Ghost of Sankara: Ibrahim Traoré and the Return of Revolutionary Africa

The West thought Thomas Sankara was buried in 1987. They were wrong.

In 2022, a 34-year-old army captain named Ibrahim Traoré seized power in Burkina Faso. It was the second coup in a year, but this one felt different. This one felt like Sankara was whispering from the grave.

Traoré doesn't wear sunglasses like Sankara. He doesn’t ride a bicycle through Ouagadougou or strum a guitar at rallies. But he speaks of sovereignty, dignity, and self-reliance—not as slogans, but as weapons and that terrifies the empire.

Burkina Faso is a small, landlocked country in West Africa. Poor by design. Bled dry by French colonialism, looted by multinational mining companies, and kept unstable through warlord conflict and debt traps. But under Traoré, the country has begun to turn its back on its old masters.

France? Gone.

Western NGOs? Suspended. Many of them act like soft-power intelligence arms.

Gold? Nationalized.

And it’s just the beginning. Traoré has called the CFA franc—a colonial currency still imposed by France—"a tool of control." He’s deepening ties with other West African nations like Mali and Niger, both also led by military regimes resisting neocolonialism. Together, they’re forming a bloc that challenges not just French control, but the entire architecture of Western imperialism in Africa. The Western press calls him “authoritarian.”That’s rich—coming from states that bombed Libya, backed coups in Congo, armed apartheid South Africa, and trained death squads across the continent.

What they fear isn’t dictatorship.What they fear is a leader who won’t sell his people to the IMF. What they fear is a sovereign Africa. Sankara once said, “He who feeds you, controls you.” Traoré knows that too. He’s championing food self-sufficiency, reviving state control over land, and denouncing corruption openly. He speaks not in technocratic abstractions, but in the raw, urgent language of liberation.

It’s too early to know how far he’ll go. Every revolutionary walks a tightrope—between principle and pressure, between survival and sabotage. And Traoré’s path will have enemies: foreign mercenaries, disinformation, economic warfare. But something has changed.

The red beret is back.The empire is afraid again and the ghost of Sankara walks beside us.