POLITICAL THOUGHT

of (i) Thomas Sankara;

B. Gumbo
 Background: Who is Sankara
• Thomas Sankara is an African Political Philosopher from Burkina Faso
who came into power in 1983 when most of Africa had been
independent for at least twenty years.
• In the early 1980s, he undertook a grounded, applied, and radical
approach for the total transformation of the State for the well-being of
the people of Burkina Faso.
• Sankara worked to break from neocolonial models of development,
from colonial knowledge systems, and from oppressive imperial
capitalist economic relations.
• He imagined a world in which the political economic systems and
infrastructures functioned for the well-being of the people, but also he
put into place policies and projects that achieved tangible successes
in well-being and happiness.
Revolution and Welfare of citizens
• He said “Our revolution will be worthwhile only if… the Burkinabè
are… a little happier. Happier because they have clean water to
drink, because they have abundant, sufficient food, because they’re
in excellent health, because they have education, because they
have decent housing, because they are better dressed, because
they have the right to leisure, because they have enjoyed more
freedom, more democracy, more dignity. Our revolution will have a
reason to exist only if it can respond concretely to these questions.”
• He wanted to emulate development in Libya and North Korea
(authoritarian regimes) saying: “we will go wherever the interests of
the Voltaic masses are to be found. We saw the achievements in
Libya – hospitals, schools, houses, and all of it available for free….
If we could transform Upper Volta tomorrow the way Qaddafi has
transformed Libya, would you be pleased, yes or no?” (Sankara
 Cont.…
• Other important strands of his international vision and thinking were
Sankara’s calls for an end to aid dependency, his rejection of odious debt, his
critique of the African ruling class, his commitment to women’s and peasant’s
rights, his esteem for environmental sustainability and food justice, and his
commitment to African empowerment and solidarity with marginalized and
excluded peoples.
• His strong conviction was that the countries of Africa unite and refuse to pay
odious debt, and identified debt as ‘a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa
… [in which] each of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true
slave’
State Transformation

• Sankara believed that the transformation of state to ensure

well-being is founded upon the full participation of the people.
• He noted: “There is no revolution without the organic and full
participation from the people”but disavowed himself as a
“revolutionary leader”
• He urged people to collaborate on revolutionary projects of
self-determination, often in the face of enormous international
and domestic capitalist and neo-imperialist pressures.
• Sankara believed active participation to be central in the
emancipation of people, for themselves, through their own
labor.
 The revolutionary pedagogy for humanization.
• For Sankara, people’s active participation in the
construction of infrastructural projects deterred
pessimism and the sense of powerlessness that were
part of colonial hangover in Burkina.
• He opined that Self-appreciation could be derived from
working, creating, and building together.
• Sankara recognized the “dual” political and economic
function that development fulfilled in African societies:
– (1) to serve the interests of a small cadre of African elites and
their international patrons and, simultaneously,
– (2) to propagate a sense of optimism about future well-being
and modernizing potentials, thus distracting from imperial
 Foreign Development Aid
• Sankara’s political philosophy emphased the political consequences of
international aid dependency—that is, the dual tendency to cultivate
systemic reliance while squashing self-confidence in societies otherwise
capable of uplift, societies like Burkina Faso.
• He rejected externally driven development agendas both for this tendency to
obscure the violent economic and political relations of global capitalism, but
also for the dependency and alienation fostered by such projects.
• He identified the following tenets of violence embedded within international
aid:
– (1) the essentialization of African peoples in which abstract development models are
imposed unilaterally;
– (2) the epistemic violence effected through the displacing of Burkinabè knowledge
systems by foreign epistemes; and
– (3) the poverty and hunger resulting from a system of international development that
squashes local/national potential and remains quiet on the global capital system.
Cultural Imperialism
• He explained that “From imperialism’s point of view, it’s more important to
dominate us culturally than militarily. Cultural domination is more flexible, more
effective, less costly”
• He said: “Imperialism is everywhere. Through the culture that it spreads, through
its misinformation, it gets us to think like it does, it gets us to submit to it, and to go
along with all its maneuvers” (Sankara, “Who Are the People’s Enemies?” 1983)
• Sankara situated international development within this matrix of cultural
imperialism and proposed a complete refashioning of the culture of international
development aid which led him to discontinued the United States Peace Corps
program in Burkina Faso in 1987.
• He noted: “Aid must go in the direction of strengthening our sovereignty, not
undermining it. Aid should go in the direction of destroying aid. All aid that kills aid
is welcome in Burkina Faso. But we will be compelled to abandon all aid that
creates a welfare mentality.”
 Coloniality
• Sankara critiqued the African “professors, engineers, and
economists” who studied in the universities of the West
and returned to the continent with “vocabulary and
ideas… from elsewhere” and became agents of
imperialism, “content… with simply adding color” to
imperial development agendas.
• Sankara said: “We have to work at decolonizing our
mentality and achieving happiness within the limits of
sacrifices we should be willing to accept. We have to
recondition our people to accept themselves as they are,
not to be ashamed of their real situation, to be satisfied
with it, to glory in it, even.”
Technicians into the Villages and into the Streets
• Sankara believed in surrounding himself with people who had a
great deal of practical experience and knowledge and often
requested feedback and insight on the progress of the
revolution. Such people included agroecologists and
agronomists, accountants, civil engineers, doctors, economists,
teachers, veterinarians, pan-African and Marxist political
thinkers, journalists, and more.
• He also advocated for interfacing technicians (experts) with the
people as he noted: “The world that we are fighting for will never
be built by technicians, it will be built by ordinary humans, who
will transform themselves in the process of transforming the
conditions of their lives.”
• THE END.