by Dalal Abu Diab (Y13)
Warning: may induce loss of faith in Western altruism and sudden respect for African socialism.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to mistake sabotage for strategy, but fortunately, the United States has an agency dedicated to the task. The CIA has spent decades perfecting the art of ruining nations that dared to govern themselves — none more brilliantly than Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara, a man whose only real crime was thinking independence meant independence.
In 1983, while Ronald Reagan was sermonising about freedom between tax cuts for billionaires and covert arms deals with fascists, a 33-year-old army captain in Upper Volta — a French colonial leftover so poor it didn’t even own its name — took power with a clarifying idea: that liberation might actually require liberated policy. Sankara renamed the country Burkina Faso, “Land of Upright Men,” and began doing what postcolonial leaders were never meant to do: govern for their own people. He nationalised land, vaccinated millions, planted forests, taxed the elite, banned female genital mutilation, and refused to borrow from the IMF — that polite arm of Western economic occupation that prefers its colonies debt-shaped rather than chain-shaped.
Sankara’s socialism wasn’t imported from Moscow; it was homegrown sanity. But to Washington, sanity smelled like subversion. The CIA couldn’t tell the difference between sovereignty and communism — a reflex conditioned during decades of Cold War brain rot where every nation that fed its poor without American permission was instantly “a Soviet client.” And so, as Sankara preached self-reliance, Reagan’s Africa desk began drafting his obituary.
The logic was vintage CIA: here was a man who refused to privatise, refused to beg, refused to turn his revolution into a photo opportunity for USAID. Worse, he told the truth about imperialism — in public. At the 1984 UN General Assembly, he accused the West of manufacturing famine through dependency and declared that “he who feeds you controls you.” In Langley, that sentence was treated as an act of war. The IMF called him naïve; the Pentagon called him dangerous; France called him insolent. Only the people of Burkina Faso called him theirs.
Within four years, he had raised literacy rates, abolished rural tribute, and banned foreign Mercedes imports for ministers — a moral crime against the global order, which runs on imported cars and exported conscience. The problem was that Sankara’s success was contagious. Across Africa, students and soldiers began quoting him. In Ghana, in Congo, even in Liberia, his name became shorthand for what independence was supposed to look like before it was monetised. Washington doesn’t tolerate inspiration without permission.
By 1987, the cure was ready. Enter Blaise Compaoré — fellow officer, close friend, soon-to-be assassin. He had been gently courted by French and American intermediaries who explained, with the usual colonial patience, that stability required moderation, and moderation meant obedience. On 15 October 1987, Sankara was gunned down during a meeting with his own cabinet. The coup was swift, efficient, and conveniently pro-Western. Compaoré announced on radio that Sankara had “died naturally.” If so, it was the most ballistic case of natural causes in recorded history.
The U.S. and France recognised the new regime within days. The IMF, suddenly enthusiastic, returned with open chequebooks. Loans poured in; conditionalities followed. Within a year, Burkina Faso was back on the development treadmill — privatising, liberalising, and unlearning dignity. The CIA called it progress. The rest of Africa called it a funeral.
For the record, Washington still pretends it had no involvement. The same way it wasn’t involved in Lumumba’s assassination in Congo, or in Nkrumah’s overthrow in Ghana, or in the “accidental” disappearance of Maurice Bishop in Grenada. The same way it didn’t bankroll Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto, or the entire curriculum of dictatorship from Jakarta to Kinshasa. The CIA has a unique linguistic gift: every coup it supports is called “self-inflicted.”
In official archives, Sankara’s murder remains “an internal matter.” In reality, it was the textbook outcome of what Reagan’s administration called “constructive engagement” — a euphemism so obscene it could only have been written by men in suits. The U.S. had already labelled Sankara’s Burkina Faso “a Marxist-Leninist experiment.” Which was curious, given that Sankara’s policies were closer to Roosevelt’s New Deal than to Stalin’s five-year plans. But America’s foreign policy has always operated on toddler logic: if you’re not playing with our toys, you must be the enemy.
The CIA’s declassified memos from the mid-80s read like psychiatric notes from an empire in denial. Analysts fretted that Sankara was “too influential,” that his speeches “resonated among African youth,” that he could “destabilise the Sahel.” Translation: he was popular. The cure for popularity, as always, was regime change. The formula was precise: isolate, slander, eliminate, and then pretend the body count was a coincidence.
