A Burkinabe Military Court has on Wednesday, April 6, 2022, sentenced Former President, Blaise Compaore to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1987 murder of his predecessor, Thomas Sankara in a coup.

According to the Court, Compaore was found guilty of an attack on State Security, complicity in murder and concealment of a corpse. Compaore ruled for 27 years before being ousted in another coup in 2014 and fleeing to neighbouring Ivory Coast, where he is still believed to live.

Speaking at the courthouse, Sankara’s widow, Mariam Sankara, said “I think Burkinabe know now who Thomas Sankara was… what he wanted and what those who assassinated him wanted too”. A procession and gathering are being planned later in the day at the spot Sankara was shot, which at the same time, currently holds a statue of him. Guy Herve Kam, a lawyer for Sankara’s family said “Today I am very proud to see the culmination of a legal battle of almost 30 years, proud to have a country where justice works”.

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59443822 303 — Statue of Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara

The charismatic Sankara was gunned down in the West African nation’s capital Ouagadougou at the age of 37, four years after he took power in a previous revolution.

Two of Compaore’s former top associates, Hyacinthe Kafando and Gilbert Diendere, were also sentenced to life imprisonment. All three previously denied involvement in Sankara’s death along with eleven other defendants accused of involvement in the plot. Three of the eleven were declared innocent and the rest received prison terms between three and 20 years.

Africa’s Che Guevera

A pan-Africanist leader who took power in 1983, Sankara was killed along with 12 other government officials. Compaoré became his successor, ruling until his 2014 removal from office.

Sankara, who gained a reputation as Africa’s “Che Guevara” (an Argentine revolutionary leader who was Fidel Castro’s chief lieutenant in the Cuban revolution), took power on a promise to thwart corruption and post-colonial influences, denouncing foreign aid as a control mechanism. He rolled out mass vaccination against polio, banned female circumcision and polygamy, and was one of the first African leaders to publicly recognise the growing AIDS epidemic as a threat to the continent.

As a former fighter pilot, Sankara won public support in the impoverished nation by selling a government fleet of Mercedes, lowering the pay of well-off public servants and forbidding first-class state travel. He cut his own salary, refused to work with air conditioning and jogged through Ouagadougou unaccompanied.

Critics said his reforms curtailed freedoms and did little to enrich ordinary people. But admiration remains and justice has been long-awaited by Sankara’s family and supporters.

Among other things, Sankara, a Marxist-Leninist, was an Army Captain when he came to power in a 1983 coup, at age 33. He was seen as a charismatic leader who railed against capitalism, he threw out the country’s name of Upper Volta, a legacy of the French colonial era, and renamed it Burkina Faso, which means “the land of honest men”.