudougou, Traoré happened to be visiting the city at the same time. Before Traoré had arrived, majority (if not all) of the vendors in the city’s grand market pooled money to give the president as a show of solidarity. For some Burkinabè, Traoré is the second coming of Sankara.
Certainly, there are issues with Russia’s presence in West Africa. And certainly not everyone in Burkina Faso supports the military regime. However, the support is seemingly strong. As we reflect on how and why this might be so, we could ask: But what are the various types of negotiations Burkinabè and others in the region must now make around safety, stability, and transparency? How are these negotiations a product of a now decade-long state of insecurity and decades of French exploitation? It is against this backdrop that the Sankara Center effectuates political educations.
-T.D. Harper-Shipman
T.D. Haper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and Africa is a Country. During the 2023-2023 academic year, Harper-Shipman is a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal working on a project titled “Suturing Reproduction and the Nation: the politics of family planning in West Africa.”
