Vol. 71/No. 34      September 17, 2007

Socialist workers and youth in North America and elsewhere will be joining with others in coming months to organize meetings with panels of speakers to launch the new books and discuss their political lessons.

On August 4, 1983, a popular uprising in Upper Volta, a former French colony in West Africa, initiated one of the deepest revolutions in African history. Thirty-three-year-old Sankara was the uprising’s central leader and became Upper Volta’s president. The name of the country was changed a year later to Burkina Faso—the Land of Upright Men.

Between 1983 and late 1987, the revolutionary government under Sankara’s leadership organized workers, peasants, and youth to carry out a broad range of social measures. Among these were nationalization of the land and other steps to improve the conditions of rural toilers, tree-planting and irrigation projects to push back the encroaching Sahel desert region, a massive healthcare and immunization campaign that eradicated parasite-induced river blindness, and a literacy campaign in the country’s indigenous languages. The government took measures to combat the centuries-old subjugation of women and encouraged them to organize and fight for their emancipation.

The revolutionary government extended solidarity to those resisting imperialist oppression and exploitation around the world: anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa and others across the African continent; the fight of Palestinians and the people of Western Sahara for their homeland; and the revolutionary government brought to power by workers and peasants in Nicaragua in 1979. Sankara spoke in New York City’s Harlem to show support for African-Americans’ fight against racist oppression and other struggles by working people in the United States.

A week before his death in a counterrevolutionary military coup, Sankara paid tribute to Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary. “Che Guevara,” said Sankara, “became, above all, a citizen of the free world—the free world that together we are in the process of building. This is why we can say Che Guevara is also African and Burkinabè.”  
 
What’s new?
The new English edition of Thomas Sankara Speaks includes five items by Sankara never before published in English, including an interview never before published in any language. That item will also appear in the new French edition. The contents of the English book, first published just a few months after Sankara’s death in 1987, are now identical to the French, whose first edition appeared (under the title Oser inventer l’avenir) in 1988. Substantial improvements have been made to the English translation, as well.

In addition, both books now include 38 pages of photographs, three pages of maps, and a chart with basic information on Burkina Faso during the revolution. A new chronology, glossary, and index help to place the revolution in the context of political developments more broadly in Africa and the world, making it more accessible to readers unfamiliar with events, places, and people mentioned in the book. The print is larger and more readable.

A full color promotional flyer on the new books is available at www.pathfinderpress.com.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Those who exploit Africa and Europe are the same’
First time in English: Thomas Sankara on canceling Third World debt  
 
 
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