ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella recalls the person of Thomas Sankara, the day after the coup d'état in Burkina Faso and the assassination of its President.

(Notizie Radicali n. 283 of 7 December 1987)

After his death, newspapers wrote far more about Thomas Sankara than they ever did or attempted to do when he was alive. Sankara was tragically assassinated by his dearest and closest of comrades, Blaise Campaoré.

Witnesses reminded me that I had warned Thomas, less than two years ago, that this was the one of the few certain conclusion written in the scenario he was living in. A revolutionary, Jacobin more than military scenario, where it was the "brothers", the comrades, who could guillotine you, and not the enemies or the opponents.

The hypothesis was expressible precisely because it appeared impossible, inconceivable, both from a human and from a political point of view. However I had the impression that Thomas understood, meditated upon, was grateful to me for that sincerity. Nothing, moreover, could make fear that this way we wanted to exacerbate a conflict or diversities which were not there.

Thomas Sankara had been educated in schools run by French Catholic missionaries. His main subject was the "classical" culture of the thirties in Italy: everything or almost everything except the liberal and democratic thought. And it was these basic cultural landmarks which he expressed, far more than the following "Marxist and military ones. In the course of his solemn speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, Sankara quoted Novalis, the Pre-Romantic German writer for whom the reality of dream portrayed the truths of life, a reaction to the "century" and to illuminist thought. He had given his children names taken from Corneille: Philip and August, not names of African or Communist heroes. Like Mussolini, but with so much more elegance and grace and sincere naivety, he recovered classical themes, Greek or Latin, patriotic or Republican, of Spartan life: "Ou la Patrie ou la mort". "On vaincra" (we shall win). A sinister slogan by which he had attempted, without success, to recover the "It is swee

t and noble to die for the home Land", unconsciously rewriting the slogan "Either Rome or death", and lexicon of all fascisms.

He naturally loved Rousseau, with his natural laws and the "good savage", his equalitarianism and disregard for law. I told him that he was "only" missing Voltaire, with his "tolerance", his attention for justice, for the State and the prisons; and to the "value" of knowledge as opposed to the value of power. He was terribly young and attentive, grave and good, stern and yet gentle as regards every death and every form of sufferance. Naive and aware, he was concerned with being such: he did not mistake, I believe, naivety with innocence. To those who asked him: "You rebaptized Alto Volta into Burkina Faso, that is, the Land of the Just. But if there exists a home of the just, what need is there for a state, for a revolution, for you? And the other countries, are they worse than yours, and the people there worse"?

He listened, and suddenly seemed to be absent, meditating. Fatigue, which was always lurking - he slept very little in order to work, study, be with his people - often overcame him, and he closed his eyes. He wanted to practise sport or play football with his ministers and comrades at least once a week. He used to wear his paratrooper outfit with the same elegance with which he would have worn a habit or a a frock. He hated the huge official cars he had inherited, and which he considered the symbol of energetic waste, and had imposed to himself and to all his ministers the use of small Renault 4 cars. He wanted ten Italian accordions to be made by a craftsman from Ascoli Piceno, and he was worried about the price, which he considered exorbitant, and the only favour he asked Giovanni Negri and myself was to check if they could be purchased with a discount.

He indicted "popular trials", "popular", mass and contradictory indeed for many former notables, officials of former regimes, obsessed as he was with corruption, with the real or alleged lack of honesty. Those were "exemplary" trials, barely more civil and human than some of our trials, such as the "7th of April" trial against Tortora and his 1200 "friends". In the end he freed almost everyone, and almost immediately accepted, at a stage in which he was only politically and not personally acquainted with us, to let us visit a former President of the Assembly of the EEC-Acp, Gerard Tango Ouedraogou in a special penitentiary, for whom we asked and obtained freedom, not as a privilege or a favour but with a provision applied to all the others.

Extremely poor, Alto Volta, until six years before Sankara came in power, had been a country in which there had never been any victims for political reasons, and in which a democratic system had been functioning, albeit very badly.

Therefore, the first casualties of this kind struck us as a sort of blasphemy. He agreed on this and proved it in many occasions. Being a believer, Thomas never accepted confusions between power and religion. One of the most serious crises he was immediately faced with was when he said that one of the most important traditionalist and animist leaders was to pay electricity bills, risking his own fall. One way or the other, this trifle took on the features of a principle. When one of his closest collaborators, the only non-military one, Basil Guissou, Minister of Foreign Affairs, told him that he had joined the Radical Party, he was happy about it and approved of it. The non-violent and Ghandian principle of the Radical Party surprised him and moved him. When I met him I immediately suggested him not to pass to a single party government, but to try the more radical and clear-cut of the anglo-saxon options: the direct election of the President, with at least two strong candidates, and the election of a Parl

iament with the uninominal system. I have been told that he never ceased to think about it. The open and sincere messages he sent to the congresses of the Party he wrote himself, just like his greetings for New Year. But he had to deal with the other members of the Revolutionary Council. He probably wanted to experiment with an intermediate stage: out of compromise and conviction. That of a "front" of individuality and autonomous and free forces. And from July, in each of his speeches, there was a key word: "Tolerance". Blaise and the others must have feared this. I have not mentioned his value, his political choices, his story. But these can be read elsewhere. For "Nigrizia" - which I am grateful to for this invitation - I can provide but one marginal yet accurate testimony, to be added to the many books and articles on him published in Europe.

What I know is that for him I would like to read many verses of the "Lament" for the death of Ignacio de Garcia Lorca. Alas, a funereal poem, a sufferance of the intellect more than of the heart. These would be the praises and the regret suitable for him. He was a French character (just like the Roman emperors and thinkers were "foreigners", "Africans"). Sankara was French in the same way that Saint Augustine was a "Roman Catholic". Genuinely "French". But he had come out of the pages not of André Malraux, or from the reportages and the novels of Lucien Bedard; neither hero nor legionary, nor revolutionary filled with hate and despair, but rather a "hero" from the "Grand Meaulnes" of Alain Fournier and the "Pilotes de nuit" and even - why not? - the "Petit Prince" of Saint-Exupery. More Nizan than Fanon, if I may continue and conclude this rather ceremonial parenthesis.

Thus, a man of state lost his battle against time, against himself. But like the Senghors, the Houphouay Boignys, the prominent "wise men" of another generation, weakened and intellectually corrupted by power or success, and whom he hated, Thomas Sankara, with his love for life, love and purity, with his intellectual honesty, with his humbleness, his innate tolerance and the tolerance he had won and which he advocated, could have become a "great" personage not only for Africa but for all of us.

His weak spot was perhaps his high-school culture and the ardour of his adolescence, which were also his strength and the symbol of his whole life. I hope that at least for myself his ashes enable will lead to an even better path of embers, in the great epoch denied him and which I seem to be walking towards.

On the 10th of December, in the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, upon initiative of African and Radical comrades, a service shall be celebrated. But already in these weeks, listening to passages of the "Requiem" on Radio Radicale, and of the Alleluia and the Hosanna and the requiescat in pace, I will certainly have not been alone in recalling Captain Thomas Sankara, African and European.