Sankara's Debt Speech to the OAU and His Assassination Three Months Later

On July 29, 1987, Burkina Faso’s president Thomas Sankara addressed the Organisation of African Unity summit in Addis Ababa with a speech that became one of the era’s most quoted statements of African economic sovereignty. Speaking as chair of the summit’s own agenda item on debt, the 37-year-old revolutionary leader argued that Africa’s crushing external debt, which had grown from roughly $6 billion across sub-Saharan Africa in 1970 to over $126 billion by 1987, was not a legitimate financial obligation but a continuation of colonialism by other means. “Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins,” he told the assembled heads of state. “Those who lend us money are those who colonized us.”

Sankara’s proposal was blunt: African nations should collectively and publicly refuse to repay debts he characterized as illegitimate, arguing that a coordinated continental refusal would protect any single nation from being punished alone for defaulting. He warned, prophetically, that pushing the argument too far carried personal risk, telling delegates that if Burkina Faso stood alone in refusing to pay, he would not be at the next summit to make the case again. Since taking power in a 1983 coup, Sankara had already built a reputation as one of the continent’s most radical leaders, pursuing land redistribution, mass vaccination campaigns, and women’s rights initiatives while sharply cutting his own government’s spending on cars, foreign travel, and salaries: policies that made him popular domestically and increasingly, a source of unease among Burkina Faso’s Western-aligned neighbors and France, the former colonial power still deeply influential across Francophone West Africa.

Sankara did not get the chance to renew that argument at another summit. On October 15, 1987, eleven weeks after the Addis Ababa speech, he was killed along with twelve associates in a coup at the headquarters of the National Revolutionary Council in Ouagadougou, led by his former close ally and second-in-command, Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré took power immediately afterward and, within months, reversed many of Sankara’s signature policies, including reopening relations with the International Monetary Fund and France.

France’s role in the coup remains a matter of documented suspicion rather than judicially settled fact. A long-delayed Burkinabè trial, which opened in October 2021 and heard more than 110 witnesses, convicted Compaoré in absentia in April 2022, sentencing him to life imprisonment for complicity in Sankara’s murder, along with Compaoré’s former security chief Hyacinthe Kafando and General Gilbert Diendéré. Burkinabè judicial investigators established that French agents were present in Ouagadougou the day after the coup, and French President Emmanuel Macron promised in 2017 to declassify all French defense and intelligence archives related to the killing. That promise has been only partially fulfilled: French authorities have released some diplomatic records but, according to Burkinabè advocacy groups and members of the French parliament who have pressed the issue, have withheld classified defense-ministry material that could confirm or rule out direct French involvement. As of the most recent reporting, no officially declassified French document has proven coordination between French and Burkinabè services in planning the assassination, leaving France’s exact role a subject of continued investigation and reasonable suspicion rather than established historical fact.