Thomas Sankara - search results

Thirty years after his murder, Heike Becker writes how Thomas Sankara’s words and his legacy have come to life again with the massive mobilization of Burkina Faso’s youth from 2013 onwards. In the 21st century young Africans with their smartphones are at the forefront of an alternative globalisation from the south.

Radical journalist Victoria Brittain discusses the life of Thomas Sankara with Brian J. Peterson. Peterson has written a biography which recounts in detail the life, politics and assasination of the Burkinabé revolutionary. The book sheds new light on the responsibility for Sankara’s murder. Brittain and Peterson talk about his work, and the project of transforming Burkina Faso in the 1980s.

Jean-Claude Kongo and Leo Zeilig look at Thomas Sankara’s reforms in Burkina Faso in the 1980s. Sankara understood that Africa had to find its own path to development, and this would require redistribution of wealth and severing the ties with imperialism. Yet ultimately Sankara’s project of transformation proved too weak.

While revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively little attention. In an extract from their forthcoming book, the editors, Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig shed new light on these political movements. They argue that Africa’s revolutionary left was extremely active in these years, and forms a vital part of global history.

Aymar N. Bisoka, David Mwambari and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni write about the recent Africa-France summit. The scholar Achille Mbembe was recruited to prepare a report for the summit by speaking to African youth. This blogpost asks what was the real meaning of the summit behind the official pronouncements.

Ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Tim Zajontz looks at the immense amounts of debt African governments owe Chinese lenders. This debt is central to capitalist accumulation and financial extraction from the African continent. Zajontz argues that Chinese capital is now pivotal to the global circuit of capital and China, just like other creditors, uses debt for the conquest of Africa and its resources.

In this long-read, Liam Taylor explores the politics and class dynamics of Kampala, Uganda. Taylor unpicks the enigma of Yoweri Museveni’s background - a former student militant who was taught by Walter Rodney, and argued for the necessity of revolutionary violence, socialism and radical transformations. Yet he soon became the apostle of neoliberal change, always promising that real change was forthcoming. 

ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews the Congolese historian and scholar-activist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. He explains that the overriding motivation of his work is solidarity with the oppressed and an uncompromising quest for the truth to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes how war, violence and extractivism defined the legacy of the empire in Africa, and why recent attempts to explore the ‘ethical’...

Amber Murrey and Edith Phaswana write about a conference in Ibadan marking the contribution of the scholar Toyin Falola. Falola’s work transcends disciplinary boundaries, appealing to researchers and students across different backgrounds and disciplines. Murrey and Phaswana explain that Falola has been at the forefront of charting a path for African intellectuals and validating humanizing accounts of African history.