Sahel Reporter

On 17 May 2025, Burkina Faso crossed a threshold. On the grounds of the former Conseil de l’Entente in Ouagadougou, the mausoleum of Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions was inaugurated with full state honours, in a setting designed to project both gravity and momentum. The ceremony unfolded under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré and was presided over by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, alongside his Senegalese and Chadian counterparts, Ousmane Sonko and Allah-Maye Halina, together with delegates of the Alliance of Sahel States and pan-African figures arriving from several continents. Twenty-one cannon shots rang out. Solemn addresses, revolutionary symbols and an eye-shaped structure conceived by the architect Francis Kéré gave the event the scale of an international statement.

It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb received from the hands of the Burkinabè authorities the insignia of Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Étalon — a conspicuous tribute to a figure of contemporary pan-African activism, conferred in the name of Sankara’s memory.

Full honours abroad, an unspoken name at home

Neither Yamb nor any of the dignitaries present pronounced the name of Mariam Sankara. Not a word for the widow, not a word for the children, not a word for the family. And the family, for its part, was not there — just as it had been absent in February 2023, during the reinterment of the remains.

A global ceremony devoted to Thomas Sankara, staged under the spotlights, celebrating the man while casting no glance towards the woman who carried his name and his struggle alone for more than three decades.

Who now holds the rights to a memory?

Behind that absence lies a deeper question: to whom does Thomas Sankara’s memory now belong? To the family that bore for decades the weight of his assassination and of exile? To the Burkinabè state, which intends today to convert his remembrance into national heritage? Or to a generation of pan-African activists who claim him as one of the ideological fathers of their cause?

The unease resides precisely in that contradiction. Sankara passed gradually from victim of a political assassination to national hero, then to continental and pan-African symbol. The monument unveiled in 2025 is officially presented as an instrument intended to safeguard, preserve and promote his political legacy. Yet this institutionalisation raises an unavoidable question: can a man’s memory be sanctified while the voices of those who lived his disappearance at close quarters are relegated to the periphery?

Exile, return and a trial long postponed

Under Blaise Compaoré, who took power after the assassination of 15 October 1987, Mariam Sankara was forced into exile. She lived for more than twenty years in Montpellier, and her standing as the widow of a former head of state was never acknowledged. To speak of Sankara amounted to an act of resistance, and every effort was made to erase her image as well as that of her husband. Only after Compaoré’s fall in 2014 was she able to return, and only in 2021 could the trial of the alleged assassins at last be opened.

Throughout those long years, Mariam Sankara never ceased to carry her husband’s memory. She was no mere spectator of Sankarist history: she stood among the rare surviving figures directly tied to the man, to his family and to his trajectory. Her struggle was also inscribed in the pursuit of truth and justice surrounding the assassination of 15 October 1987.

From the 2016 project to a doctrine of state

This is what renders the present situation paradoxical. For decades, Sankara’s memory was combated or smothered. Today it is everywhere: in official speeches, ceremonies, monuments, streets, pan-African references and institutional initiatives. His name has become politically and symbolically unavoidable.

Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, official rehabilitation gathered pace and the memorial project was launched — yet in a context where the authorities also sought to court the nostalgic electorate of Compaoré, going so far as to evoke a possible return of the former president. Sankara was turning into a pliable symbol, useful according to the needs of the moment.

The memorial itself did not begin with Ibrahim Traoré. The international committee of the Thomas Sankara Memorial points out that the project was officially launched on 2 October 2016, passing through several political sequences before culminating in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025. The clarification matters: the history of the memorial cannot be rewritten as the work of the current regime alone, since it results from a far longer process carried both by civil-society actors and by successive governments.

Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum, and the appropriation of the Sankarist figure hardened into state doctrine. Sankara’s name served to legitimise a power born of a coup de force, before being kept at a distance once that power had consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then requesting that the comparisons with him cease.

Vocabulary, above all, reveals the transformation. Sankara is no longer merely presented as an assassinated former president or as the father of the 1983 revolution; he has become an official reference, a national hero and a central element of Burkina’s contemporary political and historical narrative. The mausoleum itself is promoted by its sponsors as a means of safeguarding and advancing his political legacy. In other words, the memory is no longer simply preserved: it is organised, scripted and institutionalised.

A further question then arises. When a state formally appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of the family’s moral right to contest the manner in which that memory is arranged?

A burial decided against the family’s wishes

Three regimes, three different uses of one dead man. And in all three cases, the same woman — the one who knew and lost him most intimately — remained at the margins. Muzzled under Compaoré, instrumentalised under Kaboré, bypassed under Traoré.

The Sankara family never endorsed the staging of 2023, nor that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it declared that it felt crushed by the force of public authority. It refused that the remains of Thomas Sankara be interred at the very site of his assassination, judging that place too heavily charged to serve as a space of appeasement, and called instead for a location that would gather rather than divide. The state overrode the objection.

The family’s stance was therefore no circumstantial opposition. In its declaration of 16 February 2023, Mariam Sankara, her two sons and the brothers and sisters of Thomas Sankara put forward several alternatives.

The three sites the family proposed

• The cemetery of Dagnoën
• The Jardin de l’Amitié
• The Jardin Yennenga

Their central demand was that the scene of the murder remain a preserved historical space rather than necessarily becoming the place of burial. The family stated that its various attempts to reach a compromise had remained unanswered, and asked the president of the Transition to suspend the decision. Despite that opposition, the reinterment took place on 23 February 2023 on the memorial site, and the absence of Mariam Sankara from the ceremony was plain for all to see.

That detail is far from trivial. It created a symbolic fracture that persists to this day: the state organises the public memory of Thomas Sankara while his family contests part of the manner in which that memory is staged.

Pan-Africanism and the household it overlooks

Whether Sankara is invoked to shore up a claim to legitimacy, or muffled in order to erase an inconvenient counter-model, the outcome for his family has always been the same. It is excluded from the decisions that concern it most directly, while the figure of the dead husband is fetishised.

There is a historical irony difficult to ignore. Thomas Sankara built part of his political discourse around sovereignty, dignity and the refusal of relations of domination. Yet on the question of his own memory, his family says it was confronted with a decision of public authority that it had not wished for.

The paradox becomes even more striking when that memory is mobilised in the name of pan-Africanism. Political leaders, activists, intellectuals and public figures from several countries claim Sankara’s heritage. But the question remains: can one claim his legacy without hearing the voice of his widow and children when they contest the way that legacy is institutionalised?

Pan-Africanism ought not to be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also interrogate how individuals, families and communities are associated with the decisions taken in the name of their memory.

For the risk, in turning Sankara into a continental icon, is that the real man disappears behind the historical figure. The husband fades behind the revolutionary; the father behind the national hero; the murdered man behind the pan-African symbol. And with him gradually fades the woman who was his companion, the mother of his children and one of the principal guardians of his memory during the years when his name remained politically dangerous.

Sankara serves, for as long as he is useful. His family continues to pay the price.

The file is far from closed

The question, then, is no longer only how Burkina Faso honours Thomas Sankara. It is whether, by transforming him into state property and a pan-African icon, the country still accepts to hear those who lived his story before it became an official narrative.

A genuinely appeased memory is not measured by the number of monuments erected, the cannon shots fired or the list of personalities attending a ceremony. It is measured also by a state’s capacity to listen to those whose grief precedes the ceremonies.

And on that ground, the Sankara file is far from closed.