Natural Causes

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.