Friday October 15, marks 34 years since the murder of revolutionary leader and Panafrican visionary Thomas Sankara. Sankara died in a coup that was led by his long-term comrade Blaise Compaore, and, according to several political historians, backed by a prominent European country. The sting of this milestone should not prevent from contemplating the empowering philosophies Sankara wove into the African political landscape, for visionary ideas do not perish under the bullets of armed traitors and their western allies. Sankara and his fellow visionaries’ philosophies are still very much alive across the continent, and I believe, in Rwanda. Blood On The Leaves There’s no going around it; if your skin isn’t white, and your passport is not issued by the west, you will be kindly asked not elect someone that actually aims to improve your life. If you do, the hammer of western supremacy will crash upon your head and the ringing in your ears will feature a foreign-accented mispronunciation of your country’s name, followed by an attribution of the concussion you just experienced to your kin-skinned’s violence. Whoever killed Thomas Sankara, I wholeheartedly believe there was a westerner involved. Sankara himself publicly alluded to the likelihood – if not imminence – of his murder at the hands of foreign forces several times. “I hope our conference sees the necessity of stating clearly that we cannot repay the debt,” stated Sankara in a speech at a 1987 AU (then OAU) summit, continuing: “This is to avoid our going off to be killed one at a time.” Two and half months later, Sankara was murdered in Ouagadogou. Blaise Compaore, who led the coup, then ruled over Burkina Faso for 27 years, with little (no) objection from European nations. 4Th Degree Murder Sankara was hardly the first revolutionary to predict his early death. Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, a key figure in the DRC’s obtaining of independence from Belgium in 1960, was assassinated in 1961. Lumumba had not long before penned a poignant letter for his wife that begun with the statement: “My dear wife, I am writing these words not knowing how they will reach you and when they will and whether I shall still be alive when you read them.” The real threat these revolutionaries posed was never in their person, but in their ideas. “I am in the knowledge that death can never extinguish the torch which I have lit in Ghana and Africa” stated Kwame Nkrumah, ex Ghanaian President and revolutionary who survived several assassination attempts, including the firing of 5 bullets within close range. It’s a shame that the likely orchestrator of all these attacks on our visionaries, whose tint of skin and origins you can imagine, is yet to realise that if such is in the cards, one cannot stop a revolution in its tracks. If a leader’s ideas pose enough of a threat to an order that said leader must be neutralised, they have already enflamed the hearts of the revolutionary’s kin by the time they reach the quivering ears of the threatened party. Bar the vulgarity of constantly plotting to weaken the leaders whose rhetoric, from the exemplary humanity it displays, cannot be surpassed by the offerings of an imperialist west - murdering visionaries is simply pointless. Sankara aptly stated that “You can assassinate revolutionaries, but you cannot kill ideas.” Sadly, when the neo-imperialist’s back is against the wall, for there seems little hope for the success of their brutish plan, another approach emerges. The futurist socialist philosophy itself must be murdered. What if the ex-coloniser used the full-force of their truth-“defining” machine to kill an idea by invalidating it? What if socialism and unflinching determination to witness welfare improvements in real time were cast as authorianism? What if the principle, the philosophy of dignity for the ex-colonised was discredited at the root? We mustn’t be foolish. Sankara’s most prominent politics included increasing literacy rates, providing free education for all, liberating women from patriarchal oppression, instilling ecological values across the continent, creating an entirely self-sufficient economy, and rejecting colonial debt. Castro, to which the world owes the remarkably trained Cuban doctors that were deployed globally to assist with the Covid-19 Crisis, bore similar values. There was in turn an alleged 600 attempts on Castro’s life and eventually, a mediatic wave of questioning of his sanity and empathy for the Cubans his “choices” were choking. It matters not that American embargos were (and still are) at the root of Cuba’s obstacles in accessing the modern lifestyle the rest of the world has known for decades. The point was to kill the idea of welfare-focus and community-prioritising benefiting a population. If Castro would not die, perhaps the validity of his values could be discredited to the point of robbing him the support which empowered him. To Those That Refuse To Die At the risk of stating the obvious, the average Rwandan likely recognizes the same values of dignity for a nation through dignity for citizens that Lumumba’s Congo, Nkrumah’s Ghana and Sankara’s Burkina Faso all displayed, in the current Rwanda. “Let’s produce what we need and consume what we produce…..This is how you live with Freedom and Dignity” is yet another powerful Thomas Sankara Quote, which strikes as a perfect mirror to President Paul Kagame’s citation from a speech delivered in 2014: “Dependency must end; a country shouldn’t be a burden to another—there should be self-worth.” President Paul Kagame has always fiercely defended the importance of dignity, and particularly the awareness of one’s entitlement to it as a human being, in the African psyche. “We have to fight for every inch of our territory in terms of giving ourselves dignity” and “Why should you be a secondary citizen on this planet earth?” are two of the President’s statements that encompass the core of his endowing vision for a people the (western) world wanted either vanquished or subservient. There are too many of these parallel themes between the words of past African visionaries and Paul Kagame’s to count. Considering the fate of our past visionaries is essential to understanding why we must perpetually prioritise ourselves. No time should be wasted in patiently spoon-feeding our truths on Rwanda to entities that have splattered our blood on our leaves from the moment the western foot stepped on African shores. This energy is best spent in striving for our development, and I am forever humbled and grateful to witness Rwanda express its priorities as such, consistently. The views expressed in this article are of the writer.
