Tagged: thomas sankara
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This is video of Thomas Sankara speaking in Harlem (October 3, 1984)—“Our White House is in Black Harlem”
Our revolution is symbolised by our flag. This is our country’s new flag. Our country also has a new name. This flag, as you can see, resembles the black liberation flag. This because we are all one. We are working for the same cause as you. This is why, quite naturally, the colours are alike. They signify the same thing. We didn’t have to use the colour black, however, because we are already in Africa.
Sadly the video cuts off just before the end of the speech. Here’s the very end:
…when I address the United Nations, I will speak about the ghettos and Nelson Mandela, who must be set free. [Applause] I will speak about injustice, racism, and about the hypocrisy of leaders around the world.
But I will also explain that you and we—all of us—are waging our struggle and that they would do well to take note. [Applause] Because you represent the people, and wherever you are on your feet, imperialism trembles!I invite you to repeat with me: “When the people stand up, imperialism trembles!”
[Shouts of: ”When the people stand up, imperialism trembles!”]
Again!
[Shouts of: ”When the people stand up, imperialism trembles!”]
Again!
[Shouts of: ”When the people stand up, imperialism trembles!”][Applause]
Imperialism!
[“Down with it!”]
Puppet regimes!
[“Down with it!”]Racism!
[“Down with it!”]
Zionism!
[“Down with it!”]
Neocolonialism!
[“Down with it!”]
Glory!
[“To the people!”]
Dignity!
[“To the people!”]
Music!
[“To the people!”]
Health!
[“To the people!”]
Education!
[“To the people!”]
Power!
[“To the people!”]
All the power!
[“To the people!”]
Homeland or death, we will triumph!
Homeland or death, we will triumph!
Thank you, comrades. -
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.
-Thomas Sankara
Like Patrice Lumumba – an earlier principled political leader who was a violent casualty of the cold war – Sankara proved to be a creative and unconventional politician. separate from the interests of the major powers (in his case, France, the Soviet Union and the United States).He outlawed tribute payments and obligatory labour to village chiefs, abolished rural poll taxes, promoted gender equality in a very male-dominated society (including outlawing female circumcision and polygamy), instituted a massive immunisation programme, built railways and kick-started public housing construction.
(via sexismandthecity)
(via fuckyeahthomassankara)
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“Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them….”
“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.”
| Thomas Sankara
(via fuckyeahthomassankara)
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Sankara 20 years later: A tribute to integrity
The ideas and principles that guided the Burkinabé revolution did not vanish with Sankara’s assassination. They will continue to guide African popular struggles and resistance movements until foreign domination has been vanquished and Africans have recovered their sovereignty. The best way to honour the memory of Thomas Sankara is to continue his fight and promote the values he embodied.
In truth, African revolutionaries have a duty not only to remember the Burkinabé revolution, but all the African revolutions that inspired it. We forget that Sankara was an ardent pan-Africanist who did not hide his ideological and political debt to Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Amílcar Cabral, among others. It is our duty to study the thinking and works of Sankara and other African revolutionary leaders and thinkers in order to be able to teach the younger generations. By preserving and developing the fundamental values and ideas of the Sankarist revolution and other African revolutions, we will forge the ideological and political tools we need to deconstruct the values and concepts of the dominant system and build anew from our own concepts based on our vision of the world and our realities.
Just as Che’s blood has fed the sacred ground of the Americas where worthy successors of the legendary Argentinean revolutionary are now taking root and pursuing the dreams of Simón Bolívar and other South American heroes, the sacrifice of Sankara and his illustrious predecessors will produce other Sankaras who will one day realise the dreams of Nkrumah and the other heroes and martyrs of the African revolution: to build an independent, united and prosperous Africa that is the master of its own destiny. -
Che Guevara taught us we could dare to have confidence in ourselves, confidence in our abilities. He instilled in us the conviction that struggle is our only recourse. He, was a citizen of the free world that together we are in the process of building. That is why we say that Che Guevara is also African and Burkinabè.
