Last days of Thomas Sankara
On the 15th of October 1987, one of the most revolutionary and admired African leaders, Thomas Sankara was assassinated. It was a most painful and sad day for the people of Burkina Faso and even Africa as a whole because the man was the true definition of a leader. His four years as president of Burkina Faso saw tremendous changes in the country. He was able to transform Burkina Faso from a poor country, dependent on foreign aid to one that was an economically independent and socially progressive nation. He purged corruption, slashed ministers’ salaries, empowered women, and implemented literacy and immunization programs. He was truly exceptional and if he had lived long enough, Burkina Faso would not be as it is today. Unfortunately, he was assassinated.
It seems as if Sankara had an inkling about his death because one week before he was assassinated he said “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas. But did he know he would be betrayed by his best friend? We will never know however, in this video, we take a look at Thomas Sankara’s last day on earth and his last words as recounted by Alouna Traore, legal adviser to Sankara and the lone survivor of the attack that killed Sankara and his as well as his wife, Mariam Sankara.
October 15th, 1987, Mariam Sankara woke up beside her husband, Thomas Sankara who had finally joined her in bed the previous night. Silently on tiptoes, she left the room and prepared to go to work as she had to be there at 3:pm. She didn’t wake up her husband because it was a usual routine. Sankara would sleep for another hour as it was the only time he would recover from the previous night’s stress. Sankara’s schedule for the day included one: a meeting at 4 pm where he leads one of the three weekly meetings for his special cabinet. On this particular day, the agenda for the meeting was a report from one of his advisers who has just returned from Cotonou where he was speaking with the leaders of the Revolutionary People’s Party of Benin and collecting documents on the “Beninese Code of Revolutionary Conduct”; the project to create a newspaper of the CNR (National Council of the Revolution). Two: At 8 p.m. a complicated meeting regarding the OMR (Revolutionary Military Organisation).
Around 3.30 pm Mariam Sankara called her husband on the phone but it was Philippe, her eldest son who was seven at the time, who answered. “Daddy is in the shower”, he said.
Ten minutes later, the president, wearing a white T-shirt and red jogging trousers, is ready to leave but stopped to answer the call from his wife who had called again. “First I am going to my 4 p.m. meeting at the ‘Conseil de l’Entente,” he said and continued “Then I’m going to sport at 5 p.m. Afterwards I’ll probably come home for a shower but you won’t be home yet. I won’t see you till after the 8 p.m. meeting. We’ll talk tonight, he ended. If only she knew that that was the last time she would talk to her husband.In the meantime, the members of the special cabinet have begun to arrive in one of the villas of the Cartel Council, which serves as the headquarters of the NCR. Alouna Traoré and Paulin Babou Bamouni made a detour through the offices to the presidency just opposite; the others, Bonaventure Compaoré, Frédéric Kiemdé and Patrice
Zagré, came directly to the council. Christophe Saba, the permanent secretary for the CNR, has been there since this morning.
At 16.20, Traore decided to call the President who had not yet left his residence, where he was talking with another one of his advisers, the deputy director of the presidential press, Serge Théophile Balima. “We are here Mr President. It is late and we are waiting for you”, he said.
“I’ll be right there,” Sankara replied. He then sends Balima back and enters into a black Peugeot 205. The President sat in the passenger seat, as usual, explaining as he always did, “I like to see the road, and from behind you can’t see anything. In the back seat sat two bodyguards. The car following them is occupied by three other bodyguards plus the driver, also a soldier. They are all dressed in sportswear, this fateful Thursday afternoon: twice a week in fact, on Monday and Thursday from 5pm, the Burkinabè are supposed to do exercise. The president and his guards are therefore only armed with their automatic pistol.
At the Council, the members of the special firm are also dressed in sportswear, with the exception of Patrice Zagré, who came in a Mao shirt. At 4:30 p.m., the President arrives. He got out of the 205, followed by four of his guards, who settled in the corridor adjoining the meeting rooms. The drivers parked the two cars in a nearby courtyard and took shelter from the sun in the shade of the tall trees, particularly the Neem trees, which lined the garden. At 16.35, the chairman takes a seat at the end of the U-shaped meeting table. Warrant Officer Christophe Saba, Paulin Bamouni and Frédéric Kiemdé are seated on his right. On his left are Patrice Zagré, Bonaventure Compaoré and Alouna Traoré. Thomas Sankara, always late but also always in a hurry, opened the working session saying: “Let’s make it quick, let’s start!”.
Alouna Traoré, who the day before had left on a fact-finding mission in Contonou, begins his report: “I left Ouago the day before yesterday at 6 p.m…”. He stops, his voice suddenly muffled by the sound of a most likely a pierced exhaust pipe from an approaching car. Shocked and annoyed, Sankara asks: “What is that noise?”. He is soon joined by Saba, who frowns and ask : “What is that noise?”.
The noise gets louder, a car- “a Peugeot 504 or a covered Toyota”, says the only direct witness who survived. The car stopped in front of the small gate of the villa. Immediately, the noise of the engine was covered by the roar of Kalachinikov shots.The seven men gathered in the room flat on the floor, hiding behind the armchairs. Among them, the only one to be armed since his guards remained in the corridor or in the garden, was Sankara who grabs his gun which he had placed on the table, within reach. From outside, someone shouts: “Get out! Come out!” Sankara gets up, sighs loudly, and orders his counselors: “Stay! Stay! It’s me they want!”. This was to be his last words before he left the earth brutally.
