# Natural Causes *Thomas Sankara and the Revolution That Had No Successor* — Legendary Biographies No. 245 - **Subject:** Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara - **Written by:** Vivian Ashcombe - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2027 - **Extent:** 216 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-525-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-634-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/245-natural-causes.html ## About this book A military doctor signed the death certificate on 17 January 1988 and recorded that Thomas Sankara had died of natural causes. He had been shot on 15 October 1987 in the courtyard of the Conseil de l'Entente in Ouagadougou, one of thirteen killed there. The word was struck out, and nothing was written in its place. A tribunal convicted Blaise Compaoré in absentia of complicity in murder in April 2022; two laboratories found no usable genetic profile, so the man in the mausoleum has never been identified. He governed for four years, two months and eleven days. An army captain, he became prime minister in January 1983, was arrested that May, and took power in August at the head of the National Council of the Revolution. A year later he renamed the country Burkina Faso. He is remembered for the speech on African external debt he gave to fifty heads of state in Addis Ababa, seventy-eight days before he was killed. The speech and the courtyard are not two stories but one fact stated twice. Sankara identified the machinery that kept his country poor with a precision no African leader of his generation matched, and built nothing capable of surviving him for a single afternoon. There was no constitution to suspend, because the revolution never wrote one, and no succession mechanism. The committees and tribunals reached downward and never answered upward; in October 1987 they were pointed at him by the men holding the other end. The book grades rather than celebrates. The organizing distinction is between a decree, a prosecutable law and an exhortation. The vaccination commando of late 1984, which suppressed the wild measles virus for five years, stands against roughly two thousand civil servants removed by the Popular Revolutionary Tribunals. The asset declaration of February 1987, at which the head of state was the first witness before his own anti-corruption commission, stands beside the five-day war with Mali and its hundred and forty-one Burkinabè dead. ## Contents 1. Yako 2. Adama Touré 3. Antsirabe 4. Pô 5. Live On Air 6. Seventeen May 7. Four August 8. Orientation 9. Burkina Faso 10. Vaccination Commando 11. Alpha Commando 12. The Tribunals 13. Four Bicycles 14. Eight March 15. The Christmas War 16. Mitterrand 17. Addis Ababa 18. The Entente 19. Rectification 20. Natural Causes ## Questions **Who is Natural Causes about?** Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Natural Causes — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,258 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 66,500 words, 20 chapters, 216 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Vivian Ashcombe spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent before she started writing books. She reported from Moscow, Jerusalem, and Kyiv for the Financial Times and The Atlantic, with stretches embedded in Tehran and Damascus. Her biographies trace power and the people who hold it. Drawing on decades of notebook-shorthand and archival research, her books examine the intersection of public policy and private influence. In her biographies, including The Consulate, The Moscow Exile, and The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, she reconstructs historical events through meticulous primary-source analysis. She lives in south London, where she spends her spare time restoring mid-century furniture and volunteering at a local community archive.