Thomas Sankara

And this book is a chronological timeline of the African century, the century ahead of us.

And I began this timeline in 1983 with the phenomenal event that took place in Burkina Faso, which is now we see the outcome of Thomas Sankara rising to the presidency, is impacting, influencing Ibrahim Ta'ore.

And we can see the...

The timeline in Burkina Faso from 1983 is an example of the global timeline for African people going into, through, and beyond the so-called African century.

If we are seeing the world moving towards renewable energy for the century ahead, then they're going to absolutely need access to African materials and minerals to build the batteries and the technology for the green century ahead.

So we should be very proud of that.

Burkina Faso gives us a workable model step-by-step model and we see that transformation is not even close to complete but has made such progress since 1983 and that is of course the rise of Thomas Sankara the brilliant visionary who I hope all of us have Thomas Sankara deeply embedded in our psyche in our awareness of who we are and the work of our ancestors that we are committed to continue in our generation.

All right.

things, again, where I just feel like people want to simplify geopolitics, and it's actually a lot of moving pieces, a lot of interests and those interests can change.

And I think that, you know, often we get these leaders like Ibrahim Traore, where we think that they are built with this spirit of Thomas Sankara and this revolutionary leftist socialist spirit.

But, you know, that that's usually not the case.

And that is that means that things become a lot more complicated, not to say that the Sahel is not full of complexity.

Now there was something else.

And of course, the assassinations of both Maurice Bishop and then Thomas Sankara and Burkina.

And they were actually my, they'd become my friends.

And I think it was because, um, Because when I was back in London in The Guardian, I had this very special privilege of this whole page called Third World Review, of which the whole point of it was it wasn't written by Western journalists.

From the heart of the Global South, we bring to you stories, voices, and ideas driving change across Africa and beyond.

There's a famous saying from the leader of Bokeh Nafaso, Thomas Sankara, where he said, we must dare to invent the future.

And perhaps the interesting question today is not whether Africa can invent that future.

It is whether the world is paying enough attention when Africans do.

And as it turns out, you know, the, uh, Bur- the...

In Burkina Faso, this is now being applied, and it comes from the same source because, uh, Ibrahim Traoré today is trying to apply the same model that was, uh, that, that his predecessor Thomas Sankara tried to.

And Thomas Sankara, uh, was, was mentored in economic governance by a French, uh, econo- economist.

Uh, his name was, um, Jacques Cheminade.

but to work on your relationship with it so that it can inform and, and make more, more robust your, your life.

And, and the last thing I'll say is every revolutionary or most of the revolutionaries that we really look up to, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, I could go on and on and on, they knew [chuckles] that death was probable, if not inevitable, that they knew that, that, that, you know, when the Freikorps smashed down Rosa's door, um, you know, when, when Malcolm X talked about walking around as a dead man walking, um, you know, as Che Guevara flees into the jungles of Bolivia instead of sits comfortably at a Cuban, you know, government office.

They know that, that, that they have faced what death means and that they have, they have come to a choice that living their life in this authentic way is worth the possibility that they will die for it, and they did, and they live on because of it.

B-beautifully delivered.

It's basically this concept.

I believe the concept was actually pioneered by Thomas Sankara, but has been taken to another level by the Ibram Chouhary government.

They figured that the old model for building infrastructure, which involves awarding contracts to a private businessman, and then based on how this businessman handles that tender, the infrastructure may or may not get constructed.

It might take forever to get constructed.

Not become morbidly obsessed with death necessarily, but to work on your relationship with it so that it can inform and make more robust your life.

And the last thing I'll say is every revolutionary or most of the revolutionaries that we really look up to, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara.

I could go on and on and on.

They knew that death was probable, if not inevitable, that they knew that that that, you know, when the fry corpse smashed down Rosa's door, you know, when Malcolm X talked about walking around as a dead man walking, you know, as Che Guevara flees into the jungles of Bolivia instead of sits comfortably at a Cuban government office.