According to Alouna Traore, Sankara left the meeting room with his hands in the air and just a few steps out of the room he was gunned down. The guards, the drivers and a biker from the police, Soré Patenema, who came by chance to bring mail to the CNR headquarters had all been shot in the first burst of gunfire. A former member of President of Faso’s guard, a man nicknamed Otis, who had since then been reinstated in the ranks of the para-commandos of Po bursts into the meeting room, and pushes the president’s collaborators towards the exit, shouting “Out! Get out! Get out!”. All those who obeyed were shot in turn. At the last moment, Patrice Zagré tries to take refuge in the meeting room, but a shot in the back finishes him off.
Alouna Traoré, through sheer fear or survivorship, both perhaps, found himself lying on the gravel alive, bathed in the blood of his comrades, whose moans and sighs of agony he hears as if he was in a nightmare. Among those lying on the gravel included: four civilian members of the special cabinet (Paulin Bamouni, Patrice Zagré, Frédéric Kiemdé and Bonaventure Compaoré), eight soldiers, including Warrant Officer Christophe Saba, a poor police officer who was passing by, the drivers of the presidential convoy and four bodyguards. Alouna stepped over the PF’s body without even realising it. Looking over his shoulder, he sees Thomas Sankara on the floor with the two shots to the head that immediately killed him.
Suddenly he hears someone shouting, referring to him “There is one who isn’t dead! The one in blue! Let him get up!” He stood up in response and was told to move forward and lie back on the ground, between two other bodies, those of the two drivers. Alouna feels agitated, covered in blood without a scratch on him. Around him, the commandos are still firing, but this time in the air, as if they wanted the outside world to believe that there was a fight going on within the walls of the Conseil de l’Entente; and with acrimony, as if they wanted to believe that they were really fighting and defending themselves. This went on for a long time, perhaps thirty minutes, until they had used up all their ammunition.
Still, on the ground, Alouna looks from the corner of his eyes and sees the driver-guard of Captain Blaise Compaorés body, Hamidou Maîga, walking towards him wearing a blue mechanics overalls. He looks at Alouna and says to the others: “Leave it! I’ll finish him off!” Another officer with a scared face, whom Alouna would later say he didn’t know objected and shouted “Bring me the survivor”. Alouna Traoré was brought to him and ordered to lie down. He tries to crawl and get close to the wall but hears the scared officer shout behind him “Stay still, “otherwise you’ll join the others”.
When asked how long he lay on the ground, Alouna would later say two or three hours without further explanation. Afterwards, a soldier came to threaten him saying “You saw everything. We can’t let you leave like that. You’re going to join the others!”. Alouna doesn’t understand the situation he is in. He has gone beyond the stage of fear and has taken refuge in the world of the absurd. At the time, his only desire was to urinate. He was allowed to do so and he went to relieve himself for a long time between the flowers of the gardens of the Conseil de l’Entente, transformed that very afternoon into a killing field.
He was then taken upstairs to the floor of a villa where CNR agents were grouped together, who heard everything without having seen anything of the drama: the doctor-warrant officer Youssouf Ouedraogo, assistant to the warrant officer Christophe Saba, and the whole secretariat of the Laurent Kaboré, who also worked at the CNR. In the middle of them, he was surprised to discover Bossobé, a guard of the president. Alouna Traoré’s blue sports outfit is soaked in blood. His hands, face and hair are bloody. He is told to wash himself and then to sit down.
Long after the sun had set, Alouna hears cars manoeuvring in the alleys of the Cartel Council. He risks a glance out the window. The thirteen corpses have disappeared; tankers are cleaning the scene of the drama with large water jets. He will spend the night behind the scenes, he won’t sleep. Turning over and over in his head is only one question:
“What could the President have done to deserve this?”
Indeed what possibly could one of the most loved African leaders have done to deserve murder?
Three days before his death, a French journalist asked Sankara if he ever feared for his life and how much trust he had for Campaore, his second-in-command and childhood friend. His response was that “if Compaore plots against him, there was nothing that could save him or frustrate the plot. And true to his words nothing saved him for it was his friend Compaore who was the insider in the conspiracy between France and Cote d’Ivoire to stop his’s four-year Socialist-Marxist revolution that was hitting at the root of poverty and underdevelopment in Burkina Faso and West Africa as a whole. The armed men were later identified to be members of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
And so came the end of the Sankara revolution and the eventual 27-year reign of Blaise Compaore who became one of the disastrous examples of leaders in Africa. Compaore even prevented the family of Sankara from taking his body as he was buried along with other loyal soldiers that tried to fight back. Thankfully after the fall of the Compaore regime, the investigation into the assassination of Thomas Sankara was launched. In April 2021 a military tribunal in Burkina Faso charged 14 people, including Compaoré, in relation to the circumstances of Sankara’s assassination in 1987. Compaoré was charged with having been complicit in murder, having attacked state security, and having concealed a corpse. He refused to participate in the proceedings, however, and was tried in absentia when the trial began on October 11. The tribunal’s verdict, announced on April 6, 2022, found Compaoré guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
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