On 17 May 2025, on the grounds of the former Conseil de l’Entente in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso inaugurated with considerable pomp the mausoleum of Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions. The ceremony, held under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré and led by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, drew the Prime Ministers of Senegal, Ousmane Sonko, and of Chad, Allah-Maye Halina, alongside representatives of the Alliance of Sahel States and numerous pan-African figures from several continents. Twenty-one cannon shots rang out. Solemn speeches, revolutionary symbols, and an eye-shaped architectural design by Francis Kéré: every element was staged to lend the event an international dimension.
It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb received from the hands of the Burkinabè authorities the title of Knight of the Order of the Stallion. A pointed tribute to a figure of contemporary pan-African activism, offered in the name of Sankara’s memory.
Neither Yamb nor any of the figures present uttered Mariam Sankara’s name. 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 absent — as it had been in February 2023, during the reinterment of the remains.
A global ceremony dedicated to Thomas Sankara, under the spotlight, where the man is celebrated without a glance for the woman who carried his name and his struggle alone for more than thirty years.
A question of ownership: whose memory is Thomas Sankara’s?
Behind this absence lies a deeper question: to whom does the memory of Thomas Sankara now belong? To his family, which bore for decades the weight of his assassination and of exile? To the Burkinabè State, which now seeks to turn his memory into national heritage? Or to a generation of pan-African activists who claim Sankara as one of the ideological fathers of their struggle?
It is precisely within this contradiction that the unease resides. Thomas Sankara has gradually moved from the status of victim of a political assassination to that of national hero, then to that of continental and pan-African symbol. The mausoleum inaugurated in 2025 is officially presented as a tool intended to “safeguard, preserve and promote” his political legacy. But this institutionalisation of memory raises an unavoidable question: can a man’s memory be sanctified while the voices of those who lived his disappearance intimately are marginalised?
Exile, silence and the long fight for truth
Under Blaise Compaoré, the man 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. Her status as widow of a former president was never recognised. To speak of Sankara amounted to an act of resistance. Everything was done to erase her image and that of her husband. It was only after Compaoré’s fall in 2014 that she was able to return, and that the trial of the alleged assassins could finally open in 2021.
Throughout those long years, Mariam Sankara never ceased to carry her husband’s memory. She was not a mere spectator of Sankarist history. She was one of the few survivors directly linked to the man, to his family and to his journey. Her struggle was also inscribed in the search for truth and justice surrounding the assassination of 15 October 1987.
This is what makes the present situation particularly paradoxical. For decades, Sankara’s memory was fought or stifled. Today, it is everywhere: in official speeches, ceremonies, monuments, streets, pan-African references and institutional initiatives. Sankara’s name has become politically and symbolically unavoidable.
Yet at the very moment when this memory finally becomes official, the voice of the one who defended it when doing so carried considerable personal risk appears to have been relegated to the background.
From rehabilitation to state doctrine: three regimes, one marginalised widow
Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, Sankara’s official rehabilitation accelerated. The memorial project was launched. But in a context where the government also sought to court Compaoré’s nostalgic electorate — going so far as to evoke a possible return of the former president — Sankara became a malleable symbol, useful according to the needs of the moment.
The Memorial project did not, moreover, originate with Ibrahim Traoré. The International Committee of the Thomas Sankara Memorial recalls that the project was officially launched as early as 2 October 2016. It thus passed through several political sequences before culminating in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025.
This clarification matters: the history of the memorial cannot be entirely rewritten as a work born with the current regime. It is the result of a far longer process, carried both by civil society actors and by different governments.
Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of the Sankarist figure was transformed into a doctrine of state. Sankara’s name served to legitimise a power born of a coup de force, before being gradually kept at a distance once that power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first, claiming Sankara; then, asking that he no longer be compared to him.
Above all, the transformation of vocabulary must be observed. 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, a central element of the political and historical narrative of contemporary Burkina. The mausoleum itself is presented by its promoters as an instrument for safeguarding and promoting his political legacy.
In other words, memory is no longer merely conserved: it is organised, scripted and institutionalised.
And this is where another question arises: when a state officially appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of his family’s moral right to contest the manner in which that memory is organised?
Three regimes. Three different uses of the same dead man. And in all three cases, the same woman — the one who knew and lost him most intimately — remained on the margins. Silenced under Compaoré. Instrumentalised under Kaboré. Bypassed under Traoré.
The family’s rejected alternatives and the fracture of February 2023
The Sankara family has 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 had refused that Thomas Sankara’s remains be interred on the very site of his assassination, judging that this place, too heavily charged, could not be a place of appeasement. It had requested a space that would unite rather than divide. The state disregarded this.
The family’s position was therefore not a circumstantial opposition. In its declaration of 16 February 2023, Mariam Sankara, her two sons and Thomas Sankara’s brothers and sisters proposed several alternatives: the Dagnoën cemetery, the Garden of Friendship or the Yennenga Garden. Above all, they asked that the site of the murder remain a preserved historical space and not necessarily become the burial place.
The family explained at the time that its various attempts to reach a compromise had remained unanswered, and asked the president of the Transition to suspend the decision.
Despite this opposition, the reinterment took place on 23 February 2023 on the Memorial site. The Burkinabè press noted at the time Mariam Sankara’s absence from the ceremony.
This detail is far from trivial. It creates a symbolic fracture that persists today: the state organises Thomas Sankara’s public memory, while his family contests part of the modalities by which that memory is staged.
Whether the aim is to use Sankara to shore up legitimacy, or to stifle him in order to erase an inconvenient counter-model, the result 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.
The pan-African paradox: claiming Sankara without hearing his widow
There is a historical irony here that is difficult to ignore. Thomas Sankara had built part of his political discourse around sovereignty, dignity and the rejection of relations of domination. Yet on the question of his own memory, the family says it was confronted with a decision of public authority that it had not wished for.
The paradox is even more striking when this memory is now mobilised in the name of pan-Africanism. Political leaders, activists, intellectuals and figures from several countries claim Sankara’s legacy. But the question remains: can one claim his legacy without hearing the voice of his widow and children when they contest the manner in which that legacy is institutionalised?
Pan-Africanism should not, however, be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also interrogate the manner in which individuals, families and communities concerned are associated with decisions taken in the name of their memory.
For the risk, in transforming Sankara into a continental icon, is to make the real man disappear behind the historical figure. The husband disappears behind the revolutionary. The father disappears behind the national hero. The assassinated man disappears behind the pan-African symbol.
And with him gradually disappears the one who was his companion, the mother of his children and one of the principal guardians of his memory during the years when his name was still politically dangerous.
Sankara serves, as long as he is useful. His family, meanwhile, continues to pay the price.
The question, then, is no longer merely how Burkina Faso honours Thomas Sankara. It is whether, in transforming Sankara into state heritage and a pan-African icon, the country still accepts hearing those who lived his story before it became an official narrative.
For a truly pacified memory is not measured by the number of monuments built, the cannon shots fired or the list of figures present at a ceremony. It is also measured by a state’s capacity to listen to those whose grief precedes the ceremonies.
And on that ground, the Sankara file remains far from closed.
