Burkina Faso: Thomas Sankara, an eternal source of inspiration for Burkinabe youth in search of guidance
Nearly four decades after his death, Captain Thomas Sankara continues to stir consciences and fuel imaginations. The scene unfolding this Wednesday at the Thomas Sankara Memorial in Ouagadougou bore vivid witness to this fact.
Children from the public preschool education center of Gourcy, hailing from the Yaadga region, received a visit from the Minister-Cabinet Director of the President of Faso, Captain Martha Céleste Anderson Medah. A meeting heavy with symbolism, where the revolutionary past embraced a nation’s future.
Addressing these young children, Captain Medah did not merely deliver a ceremonial speech.
He transmitted an inheritance. “If we love our country, Burkina Faso will become very beautiful, very strong, and you, the children, are the future of this country,” he taught them, inviting these young Burkinabe to love the flag, to work hard at school, and to respect their parents.
Above all, he urged them to immerse themselves in the history of Thomas Sankara in order to become good patriots.
This disarmingly simple scene reveals a profound truth: Sankara is not dead. He is not merely a name inscribed on a memorial or a figure frozen in history textbooks.
He has become a moral reference point, a compass for generations who never even knew him.
In Burkina Faso, his call for dignity, integrity, and work well done still resonates in official discourse and popular aspirations alike.
Yet beyond the borders of the land of upright men, Sankarist inspiration has spread. From Bamako to Dakar, from Conakry to Kinshasa, Africa’s youth is rediscovering this leader who dared to say: “We must dare to invent the future.”
On a continent in search of genuine sovereignty and endogenous models, Sankara embodies that voice which refused to bow before established powers.
The director of the Gourcy preschool center, Mr. Boureima Savadogo, understands this well. He sees this visit as an “opportunity to instill in children the ideals of the popular progressive revolution.” Thus, the flame does not die out: it is transmitted, patiently, from the minister’s hands to those of the children, like a torch lighting the march of a people.
Far from being a mere commemoration, this gathering at the Memorial proves that Thomas Sankara remains an invisible architect, whose thought continues to build the Burkina Faso of tomorrow. Through these children, an entire continent remembers and projects itself forward.
Olivier TOE
