Freedom can only be won through struggle, and we call on all our sisters of all races to go on the offensive to conquer their rights’ (Sankara 1984b: 162).

His revolutionary orientation was founded upon an insistence that all Burkinabè be free and empowered but that genuine self-empowerment was something to be cultivated through hard-work and seized through struggle rather than allotted by the government or given through international aid.

At the time of his death, Sankara owned little and was quite possibly one of the poorest heads of state in the world. Among his possessions at the time of his death: four bicycles, a car, three guitars and a refrigerator. Take, on the other hand, Blaise who has an estimated net worth of US$275 million.

Sakara’s speeches and activities were more like those of radical social justice activists than with heads of state.

the chapters in this collection reveal that much of this apparent madness was part of Sankara coming into power with a commitment to the people of le Faso alongside an understanding of the operations of oppression, imperialism and a colonial global political economy. Sankara understood the immensities and dangers of the revolutionary project before him; he knew that he would be perceived as a ‘madman’ for fighting against a powerful global economic elite.

I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future. (Sankara 1985a: 141–144; emphasis added)

Sankara’s solidarity with Western Sahara was ‘a powerful socio-cultural, anti-colonial symbol’, but according to Delices, Sankara’s solidarity lacked economic or material substance given the constraints of Burkina’s economy.

He would urge us to have a broader focus when we look at the politics of social justice in Burkina Faso, the ‘land of the upright people’.

These Committees depended on the energies of Sankara and did not become institutionalised enough to prevent his murder and the reversals of the gains of the poor.

Constant reference to the poor as slaves in their discourse meant that even when these intellectuals articulated Pan-African ideas, the reference point for freedom was not the peoples, but the freedom for this stratum to have more room within the hierarchy of French domination.

Hence the class character of Upper Volta was shaped by the dominance of French capital, with French commercial and trading firms in the interstices of the system. French domination was maintained through the coercive organs of the state - police, military, courts, prison and tsetse fly control. At the ideological level, the French system depended on the reinforcement of ideas of African inferiority.

Sankara had been groomed to serve these interests but he wanted to be a decent human being in a society of upright human beings. Hence in the period of his short leadership of Burkina Faso, 1983-1987, he changed the name and orientation of the society to signal a Pan-African assertion of dignity and self-confidence.