principle priorities was the banning of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), promoting contraception and discouraging the practice of polygamy.

His quest to move his people from poverty to power saw him embark on a massive nationalisation project. This without doubt caused ripples within the business elite and the French government. In 1987, after only four years in power, Sankara was assassinated in an ‘imperialist’ coup, orchestrated by his former comrade Blaise Campore. The truth of who was behind the assassination remains elusive; Campore on the other hand has proceeded to overturn Sankara’s policies and gains and remains in power today.

In reflection on Sankara, I am reminded of the great Africa American poet, Countee Cullen, in his great poem ‘Heritage’. He raises the question, ‘What is Africa to me?’ It is for this that I will expand the question asking, ‘What is Africa to Africans, and what is Africa is to the world?’

To answer this question, we have to examine what has gone wrong with our family communication. If we are going to have a whole revolution for social change, we have to look at when we had it as against when we lost it. We have to draw on the past in order to make the present and the future.

Africa and its people are knocking at the door of the 21st century, caught at the crossroads for world power and painful lessons we should have learned a long time ago. Freedom is not free, freedom is something that you take with your own hands and nature it with the same hands. Freedom is not handed from one generation to another, and it is the challenge of each generation to assume the responsibility of securing their being – their manhood and womanhood, the true definition of being on earth in the analysis of nationhood.

It is on the historical lessons of secured freedoms set out by Thomas Sankara that can lift us up to the global level, stating that progression of circumstances has changed us from being a people begging and pleading, to a people insisting and demanding. Can we get a leadership to assume this responsibility?

In showing the way to the future, Sankara stated: ‘I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organisation we deserve victory… You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from unconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.’ (Thomas Sankara, 1985) This is the kind of madness African leadership is missing today.

As we remember our dead, let us remember the living too, let us remember our past, but critically let us be courageous enough to dream again and visionary enough to act on our dreams.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Mwaura Kaara is the regional youth coordinator for the UN Millennium Campaign, Africa. Currently he is a visiting scholar for the Ragnar Sohlman at the Network of North South and the Dag Hammarskjold Programme, Oslo Norway.
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