And so, another African country that might have charted an independent course was rerouted through the familiar cycle of coups, debt, and dependency. Burkina Faso went from revolutionary vanguard to a donor-compliant democracy in less than a decade — the kind the West loves best: poor, polite, and perpetually in need of aid. The CIA called it “stability.” The IMF called it “adjustment.” History calls it theft.
Today, four decades later, the script has not aged. When Captain Ibrahim Traoré took power in 2022, declaring that Burkina Faso would again free itself from foreign manipulation, the Western reaction was instant and hysterical. “Authoritarianism,” screamed Washington. “Russian influence,” warned Paris. The same clichés, reheated for another generation. Traoré’s crime is not repression — the West adores strongmen when they’re obedient — but defiance. He expelled French troops, rejected IMF debt diplomacy, and began talking about sovereignty as if it weren’t a museum piece. To Western diplomats, that’s communism all over again: a government acting without supervision.
The irony is grotesque. The United States, whose foreign policy runs on coups like a generator runs on diesel, still dares to lecture Africans about democracy. From Patrice Lumumba to Thomas Sankara to Muammar Gaddafi, any leader who attempted to use national resources for national development was treated as a contagion. America doesn’t oppose tyranny; it opposes independence.
Sankara’s revolution was never about ideology. It was about common sense: grow your own food, educate your own people, refuse to beg. But common sense is fatal in a world managed by financiers. The IMF, that celestial accountant of human misery, prefers reform packages to revolutions. When Sankara called foreign debt “a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa,” he was not exaggerating. He was reading the balance sheet. The interest payments alone ensured that no African state could ever fully own itself again. When he urged African nations to collectively refuse repayment, he wasn’t being radical; he was being rational. That was the problem. Rationality is subversive when profit depends on delusion.
The CIA and IMF function as complementary instruments in the same orchestra of obedience — one overtly violent, the other politely coercive. One removes leaders; the other rewrites laws. Sankara faced both and refused both. That’s why he had to die. His existence embarrassed the West’s myth of benevolent imperialism. He proved that literacy and vaccination rates could rise faster without loans than with them. He made capitalism look stupid, and that’s the one crime Washington will never forgive.
Burkina Faso under Sankara was not a utopia. It was better — it was honest. It lived within its means, fed its people, and refused to export its conscience. He walked to work, sold off government limousines, and cut ministerial salaries by half. Compare that to Reagan, who was busy arming death squads in Central America while quoting Scripture about liberty. Compare it to the IMF economists who called African self-reliance “ideological rigidity” as they enforced starvation in the name of market efficiency.
Sankara said, “We must dare to invent the future.” The CIA prefers to recycle the past. And so it keeps manufacturing enemies out of anyone with the audacity to think independently — from Havana to Ouagadougou, from Tehran to Caracas. Communism remains the all-purpose exorcism: the chant that absolves Washington of introspection. The label doesn’t describe ideology anymore; it describes disobedience.
If there is a modern sequel, it is playing out again in Burkina Faso. Ibrahim Traoré, barely older than Sankara when he took power, has revived the forbidden vocabulary of sovereignty. He wears red berets, quotes Sankara, and talks of ending dependency on Western aid. The American commentariat, predictably, calls him “radical.” The French call him “unstable.” The IMF calls him “non-compliant.” Ordinary Africans call him necessary.
It is too early to know whether Traoré will survive the pattern, but the pattern is familiar. Washington will whisper about democracy, Paris will mumble about security, the IMF will quietly close its vault, and the same media that ignored Sankara’s achievements will suddenly rediscover Burkina Faso — as a problem. Perhaps they will find another “moderate” to replace him. Perhaps they will wait until poverty does the work for them.
But the world has changed since 1987. The illusion of American omnipotence is cracking, and the Global South has stopped asking for permission. Sankara’s ghost walks not just in Ouagadougou but in every capital tired of being tutored by thieves. He warned that “a soldier without political education is a potential criminal.” The same could be said of a superpower without moral education — armed to the teeth, illiterate in decency, preaching freedom in the dialect of coercion.
I call it imperial sadism.