Thirty-three when he took power in 1983, Thomas Sankara renamed Upper Volta Burkina Faso — land of upright people — and ran four years of radical self-reliance: mass child vaccination, tree-planting against the Sahel's advance, bans on female genital cutting and forced marriage, women in government, and demonstrative personal austerity. He also ruled without elections, restricted the press, and jailed opponents. Soldiers killed him in 1987 in a coup led by his closest comrade, Blaise Compaoré. A 2021–22 trial convicted Compaoré in absentia. Across Africa he is an icon; the record requires holding genuine gains and real coercion together.
He cut his own salary to a clerk's wage, sold off the government's fleet of Mercedes, and made the cheap little Renault the official car of the state. He told a summit of African leaders that debt was a weapon reinvented by the former colonizers, and that the poor of the world should simply refuse to pay it. Thomas Sankara governed Burkina Faso for barely four years, from 1983 to 1987, and in that brief span he tried to prove that one of the poorest countries on earth could feed itself, school itself, and stand on its own without anyone's charity. Then soldiers in a coup led by his former comrade Blaise Compaoré killed him. He was thirty-seven. Across Africa, young people who were not yet born when he died now carry his face on their shirts.