Mariam Sankara and the fight for a memory: a turning point in Burkina Faso

A solemn inauguration, a conspicuous absence

On 17 May 2025, Burkina Faso unveiled the Thomas Sankara and Twelve Companions Mausoleum at the former Conseil de l’Entente site in Ouagadougou. 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 several continents. Twenty-one cannon shots rang out. Solemn speeches, revolutionary symbols, and an eye-shaped architectural design by Francis Kéré combined to give the event an international dimension.

It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb received the insignia of Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Étalon from the Burkinabè authorities—a tribute to a contemporary pan-African activist in the name of Sankara’s memory.

Neither Yamb nor any of those present spoke Mariam Sankara’s name. 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 absent—just as in February 2023, during the reburial of the remains.

A global ceremony dedicated to Thomas Sankara, under the spotlight, celebrating the man without a glance for the woman who carried his name and his struggle alone for more than thirty years.

The contested ownership of a legacy

Behind this absence lies a deeper question: to whom does Thomas Sankara’s memory now belong? To his family, who bore the weight of his assassination and exile for decades? To the Burkinabè state, which now seeks to turn his memory into national heritage? Or to a generation of pan-African activists who claim Sankara as one of the ideological fathers of their cause?

It is precisely in this contradiction that the unease resides. Thomas Sankara has gradually shifted from victim of a political assassination to national hero, then to 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 raises an unavoidable question: can a man’s memory be sanctified while marginalising the voice of those who experienced his disappearance intimately?

Exile, resistance, and the long road to truth

Under Blaise Compaoré, 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 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.

During 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 fight 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 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 very moment when this memory finally 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

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 court Compaoré’s nostalgic electorate—going so far as to evoke 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 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 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, driven 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 legitimise a power born of a coup, before being gradually distanced once that power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then asking that comparisons with him cease.

Above all, 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 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 the way that memory is organised?

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.

A family’s opposition and a symbolically divided memory

The Sankara family never endorsed the staging of 2023 or that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it declared it felt “crushed by the force of public authority.” It refused to allow Thomas Sankara’s remains to be interred at the very site of his assassination, judging that this place, too heavily charged, could not be a place of appeasement. It requested a space that would unite rather than divide. The state overrode this.

The family’s position was therefore not a circumstantial opposition. In its declaration of 16 February 2023, Mariam Sankara, her two sons and Thomas Sankara’s brothers and sisters proposed several alternatives: Dagnoën cemetery, the Jardin de l’Amitié or the Jardin Yennenga. Above all, they asked that the site of the murder remain a preserved historical space and not necessarily become the burial place.

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 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 insignificant. 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.

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. It is excluded from the decisions that concern it most directly, while the figure of the dead husband is fetishised.

There is a historical irony difficult to ignore. Thomas Sankara built part of his political discourse around sovereignty, dignity and the rejection 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 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 the way that legacy is institutionalised?

Pan-Africanism, however, should not be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also interrogate the way individuals, families and communities concerned are associated with decisions taken in the name of their memory.

For the risk, by dint of 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 principal 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 merely how Burkina Faso honours 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 capacity to listen to those whose pain precedes the ceremonies.

And on this terrain, the Sankara case remains far from closed.