On 17 May 2025, on the site of the former Conseil de l’Entente in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso inaugurated with great pomp the mausoleum of Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions. The ceremony, held under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, was led by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo. The Prime Ministers of Senegal, Ousmane Sonko, and of Chad, Allah-Maye Halina, were present, as were 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, eye-shaped architecture by Francis Kéré: everything was staged to give the event an international dimension.
It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb received from the hands of the Burkinabe authorities the title of Knight of the Order of the Stallion. 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 the name of Mariam Sankara. 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 not there. 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 more than thirty years.
But behind this absence lies a deeper question: to whom does the memory of Thomas Sankara now belong? To his family, who bore for decades the weight of his assassination and exile? 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 the status of victim of a political assassination to that of national hero, then 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 the memory of a man 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 more than 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 never ceased to carry the memory of her husband. 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.
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 seems 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 the nostalgic electorate of Compaoré, 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 had been officially launched as early as 2 October 2016. It thus went through several political sequences before culminating 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 by both civil society actors and different governments.
Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of the Sankarist figure turned into state doctrine. Sankara’s name served to legitimize a power born of a coup, before being gradually distanced once the power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then asking that he no longer be compared to him.
Above all, one must observe the transformation of vocabulary. 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 preserved: it is organized, staged and institutionalized.
And that 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 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. Muzzled under Compaoré. Instrumentalized under Kaboré. Bypassed under Traoré.
The Sankara family never validated the staging of 2023, nor that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it had declared that it felt “crushed by the force of public authority.” It had refused that Thomas Sankara’s remains be buried on 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 bring together rather than divide. The state overrode this.
The family’s position was therefore not an opposition of circumstance. In its declaration of 16 February 2023, Mariam Sankara, her two sons and Thomas Sankara’s brothers and sisters had proposed several alternatives: the Dagnoën cemetery, the Garden of Friendship or the Yennenga Garden. They especially asked that the place 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 on the Memorial site. The Burkinabe press at the time noted the absence of Mariam Sankara at the ceremony.
This detail is far from trivial. It creates a symbolic fracture that remains today: the state organizes the public memory of Thomas Sankara, while his family contests part of the modalities by which this memory is staged.
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 kept out of the decisions that concern it most directly, while the figure of the dead husband is fetishized.
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 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 this legacy is institutionalized?
Pan-Africanism should not, however, be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also question how individuals, families and communities concerned are involved in decisions taken in the name of their memory.
For the risk, by turning 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 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 heritage 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 front, the Sankara case remains far from closed.