A grandiose ceremony for a contested memory
On 17 May 2025, Burkina Faso inaugurated with great fanfare the mausoleum of Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions at the former Conseil de l’Entente site in Ouagadougou. The ceremony, held under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, was led by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo. Prime Ministers Ousmane Sonko of Senegal and Allah-Maye Halina of Chad were present, along with 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: everything was staged to give the event an international dimension.
It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb received the title of Knight of the Order of the Stallion from the Burkinabe authorities. A strong tribute to a figure of contemporary pan-African activism, in the name of Sankara’s memory.
Neither Yamb nor any of the personalities 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 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 over thirty years.
Three regimes, one marginalized widow
But behind this absence lies a deeper question: to whom does Thomas Sankara’s memory now belong? To his family, who bore the weight of his assassination and exile for decades? To the Burkinabe state, which now intends to transform 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 in this contradiction that the unease lies. Thomas Sankara has gradually moved from being the victim of a political assassination to a national hero, then to a 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 institutionalization of memory raises an unavoidable question: can one sanctify a man’s memory while marginalizing the voice of those who intimately experienced his disappearance?
Under Blaise Compaoré, the man who took power after the assassination of 15 October 1987, Mariam Sankara was forced into exile. She lived for over twenty years in Montpellier. Her status as widow of a former president was never recognized. Speaking of Sankara was 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 could return, and that the trial of the alleged assassins could finally open in 2021.
During those long years, Mariam Sankara nonetheless 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, his family and his journey. Her struggle also formed part of the search for truth and justice around the assassination of 15 October 1987.
The transformation of a dangerous memory into state property
This is what makes the current 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.
But at the moment when this memory finally becomes official, the voice of the one who defended it when doing so carried considerable personal risk appears to be relegated to the background.
Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, the official rehabilitation of Sankara accelerated. The memorial project was launched. But in a context where the government also sought to seduce Compaoré’s nostalgic electorate, going so far as to mention 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, begin with Ibrahim Traoré. The International Committee of the Thomas Sankara Memorial recalls that the project was officially launched on 2 October 2016. It thus went through several political sequences before resulting in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025.
This clarification is important: the history of the memorial cannot be entirely rewritten as a work born with the current regime. It is the result of a much longer process, carried both by civil society actors and by various governments.
Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of the Sankarist figure turned into a state doctrine. Sankara’s name served to legitimize a power born of a coup d’état, before being gradually kept at a distance once power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then asking that comparisons with him cease.
We must above all observe the transformation of vocabulary. Sankara is no longer merely presented as a former assassinated 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 preserved: it is organized, scripted and institutionalized.
And this raises another question: when a state officially appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of his family’s moral right to contest the way that memory is organized?
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. Instrumentalized under Kaboré. Bypassed under Traoré.
The family’s rejection of the official narrative
The Sankara family has never endorsed the staging of 2023 or that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it declared that it felt “crushed by the force of public authority.” It had refused to allow Thomas Sankara’s remains to be buried at the very site of his assassination, considering 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 overrode 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. They above all requested that the site of the murder remain a preserved historical space and not necessarily become the burial site.
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 at the Memorial site. The Burkinabe press noted Mariam Sankara’s absence from the ceremony at the time.
This detail is far from trivial. It creates a symbolic fracture that persists today: the state organizes Thomas Sankara’s public memory, while his family contests part of the modalities by which that memory is staged.
The paradox of pan-Africanism without the family
Whether one wants to use Sankara to establish legitimacy, or to stifle him to erase an inconvenient counter-model, the result for his family has always been the same. It is excluded from decisions that concern it most directly, while the figure of the dead husband is fetishized.
There is a historical irony here that is hard to ignore. Thomas Sankara had built part of his political discourse around sovereignty, dignity and the refusal 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 mobilized in the name of pan-Africanism. Political leaders, activists, intellectuals and personalities 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 way that legacy is institutionalized?
Pan-Africanism should not, however, be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also question the way individuals, families and communities concerned are associated with decisions taken in the name of their memory.
For the risk, by dint of transforming Sankara into a continental icon, is that the real man disappears 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 main 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 is therefore no longer only how Burkina Faso honors Thomas Sankara. It is whether, by transforming Sankara into state property and a pan-African icon, the country still agrees to hear those who lived his story before it became an official narrative.
For a truly appeased memory is not measured by the number of monuments built, the cannon shots fired or the list of personalities present at a ceremony. It is also measured by a state’s ability to listen to those whose pain precedes the ceremonies.
And on this terrain, the Sankara case is far from closed.
