Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara What People Love To Ignore

Thursday, 29 August 2024

By: TB Obwoge

This has been sitting in my drafts for the better part of the month of August, not because I'm lazy but because it is draining.

Why you might ask, because in Thomas Sankara lived a man that cared about women's liberation just as much as he cared about the liberation of African people.

Much of his works and words are ignored, especially in West African countries, some of the worst ranked countries in the world for women's rights.

Posing the question of women in Burkinabè society today means posing the abolition of the system of slavery to which they have been subjected for millennia. The first step is to try to understand how this system works, to grasp its real nature in all its subtlety, in order then to work out a line of action that can lead to women’s total emancipation. In other words, in order to win this battle that men and women have in common, we must be familiar with all aspects of the woman question on a world scale and here in Burkina.

We must understand how the struggle of the Burkinabè woman is part of a worldwide struggle of all women and, beyond that, part of the struggle for the full rehabilitation of our continent. Thus, women’s emancipation is at the heart of the question of humanity itself, here and everywhere. The question is thus universal in character.

Source: Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara

There are so many coutries in Africa where woman are still forced to shave their hair off in order to attend school. I was interestingly enough having a conversation with a Ghanaian man who was ranting about Ghana being decades behind other countries in the world.

He arrived at this topic, the topic of girls hair, when I started talking about this old colonial rule. As an African man, he had never heard of this. This made him more frustrated with his country, as Ghanaians are flooding to leave the country.

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara made huge changes to the way women were treated in Burkina Faso.

Even more impressive were Sankara’s health, education, and family development policies, which brought huge strides toward gender equality in the West African country. In his first year in power, Sankara established the Ministry of Family Development and the Women’s Union of Burkina to “give the women of our country a framework and sound tools for waging a successful fight.” He restricted polygamy and dowries and prohibited forced marriage and female genital mutilation. He granted new rights to women, including introducing inheritance for widows and orphans.

Source: Jacobin.Com

On 15 October 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by Blaise Compaoré, a man he called a brother. After his death his widow Mariam Sankara started a fight for the rights of widows. Imagine that in Burkina Faso her name doesn't ring out for the activism though.

Is Miriam Sankara being ignored like the legacy of her husband who fought for women's rights?

Here is a portion of a speech she gave 35 years after her husband's death, when she was speaking abuut the trial of her husband's killer.

The date of April 6, 2022 will remain engraved in the history of our country as an important moment during which the justice of Burkina Faso sanctioned the assassins of President Thomas Sankara and his 12 companions in misfortune (Verdict Guilty: Blaise Compaoré Guilty of the Murder of Thomas Sankara).

Once again, I would like to thank you all for your support before and during this first part of the trial. My thanks go to the family lawyers, to the organizers of the “fight against impunity, justice for Thomas Sankara” campaign, to militant Africa in general, to the associations of Burkina, to the Diaspora, to the people of Burkina Faso and to the friends from Burkina Faso.

.. Burkina, as we all know, is going through a serious period in its history due to the destabilization imposed on it by terrorists supported by shadow forces. These forces want to wipe our country off the map of the world. This project is unacceptable.

We must all opt for the support of our security forces, the families of the victims and those displaced by war, who number in the thousands.

However, we must know that our struggle is not over.

Admittedly, we must rely on our own strengths, but it is imperative that we call on honest and credible partners, if necessary.

May Burkinabè patriotism serve as a compass for the final victory against terrorism, for social cohesion and for the prosperity of our country.

Fatherland or death, we will win!

Mariam Sankara, Montpellier 15 October 2022

Source and Translation: Afrolegends,Com

“We have no need of a feminized apparatus to bureaucratically manage women's lives or to issue sporadic statements about women's lives by smooth-talking functionaries. What we need are women who will fight because they know that without a fight the old order will not be destroyed and no new order will be built. We are not looking to organize what exists but to definitively destroy and replace it.”

― Thomas Sankara, Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

There is so much more that people ignore about Sankara, this is just the tip of the things ignored by many people, especially African men.

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