Sankara had come to power in 1983 with a vision that thrilled a continent and unsettled its creditors. He renamed the former Upper Volta as Burkina Faso - 'the Land of Upright People' - stitching the new name together from two of its languages. He cut ministers' salaries, sold off the government's Mercedes fleet in favor of modest Renaults, and campaigned to vaccinate millions of children and plant millions of trees against the encroaching desert. He spoke against debt as a weapon, against the lingering grip of the former colonial power, France, and against the patience that poverty was expected to show. Admirers across Africa called him 'Africa's Che Guevara.' His critics, at home and abroad, called him reckless. Both were watching closely when the relationship at the center of his revolution began to fracture.

Blaise Compaoré was not an outsider. He and Sankara had been comrades, bandmates, fellow officers - allies in the 1983 upheaval that brought Sankara to power. By 1987 the friendship had cooled into rivalry, sharpened by disputes over the direction of the revolution and over relations with neighboring Ivory Coast and with France. On 15 October, an armed group entered the meeting where Sankara sat with his aides. The killing was swift. Compaoré assumed the presidency immediately, blaming the breakdown in foreign relations and, for years afterward, describing his friend's death as an 'accident' - a word that fit neither the testimony nor, eventually, the evidence.

What followed was meant to erase him. Sankara's body was buried hastily in an unmarked grave on the city's edge; his widow, Mariam, fled the country with their two young children. For decades the family pressed for the truth. When the grave attributed to him was finally exhumed and examined in 2015, a lawyer for Mariam Sankara reported that the remains were riddled with more than a dozen bullets. Compaoré, meanwhile, dismantled the revolution piece by piece - reversing the nationalizations, returning to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He ruled Burkina Faso for twenty-seven years, outlasting nearly everyone who had stood beside him at the beginning.

History did not let the matter rest. A popular uprising drove Compaoré from power in 2014, and he fled to Ivory Coast. In 2021 a military tribunal in Ouagadougou opened the long-delayed trial for Sankara's murder. In April 2022 the court convicted Compaoré of complicity in the assassination and sentenced him, in absentia, to life imprisonment, along with his former security chief; the general Gilbert Diendéré received a life sentence as well. Compaoré never returned to face the verdict. Then, in February 2023, Sankara and those killed alongside him were reinterred at the assassination site in a ceremony attended by government officials. Two years later, in May 2025, a purpose-built mausoleum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré opened on that same ground, housing all thirteen tombs beneath individual skylights. The unmarked grave had finally been answered - thirty-eight years late, but answered.