PARIS — During the fourth annual African Book Fair here March 14-16, one Burkinabe participant posted a short TikTok video about the French language edition of Thomas Sankara Speaks, a book that contains all of Sankara’s speeches while he was president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, which she had just bought at the Pathfinder stand. “He was a pioneer in everything having to do with feminism and ecology,” she wrote.
Pathfinder supporters sold 29 copies of that book, along with 57 other titles by Sankara and a number of other books. These included 12 copies of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes; 30 copies of Socialism and Man in Cuba by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro; seven of the new French edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women; three copies of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class, and many others.
A student at the North Paris Sorbonne University, who came with two friends, got Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Sankara as well as Barnes’ book. “I’m interested in Malcolm’s evolution from Black nationalism to a broader perspective,” she said.
Many buyers said they wanted to learn about Marxism. Altogether 195 Pathfinder books were sold at the stand, including 20 in English and one in Arabic. It was the first time Livres Pathfinder, which distributes Pathfinder in France, participated in the event.