In 1983, Argentina attempted to take control of some small islands called the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher revived the ugly head of imperialism and thrashed the Argentinian attempt.
In 1774, the British settlement was withdrawn, but British sovereignty was not abandoned. In 1816, Argentina declared its independence from Spain and asserted its authority over the Falklands as the successor state to Spain. In 1820, Colonel Jewett took formal possession of the islands on behalf of Buenos Aires.
The validity of this Argentinian authority was never officially acknowledged by the British even though their colonists had abandoned the Islands forty-six years prior to Argentinian independence. Thirteen years later in 1833, Britain sent a warship to Puerto
Soledad and expelled the remaining Argentinian military personnel.
But still they had no intention of settling on the island, they just wanted to own it. And one hundred fifty years later they were still unwilling to cede the islands to Argentina. So as news of the British victory blazed across the headlines, inside the pages I found a story better to my liking.
It was a story about a revolt in Upper Volta, a small and poor land-locked country in Western Africa that had led to an obscure, but charismatic army officer becoming head of state; was truly inspiring news for all those looking for some kind of breakthrough against imperialism in that part of the world.
In a few short dramatic years, we saw the establishment of what would become Burkina Faso. I recently came across a biography of the charismatic thirty-three year old leader, a gentleman named Thomas Sankara by Ernest Harsch and I thought again of my admiration for Sankara back in ‘83 that I had followed admiringly until it ended with Sankara’s brutal assassination, along with six of his closest advisors and seven drivers and guards, in a counter-revolutionary coup from within the armed command and government, inspired by France’s neo-colonialist Social Democratic President, Francois Mitterrand.
Sankara had gone to a military academy and studied under Toure,and the became active in trying to prevent the Senegalese military oppression of the region’s natives.
Immediately arrested by the army, he found himself deported to a military camp, far from Ouagadougou, the capital. But he managed to remain in contact with other oppositionists and activists throughout the region to emerge as the head of a revolutionary alliance of young radicals, military officers and civilian activists, to take over the presidency, in a new government called, the National Council of the Revolution (CNR), an overturn that was greeted with a mass welcoming demonstration in the capital, that lasted for several days and that rapidly spread across the country.
In Sankara’s first major address, he called for the implementation of sweeping measures to reduce hunger and poverty, including the strengthening of a state that was extremely weak and that barely had a presence outside the major cities and towns. The previous regimes had governed through a system of chiefs and notables. Very quickly Committees for the CNR sprung into existence in the poorest neighborhoods and spread throughout the country.
The problems facing the tiny country, renamed Burkina Faso, were numerous and enormous. Hunger was common and the life expectancy seldom exceeded forty years. Sankara also addressed the cultural suppression of women.
“Our society – still too primitively agrarian, patriarchal and polygamous – turns the woman into an object of exploitation for her labor power and of consumption for her biological reproductive capacity,” Sankara declared.
The adult literacy rate was a miserable 11 per cent and less than three per cent of children made it to secondary school.The urban population was only one in ten but bordering the southern reach of the Sahara, desertification threatened to further reduce the country’s arable land and the need to supply water was urgent. Agriculture still predominantly used animals to work the land. Cotton, introduced by colonialism, created a gross distortion of the economy demanding most of the available water resources to be directed to maintain the production that fed no one but enriched a few non-residents. The “chiefs”, supposedly tribal, and been implemented as overseers for the cotton fields and had diverted most of the water through irrigation to the cotton fields
Under Sankara’s government, the population was soon mobilized to tackle the country’s problems within a framework of creating a national economy that could be “independent, self-sufficient, planned at the service of a democratic and popular society,” as Sankara stated in his first orientation speech.
The CDR abolished the colonial era “head tax” and from the beginning, and an emphasis was placed on helping agriculture in a “Struggle for a Green Burkina,” making the country one of the first to seriously address environmental issues, which might have been what initially attracted me, as I had just become involved in our little lobby to oppose the large energy consortiums.
New schools, health clinics and reservoirs were built. Campaigns were immediately undertaken to reduce illiteracy and a massive child vaccination program was rolled out to reduce disease. Land and mineral wealth was nationalized, with the farmers’ right to till the land guaranteed by law. Female circumcision was banned, along with forced marriages and polygamy, with the government (that was primarily practiced by the chiefs); making a strong commitment to the liberation of women from exploitation and oppression, leading to the setting up of a mass women’s movement, the Women’s Union of Burkina.
To reduce government corruption, Sankara went so far as to prohibit official portraits , even of himself. Setting a personal example, Sankara shunned luxury and imported goods, getting rid of the presidential Mercedes and Cadillac, instead using a budget-priced Renault but was more frequently observed riding his bicycle, even on official business.
To Mitterrand’s discomfort, during a state visit to the country, Sankara publicly took him to task because of France’s relations with the apartheid regime of South Africa which was, at the time, under international sanctions; and he criticized France’s attitude toward African immigrants.
“We Burkinabe have never understood,” he told President Mitterrand in front of a large assembly of journalists who had accompanied him to Ouagadougou, “why criminals like Jonas Savimbi, the head of UNITA, and murderers like Pieter Botha, have the right to travel to France, which is so clean and beautiful. They stain the earth with their hands and their feet covered with blood.”
Sankara did not confine himself to only opposing neo-colonialism in Africa. At the Non-Aligned Movement in New Delhi, he sought out revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro and Maurice Bishop and gave his support to Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government in Nicaragua and he backed the rebels in El Salvador who at the time were battling a U.S.-backed dictatorial regime.
Obviously his stance garnered not only the notice of Mitterrand, but pricked the ears of Margaret Thatcher’s imperialist counterpart In America, Ronald Reagan, himself intent on maintaining dictatorial regimes, in the Caribbean and central America.
The World Bank even attempted to control the nation’s access to markets so that the new government was compelled to reject the IMF’s “conditionality” for loans, an arrangement that would have meant an end to the revolution and the shifting of decisions over economic policy to an external entity.
And speaking for America, U.S. Ambassador, Leonardo Neher, would state“…we are not going to allow another Cuba in Africa.”
On On 15 October 1987, Sankara and twelve other officials were killed in a coup organized by a former colleague. When accounting for his overthrow, Compaoré stated that Sankara jeopardized foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighboring Ivory Coast, and accused his former comrade of plotting to assassinate opponents.
In 2017, thirty years after Sankara was assassinated, the widow of Thomas Sankara finally achieved her goal of getting the French to release military documents that indicated that Mitterrand and the French military were heavily involved in the planning and execution that had led to Sankara’s death.
And I imagine, without any evidence, quite heavily encouraged, by Messr. Reagan and Ms, Thatcher.
The blood on the hands of the "French" dooms them, like "Rome," to a hell that makes hell akin to heaven.
Dwell, a wee bit, on me statement.
You've a fantastic mind, mate; and I much enjoy being in the playground that is same.