David Letsoalo
There is a tendency to remember our heroes of the freedom struggle on the days or months of their deaths. It is really worrisome that we have normalised this strange and abhorrent practice. We sit back, do nothing, and look forward to the day of commemoration of these great men and women of our freedom struggle. It’s so piecemeal, so truncated and most gravely half-hearted. To most of us it’s utterly preposterous! Think Independence Day in various countries in Afrika, Freedom Day, Youth Day, Women’s Day and Sharpeville Day in South Africa.
With regard to our heroes, heroines and martyrs we need to be challenged about how we salute giants such as Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Onkgopotse Tiro, Solomon Mahlangu and many others.
If we know what their ideals were or what they died fighting for, the best way to show respect to their memory is to pursue their mission or implement their ideas as our way of life. This cry is even more instructive for politicians. As for the former liberation movements, this call is particularly instructive.
This past week has been particularly hectic especially with the beginning of the highly anticipated trial of the killers of the much-loved former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, exactly 34 years after his brazen and shocking assassination.
Almost all media platforms were running helter-skelter to - at least - cover a little bit about this popular, Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial revolutionary leader. Just to tick the boxes of compliance in the discoursal spaces.
Obviously, they will soon be iced now that the 15th of October (the anniversary of Sankara’s death) has passed, we will wait for next year around this time for any coverage of news about Sankara in our media spaces. These are but examples of the routine, piecemeal and truncated efforts at keeping the memory of our heroes alive. It’s a bad habit, and it must simply be halted urgently.
The story of Noel Isidore Thomas Sankara is filled with a lot of incredulity, but it’s obviously not esoteric. It’s such a magnificent life story that, to some of us, engenders elements of spiritual relation and reinterpretation of our painful existence as black people.
Driven by the love for the downtrodden people of his country, Burkina Faso, he took power via a military coup in August 1984 as a young man of 33. As president, he turned the country from the proverbial basket case to a beautiful story of abundant success before his callous assassination on 15 October 1987.
To me, I see Sankara as a precious asset that God and our ancestors had gifted us as a shining light and a living example to guide us through the labyrinth and meshwork of the chimeric post-independent or “post-colonial” Afrika.
But the post-independent and post-colonial are deceitful and fallacious as Afrika continues to be dependent on its erstwhile colonisers, and therefore remains colonised.
This is exactly what he understood at the time and bravely fought to stave off the neo-colonial, neo-imperialist and capitalist forces. And he knew it was a deadly move, and yet reconciled himself to it because, as he said, “while revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas”.
It is his ideas that have made him a paragon of selfless, people-driven and servant leadership. He became an embodiment of what a true revolutionary ought to be. What characterises a true cadre or a revolutionary is the love for one’s people, and not himself, his friends and relatives. This is the same message that the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe cogently articulated when framing true leadership on “the consuming love for one’s people”.
Of course, this whole message is clearly summarised through the PAC’s slogan of “serve, suffer, sacrifice”. The likes of Steve Biko, as leaders, demonstrated their love for the people by being prepared to die for the noble cause. And, indeed, they were killed by the white regime.
Sankara understood the notion of servant leadership and ensured that the trait of a true revolutionary leader should be the preoccupation with service to humanity in pursuit of an equal society.
It is thus not surprising that, unlike the gullible and sell-out leadership of post-independence Afrika, he fervently dealt with issues of women emancipation, community works programme, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, as well as nationalisation of land and redistribution thereof to ordinary people.
It is such ideals and principles that cost him his life (which was a tremendous loss to the continent at large). If in four years he was able to achieve the milestones that many Afrikan leaders would have failed to achieve three decades and more, can we imagine what Afrika would have achieved, learned and experienced had he lived for much longer? It is in this respect that I assert that this continent has lost immensely.
Even in his death, Sankara continues to scare our oppressors and their puppets or proxy leaders in our midst. These lackeys have rendered the African Union a shadow of its former self (OAU), and made Afrika susceptible to the pilfering actions of imperialists such as China and France.
But Sankara, in fighting all these things, knew that he was doing it for the people, hence his formidable stance that he wanted people to remember him as “someone whose life has been helpful to humanity”.
If Sankara is watching us all in Afrika (and I truly believe he is watching), or if he were to resurrect today (during this election frenzy in South Africa/Azania), what would he think? How would he feel? What would he say about China literally buying some of our countries in Afrika? What about the continued role of France, not only in the so-called Francophone countries but almost the rest of the continent? I hate to imagine what he would be saying about the erstwhile liberation movement in Zimbabwe returning and /or paying settlers for the land taken from Afrikans by conquest?
With regard to our country, Azania, I think Sankara would be in excruciating pain and huge disappointment watching the 27 years of the rainbow administration under an erstwhile liberation movement, the ANC. Yes, 27 years of sustaining white privilege and propping apartheid? Twenty-seven years of looting under the guise of black economic empowerment (BEE) and state capture? And, indeed, 27 years of undeniable corruption! This is utter disrespect for the people that continue to live in hope, the hope that one day they will be free.
In this country, Azania, I am sure Sankara (if he is watching), has issued a red card to deplore the anti-socialist and neo-liberal policy trajectory taken by the ANC government. I am sure he is disgusted with the high levels of corruption, and materialism, the largesse and “blue lights” that the leaders have made their expertise and obsession.
He would be particularly pained that this is the regime that sponsored a UN resolution that ultimately led to the killing of his friend and revolutionary leader, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. He would obviously be hurt by the indignity meted on the people via handouts, food parcels and grants because he championed the idea of “upright people”. He abhorred the dependency syndrome. “He who feeds you, controls you”, he would say.
I know it has become fashionable these days to engage in the rhetoric of women emancipation. Most leaders in the government are quite comfortable to quote Sankara on issues of women emancipation, especially around the so-called Women’s Day or Women’s Month (August) on the South African calendar.
I sympathise with them when they avoid the strong views that Sankara made on issues of land, economy, anti-imperialism and socialism. As a political leader, what do you do when your party practically abandoned in its own Freedom Charter in favour of white monopoly capitalism?
On this issue of women emancipation, Sankara was unequivocal. He did not just do cheap sloganeering on women’s issues, he practised what he preached.
He did not “talk of women’s issues as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion...women hold up the other half of the sky”. In this context, I recently made the observation that since 1912 the ANC has never had a woman president and there are no signs this will happen in our lifetime.
This, by extension, has the effect that this country will not experience a woman president in our lifetime! Is it time, now, to go beyond the rhetoric of gender equality and practise what we preach by accepting that things must change in this regard.
To merely celebrate “the year of Charlotte Maxeke” and not deal with the issue of a woman president is being disingenuous, if not a simple act of trickery.
Indeed, for as long as the post-1994 rainbow project has deprived us of a woman president (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela) means that we have essentially not had a true revolution. “There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women”, Sankara argued.
As we, for the umpteenth time, shamelessly promise the oppressed people of this country pie in the sky in this election season, let’s remember the example set by Sankara and stop the myopic narrative line that South Africa is “young democracy” at 27 years. Sankara turned Burkina Faso around in just four years. If Thomas Sankara is watching…
David Letsoalo is a Sankarist, an activist and Law academic