Qualla: 1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État

1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

He was thirty-seven years old, and by the standards of presidents he owned almost nothing. A bicycle. A few guitars. A small salary he had slashed himself. Thomas Sankara had spent four years trying to prove that a poor West African country could feed itself, govern itself, and answer to no foreign capital - and on the afternoon of 15 October 1987, in the courtyard of a council building in Ouagadougou, that experiment ended in gunfire. Sankara and twelve other people were killed. The man who took power was his closest friend.

1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État: The Upright Man

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 of...

1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État: Two Friends

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 relat...

1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État: An Unmarked Grave

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

1987 Burkina Faso Coup d'État: The Reckoning

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 as...