-Thomas Sankara (via theravenquoth)
for more go to:
http://fuckyeahthomassankara.tumblr.com/
(via fuckyeahthomassankara)
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Who was Thomas Sankara?
Thomas Sankara, often referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara” was the president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. He seized power in a 1983 popularly supported coup, with the goal of eliminating corruption and the dominance of the former French colonial power.
Sankara’s foreign policies were centered around anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid because, as he often said, “he who feeds you, controls you.” He pushed for debt reduction and nationalized all land and mineral wealth, averting the power and influence of the IMF and World Bank.
His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nation-wide literacy campaign, and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children. And his was the first African government to publicly recognize the AIDS epidemic as a major threat to Africa.
Thomas Sankara was an extraordinary man.- He outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy and was the first African leader to appoint women to major cabinet positions and actively recruit them for the military. A motorcyclist himself, he formed an all-woman motorcycle personal guard.
- He encouraged women to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant.
- He launched a nation-wide public health ‘Vaccination Commando’ a state run program that in a period of only 15 days in early November 1984, completed the immunization of 2.5 million children against meningitis (a world record), yellow fever and measles. This operation was so successful in that children in neighbouring countries like the Ivory Coast and Mali were sent to Burkina Faso for free immunization that helped curtail high rates of infant and child mortality.
- He sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of the ministers. He lowered his salary, as President, to only $450 a month and limited his possessions to a car, four bikes, three guitars, and a refrigerator.
- He planted over ten million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel and established an ambitious road and rail construction program to “tie the nation together.”
- He was known for jogging unaccompanied through the capital city in his track suit and posing in his tailored military fatigues with his mother-of-pearl pistol. And when asked why he didn’t want his portrait hung in public places, as was the norm for other African leaders, he said ”there are seven million Thomas Sankaras.”
Sankara’s revolutionary policies for self-reliance and defiance against the neoliberal development strategies imposed by the West made him an icon to many supporters of African liberation. But his policies alienated and antagonized the vested interests of the small but powerful Burkinabe middle class, the tribal leaders who he stripped of the traditional right to forced labor and tribute payments, and the foreign financial interests in France and their ally Ivory Coast.
Compaore and Sankara
On October 15, 1987 Sankara was killed by an armed militia of twelve officials in a coup d’état organized by Compaore. Sankara’s body was dismembered and buried in an unmarked grave. Compaore immediately took power, overturning most of Sankara’s policies. Compaore reportedly ousted Sankara because he believed that his revolutionary policies were jeopardizing Burkina Faso’s relationship with France and Ivory Coast. Sankara and Compaore were not only colleagues, they were childhood friends.
This is why ‘Bad Karma’ should be Blaise Compaore’s middle name. He is a ruthless man who orchestrated the brutal assassination of his best friend.
Yet he is the man routinely designated by the international community to act as a ’mediator’ to help resolve African conflicts… smdh -
Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso The Land of Upright Men
Pan-Africanist Theorist, Marxist Revolutionary, Anti-Imperialist, Thomas Sankara was president of Burkina Faso from 1983 after a popularly supported coup, till he was killed in a coup orchestrated by his must trusted allies on october 15 of 1987. A week before his disappearance Sankara said: ” While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas”.
Photo: Thomas Sankara and Algerian film director Ibrahim Tsaki.
For more about him see below
(via loveisthewateroflife)
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Thomas Sankara - The Upright Man
A Documentary on the rise and fall of Africa’s ‘Che’ Thomas Sankara, a must watch.
Thomas Sankara rose to power in a popularly supported coup in 1983 and renamed his country to Burkina Faso, “Land of Upright Men” and launched the most ambitious program for social and economic change ever attempted in Africa.
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Sankara’s assassins were guided by imperialism, which could not allow a man with the ideas and actions of Sankara to lead a country on a continent so exploited for hundreds of years by international imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonial governments that do their bidding. Sankara’s political ideas will endure, like those of Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, also assassinated by traitors at the behest of the empire.
-Ulises Estrada, a key organizer of Che Guevara’s 1966-67 guerrilla mission to Bolivia -
Children “pioneers” of the Revolution, donning starred berets like Che.
