Thread by @cobbo3

Now there’s a chance of justice for Thomas Sankara, it’s useful to review what got him killed 1/8
theconversation.com/now-theres-a-c…

Thomas Sankara was the leader of a bold initiative to transform a country trapped in a dependent relationship with the rest of the world, particularly France 2/8

Sankara refused to accept that poverty in West Africa was inevitable, and offered a new kind of freedom. Sankara was really vulnerable only to counter-coups – from forces who wanted to return to business as usual with French imperialism 3/8

Sankara’s govt launched a mass vaccination programme in an effort to eliminate polio, meningitis and measles. From 1983, 2 million Burkinabé (25% of the 8 million population then) were immunised 4/8

Before 1983 infant mortality in Burkina Faso was at roughly 20% but fell in the period of Sankara’s presidency to 140 per 1000 births. These were vital and welcome initiatives, [among many others] 5/8

Opposition, under Sankara’s instructions, had been marginalised or stamped out. This left him exposed, with only a small militant core by his side. There was no popular movement among the working class and the poor that might have resisted a return to the old state 6/8

Sankara had stripped himself of the ability to defend the transformation he had tried to achieve. He had tried to substitute his popularity, charisma and oratory for a real movement that could confront the forces working towards his defeat 7/8

When, in 1961, the revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote about Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s murder and isolation, he was expressing the dangerous loneliness of the African radical intelligentsia, of which Sankara was a later representative 8/8