The official inauguration of the Thomas Sankara mausoleum in Ouagadougou on 17 May 2025 marked a defining moment in Burkina Faso’s public memory. Yet beyond the ceremonial grandeur, the event raised pressing questions about the real-world impact on those who lived the history firsthand. The families of the deceased, the citizens of a nation still grappling with a violent past, and the broader pan-African movement all bear the consequences of how this memory is being institutionalised. When the state stages a tribute of this magnitude, the effects ripple far beyond the podium and the cameras.
The scale of the commemoration and its immediate effects
On the grounds of the former Conseil de l’Entente in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso unveiled the mausoleum dedicated to Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions. The ceremony, held under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré and led by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo, drew Prime Ministers Ousmane Sonko of Senegal and Allah-Maye Halina of Chad, along with representatives of the Alliance of Sahel States and numerous pan-African figures from across continents. Twenty-one cannon shots echoed across the capital. Solemn speeches, revolutionary symbols, and an eye-shaped architectural design by Francis Kéré all contributed to an event of international proportions.
During the ceremony, Nathalie Yamb was awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Étalon by the Burkinabè authorities—a tribute to a contemporary pan-African activist, framed as honouring Sankara’s memory. Yet neither Yamb nor any of the dignitaries present mentioned Mariam Sankara. Not a word for the widow, not a word for the children, not a word for the family. And the family, for their part, was absent, just as they had been in February 2023 during the reburial of the remains. The impact of this omission is not merely symbolic: it signals a profound shift in who controls the narrative and who bears the emotional cost.
A global tribute, a family sidelined
A worldwide ceremony dedicated to Thomas Sankara, under the spotlight, celebrated the man without acknowledging the woman who carried his name and his struggle alone for over thirty years. This absence raises a deeper question: to whom does Sankara’s memory now belong? To his family, who bore the weight of his assassination and exile for decades? To the Burkinabè state, which seeks to transform his legacy into national heritage? Or to a generation of pan-African activists who claim Sankara as an ideological father of their cause?
It is precisely in this contradiction that the unease lies. Thomas Sankara has gradually moved from being the victim of a political assassination to a national hero, then to a continental and pan-African symbol. The mausoleum inaugurated in 2025 is officially presented as a tool to “safeguard, preserve and promote” his political legacy. But this institutionalisation of memory poses an unavoidable question: can a man’s memory be sanctified while marginalising the voices of those who intimately experienced his disappearance?
Decades of exile and the long road to recognition
Under Blaise Compaoré, who took power after the assassination of 15 October 1987, Mariam Sankara was forced into exile. She lived in Montpellier for more than twenty years. Her status as widow of a former president was never recognised. Speaking of Sankara was an act of resistance. Everything was done to erase her image and that of her husband. Only after Compaoré’s fall in 2014 could she return, and the trial of the alleged assassins finally opened in 2021.
Throughout those long years, Mariam Sankara never ceased to carry her husband’s memory. 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 surrounding the assassination of 15 October 1987.
This is what makes the current situation particularly paradoxical. For decades, Sankara’s memory was fought or suppressed. 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. Yet at the very moment this memory becomes official, the voice of the one who defended it when doing so carried considerable personal risk appears to have been relegated to the background.
From rehabilitation to state doctrine: the shifting uses of a legacy
Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, Sankara’s official rehabilitation accelerated. The memorial project was launched. But in a context where the government also sought to appeal to Compaoré’s nostalgic electorate—even hinting at the former president’s possible return—Sankara became a malleable symbol, useful according to the needs of the moment.
The memorial project did not originate with Ibrahim Traoré. The International Committee for the Thomas Sankara Memorial recalls that the project was officially launched on 2 October 2016. It thus traversed several political sequences before culminating in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025. This precision matters: the memorial’s history cannot be entirely rewritten as the work of the current regime. It is the result of a much longer process, driven by both civil society actors and various governments.
Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of Sankara’s figure transformed into a state doctrine. Sankara’s name served to legitimise a power born of a coup, before being gradually distanced once that power consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then demanding that comparisons to him cease.
The transformation of vocabulary is particularly telling. Sankara is no longer merely presented as a former president assassinated or as the father of the 1983 revolution. He has become an official reference, a national hero, a central element of Burkina Faso’s contemporary political and historical narrative. The mausoleum itself is presented by its promoters as an instrument to safeguard and promote his political legacy. In other words, memory is no longer merely preserved: it is organised, staged, and institutionalised.
And this raises another question: when a state officially appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of the family’s moral right to contest how that memory is organised?
Three regimes, one constant: the marginalisation of Mariam Sankara
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. Silenced under Compaoré. Instrumentalised under Kaboré. Bypassed under Traoré.
The Sankara family never validated the staging of 2023 or 2025. As early as February 2023, they declared they felt “crushed by the force of public authority.” They had refused the reburial of Thomas Sankara’s remains at the very site of his assassination, considering that this place, too heavily charged, could not be a place of appeasement. They had requested a space that would unite rather than divide. The state overruled them.
The family’s position was therefore not a circumstantial opposition. In their declaration of 16 February 2023, Mariam Sankara, her two sons, and Thomas Sankara’s siblings proposed several alternatives: the Dagnoën cemetery, the Garden of Friendship, or the Yennenga Garden. Above all, they asked that the site of the murder remain a preserved historical space and not necessarily become the burial site. The family explained that their various attempts to reach a compromise had gone unanswered and asked the transitional president to suspend the decision.
Despite this opposition, the reburial took place on 23 February 2023 at the memorial site. The Burkinabè press noted Mariam Sankara’s absence from the ceremony. This detail is far from trivial. It creates a symbolic fracture that persists today: the state organises Thomas Sankara’s public memory, while his family contests some of the modalities by which that memory is staged.
The human impact of sanctification
Whether one seeks 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. They are excluded from decisions that concern them most directly, while the figure of the dead husband is fetishised.
There is a historical irony 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 by public authority that it had not wished for. The paradox is even more striking when this memory is now mobilised in the name of pan-Africanism. Political leaders, activists, intellectuals, and figures 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 how that legacy is institutionalised?
Pan-Africanism should not 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 transforming Sankara into a continental icon, is that the real man disappears 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 continues to pay the price.
The question is no longer only how Burkina Faso honours Thomas Sankara. It is whether, by transforming Sankara into state heritage and a pan-African icon, the country still accepts hearing 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 dignitaries present at a ceremony. It is also measured by a state’s ability to listen to those whose grief precedes the ceremonies. And on this front, the Sankara file remains far from closed.
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