Burkina Faso Circa 1987
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Women’s liberation and African freedom struggle
Thomas Sankara
Below is an excerpt from Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for January. Sankara was the central leader of the popular democratic revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) from 1983 to 1987. This excerpt is from a talk he gave to several thousand women commemorating International Women’s Day on March 8, 1987, in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital.BY THOMAS SANKARA
‘The question of women’s equality must be in the minds of all decision-makers, at all times, and in all the different phases of conceiving and executing plans for development. Conceiving a development project without the participation of women is like using only four fingers when you have ten. It’s an invitation to failure.
In the ministries responsible for education, we should take special care to assure that women’s access to education is a reality, for this reality constitutes a qualitative step toward emancipation. It is an obvious fact that wherever women have had access to education, their march to equality has been accelerated. Emerging from the darkness of ignorance allows women to take up and use the tools of knowledge in order to place themselves at the disposal of society. All ridiculous and backward concepts that hold that only education for males is important and profitable, and that educating women is an extravagance, must disappear in Burkina Faso.
Parents should accord the same attention to the progress of their daughters at school as they do to their sons, their pride and joy. Girls have proven they are the equals of boys at school, if not simply better. But above all they have the right to education in order to learn and know—to be free. In future literacy campaigns, the rate of participation by women must be raised to correspond with their numerical weight in the population. It would be too great an injustice to maintain such an important part of the population—half of it—in ignorance.
In the ministries responsible for labor and justice, texts should constantly be adapted to the transformation our society has been going through since August 4, 1983, so that equality between men and women is a tangible reality. The new labor code, now being drawn up and debated, should express how profoundly our people aspire to social justice. It should mark an important stage in the work of destroying the neocolonial state apparatus—a class apparatus fashioned and shaped by reactionary regimes to perpetuate the system that oppressed the popular masses, especially women.
How can we continue to accept that a woman doing the same job as a man should earn less? Can we accept the levirate* and dowries, which reduce our sisters and mothers to common commodities to be bartered for? There are so many things that medieval laws continue to impose on our people, on women. It is only just that, finally, justice be done….
As we go forward, our society should break from all those feudal conceptions that lead to ostracizing the unmarried woman, without realizing that this is merely another form of appropriation, which decrees each woman to be the property of a man. This is why young mothers are looked down upon as if they were the only ones responsible for their situation, whereas there is always a guilty man involved. This is how childless women are oppressed due to antiquated beliefs, when there is a scientific explanation for their infertility, which science can overcome.
In addition, society has imposed on women norms of beauty that violate the integrity of their bodies, such as female circumcision, scarring, the filing of teeth, and the piercing of lips and noses. Practicing these norms of beauty is of dubious value. In the case of female circumcision, it can even endanger a woman’s ability to have children and her love life. Other types of bodily mutilation, though less dangerous, such as the piercing of ears and tattoos, are no less an expression of women’s conditioning, imposed by society if a woman wants to find a husband. Comrade militants, you look after yourselves in order to win a husband. You pierce your ears and do violence to your body in order to be acceptable to men. You hurt yourselves so that men can hurt you even more! …
Comrades, no revolution—starting with our own—will triumph as long as women are not free. Our struggle, our revolution will be incomplete as long as we understand liberation to mean essentially that of men. After the liberation of the proletariat, there remains the liberation of women.
Comrades, every woman is the mother of a man. I would not presume, as a man and as a son, to give advice to a woman or to indicate which road she should take. This would be like giving advice to one’s own mother. But we know, too, that out of indulgence and affection, a mother listens to her son, despite his whims, his dreams, and his vanity. And this is what consoles me and makes it possible for me to address you here. This is why, comrades, we need you in order to achieve the genuine liberation of us all. I know you will always find the strength and the time to help us save our society.
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt. I await and hope for the fertile eruption of the revolution through which they will transmit the strength and the rigorous justice issued from their oppressed wombs.
Comrades, forward to conquer the future.
The future is revolutionary.
The future belongs to those who struggle.
Homeland or death, we will win!’
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