THOMAS SANKARA
Thomas Sankara Speaks
PREFACE BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
INTRODUCTION BY MICHEL PRAIRIE
KWELA BOOKS
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Preface
MARY-ALICE WATERS
This preface is taken from remarks by Mary-Alice Waters to a 10 February 2005 presentation in Havana, Cuba, of the Spanish-language edition of We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara, a booklet published in French in 2001 and in English the following year containing five of the speeches and interviews that are in this edition of Thomas Sankara Speaks. The event was organised as part of the annual Havana International Book Fair.
Also speaking on the panel were Manuel Agramonte, Cuba’s ambassador to Burkina Faso during the four years of the revolutionary government led by Thomas Sankara; Armando Hart, one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution and long-time minister of culture; and Ulises Estrada, director of Tricontinental magazine and himself an internationalist combatant with a long record of missions in Africa and Latin America.
In October 1984, adopting a practice employed so effectively by Fidel [Castro] and Che [Guevara] before him, Thomas Sankara used the platform of the United Nations General Assembly to speak for and on behalf of the oppressed and exploited of the world. “I come here to bring you fraternal greetings from a country … whose seven million children, women, and men refuse to die from ignorance, hunger, and thirst any longer”, Sankara told the assembled delegates of 159 nations.
“I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is … to speak on behalf of my people … to speak on behalf of the ‘great disinherited people of the world’, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt.”
Sankara voiced the determination and dignity of the people of one of the poorest countries of imperialist-ravaged Africa – one that then had the highest infant mortality rate in the world, a rural illiteracy rate approaching 98 per cent, and an average life expectancy of some forty years. He reached out to, and spoke on behalf of, all those the world over who refuse to accept the economic bondage of class society and its consequences, including ecological devastation, social disintegration, racism, and the wars of conquest and plunder inevitably wrought by the workings of capitalism itself. Sankara knew such conditions are not “natural” phenomena, but the products of today’s imperialist world order.
That world order, Sankara explained, can be fought, and must be destroyed. What marked him above all was his confidence in the revolutionary capacities of ordinary human beings to accomplish this. Like Fidel and Che, Sankara believed in the men and women so arrogantly dismissed by the rulers of the imperialist world. Sankara, as Fidel so memorably said of Che, did not think that man is “an incorrigible little animal, capable of advancing only if you feed him grass or tempt him with a carrot or whip him with a stick”. Sankara, like Che, knew that anyone who thinks like that “will never be a revolutionary … never be a socialist … never be a communist”.1
Sankara believed that a world built on different economic and social foundations can be created not by “technocrats”, “financial wizards”, or “politicians”, but by the masses of workers and peasants whose labour, joined with the riches of nature, is the source of all wealth. By ordinary human beings who transform themselves as they become an active, conscious force, transforming their conditions of life. And the revolutionary government he headed set out along this course, mobilising peasants, workers, craftsmen, women, youth, the elderly, to carry out a literacy campaign, an immunisation drive, to sink wells, plant trees, build housing, and begin to eliminate the oppressive class relations on the land.
* * *
Sankara stood out among the leaders of the struggles for national liberation in Africa in the last half of the twentieth century because he was a communist. Unlike so many others, he did not reject Marxism as a set of “European ideas”, alien to the class struggle in Africa. He understood that Marxism is precisely not “a set of ideas”, but the generalisation of the lessons of the struggles of the working class on the road to its emancipation the world over, enriched by every battle. And he drew from those lessons to the best of his abilities.
Speaking before the United Nations in 1984, he linked the freedom struggle of the people of Burkina Faso to the centuries of revolutionary struggle from the birth of capitalism to today – from the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century to the great October Revolution of 1917 that “transformed the world, brought victory to the proletariat, shook the foundations of capitalism, and made possible the Paris Commune’s dreams of justice”. We are the heirs of those revolutions, he said – hence the title of this small book.
We are “open to all the winds of the will of the peoples of the world and their revolutions, having also learned from some of the terrible failures that led to tragic violations of human rights”, he noted. “We wish to retain only the core of purity from each revolution. This prevents us from becoming subservient to the realities of others.”
And along that line of march, Sankara looked to Cuba as the preeminent example of revolutionary struggle in our times.
* * *
Sankara was not only a leader of the people of Africa. He was not only a spokesman for the oppressed and exploited of the semi-colonial countries. He gave leadership to working people in the imperialist world as well. In the last decades of the twentieth century, proletarian leaders with the world stature of Thomas Sankara, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, and in a similar way Malcolm X in the United States, have emerged from the ranks of the oppressed peoples of all lands – even the most economically undeveloped – to give leadership to the international struggle for national liberation and socialism. And thus to take their rightful place in history.
That fact is a measure of the vast changes that have marked the past century – the strengthening of revolutionary forces worldwide foreseen by [VI] Lenin and the leaders of the Communist International in the first years after the victory of the October Revolution.
This is the tradition in which we can today place the example given us by our five Cuban brothers who continue to fight not as victims, but as combatants of the Cuban Revolution placed by circumstances beyond their will on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States.2 Within the federal prisons, where they are serving the draconian sentences the US rulers imposed on them, they are carrying out their political work among some two million others who are the recipients of what Washington calls justice. That is where we see the original of the face that the whole world has witnessed so clearly at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and in Iraq.3
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The face of Thomas Sankara has a powerful, indeed unique impact. Some do not know who Sankara is. But they are attracted to the confidence, character, and integrity they see in his face, and want to know more about him.
It is among the growing tens of thousands of immigrant workers from West and Central Africa who today are swelling the ranks of the working class in the imperialist centres, driven there by the whiplash of capital, that Sankara
