Research Guide of Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere and Thomas Sankara: Thomas Sankara Research Guide

Biography, works and achievements, books, videos and recordings and archival materials of Thomas Sankara. president of Burkina Faso, was born Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara on 21 December 1949 in Yako, in the northwest of the French colony Upper Volta. He was the third of ten children of Joseph Sankara and Marguerite, née Kinda. Whereas his mother was Mossi, the largest ethnic group, his father was of the mixed Mossi-Peul heritage known as Silmi-Mossi. During his early years, Thomas, like his father, bore the Mossi surname Ouédraogo, but both later reverted to Sankara. Thomas spent his childhood in Gaoua in the southwest and excelled in his secular and Catholic schooling. At the age of sixteen, contrary to his father’s wishes, Sankara chose to pursue his secondary education not at a seminary but a public lycée in Bobo-Dioulasso. Upon completing his first secondary schooling, he was selected for a new national military academy established in Ouagadougou, the capital, by General Sangoulé Lamizana, who came to power on 3 January 1966 amid popular demonstrations against President Maurice Yaméogo (who had governed Upper Volta since its independence on 5 August 1960). Like other peers, Sankara saw the military not only as a route for professional advancement, but also as one of the few institutions with the capacity to stimulate national development and overcome what they regarded as the archaic features of a largely rural and traditional society. During his three years at the academy, Sankara began reading political literature and held impassioned discussions with fellow cadets and civilians strongly influenced by anticolonial, socialist, and Marxist ideas. He continued such exchanges during subsequent periods of training abroad (in Madagascar, Morocco, and France) and at his various military postings at home. He rose steadily in rank, saw combat in Upper Volta’s brief border war with Mali in December 1974, and was assigned in 1976 to command a new elite paratroop training center in Pô. In 1979, while the center’s commander, he married Mariam Serme, who had been raised Muslim but converted to Catholicism after their marriage.