Thomas Sankara's Case for Women's Liberation as Revolution

When Thomas Sankara addressed a rally of thousands of women in Ouagadougou on March 8, 1987, International Women’s Day, he framed gender equality not as a side project of his revolution but as its precondition. “There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women,” he told the crowd, in a speech later published as “The Revolution Cannot Triumph Without the Emancipation of Women.” He spent much of the address detailing the specific, daily mechanics of women’s subordination in Burkinabè society, from unpaid domestic labor to exclusion from land ownership and political life, arguing that the country’s broader project of self-reliance and social transformation would upset traditional power dynamics between men and women and require both, in his words, to “rethink the nature” of their relationship. He called the task “formidable but necessary.”

The speech was not an isolated gesture. Since seizing power in the August 1983 uprising that made him president at age 33, Sankara had already moved to translate that rhetoric into policy. His government banned polygamy and forced marriages by law, prohibited female genital mutilation, and lifted restrictions on contraception in 1986, remarkable positions for a Sahelian government to take at the time and ones that drew both domestic controversy and international attention. He established a Ministry of Family Development to focus specifically on women’s issues and backed the creation of the Union of Burkinabè Women, a mass organization intended to give women an organized political voice within the revolution’s structures. Sankara also appointed women to senior positions in his cabinet and administration in numbers unprecedented for the region, and, notably, opened recruitment into the military and police to women, a step few other African governments had taken at that point.

Sankara connected the policy program to a broader critique of how revolutionary movements typically treated women’s issues as secondary, an argument that resurfaces throughout his public remarks in this period and in earlier statements collected posthumously as “Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle.” He insisted that women’s oppression was not a natural or inevitable condition but a historically constructed one, tied to the same colonial and class structures his government was trying to dismantle, and that no revolution claiming to serve the people could leave half the population’s subjugation intact. He encouraged women to remain in school and in paid work even while pregnant, and pushed back publicly against practices he considered part of that historical machinery of control.

Sankara did not get years to build on the program. On October 15, 1987, seven months after the Ouagadougou speech, he was killed alongside twelve aides in a coup at the National Revolutionary Council headquarters, led by his former close ally and second-in-command, Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré’s government, which held power for the next 27 years, rolled back several of Sankara’s signature policies in the years that followed. A long-delayed Burkinabè trial convicted Compaoré in absentia in April 2022 for complicity in Sankara’s assassination, sentencing him to life imprisonment. Sankara’s 1987 address, though, has outlasted the government that silenced him: it continues to circulate widely as one of the era’s clearest statements linking gender equality directly to the legitimacy of any claim to revolutionary or national liberation.