Sankara’s mausoleum and its consequences: what an official memory leaves behind in Burkina Faso

The 2025 inauguration and the consequences it set in motion

When Burkina Faso unveiled the mausoleum of Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions on 17 May 2025, the ceremony was designed to project far beyond Ouagadougou. Held on the site of the former Conseil de l’Entente, it took place under the patronage of Captain Ibrahim Traoré and was conducted by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo. The presence of Senegal’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko and Chad’s Prime Minister Allah-Maye Halina, together with representatives of the Alliance of Sahel States and pan-African figures who had travelled from several continents, gave the event a deliberately international dimension. Twenty-one cannon shots, solemn addresses, revolutionary symbols and an eye-shaped structure designed by Francis Kéré completed a staging intended to elevate a national memorial into a continental landmark.

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

Yet neither Yamb nor any other figure present spoke the name of Mariam Sankara. Not a word for the widow, not a word for the children, not a word for the family. The family, for its part, was not there, just as it had been absent in February 2023, when the remains were reburied.

A global ceremony devoted to Thomas Sankara, played out under the spotlights, in which the man was celebrated without a single glance towards the woman who had borne his name and his struggle alone for more than thirty years.

A widening rift over who owns the memory

Beneath that absence lies a more uncomfortable question: who now holds the memory of Thomas Sankara? His family, which carried for decades the weight of his assassination and of its own exile? The Burkinabè state, which now seeks to convert his remembrance into national heritage? Or a generation of pan-African activists who claim Sankara as one of the ideological fathers of their cause?

It is within this contradiction that the discomfort resides. Over time, Sankara has shifted from the status of victim of a political assassination to that of national hero, and then to that of continental and pan-African symbol. The mausoleum inaugurated in 2025 is officially presented as a tool intended 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 the voices of those who lived his disappearance most intimately are pushed to the margins?

A widow consigned to the margins of an official narrative

Two decades of exile and one long pursuit of justice

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 the widow of a former president was never recognised. To speak 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 was she able to return, and only then could the trial of the alleged assassins finally open, in 2021.

Throughout those long years, Mariam Sankara never ceased to carry her husband’s memory. She was no mere spectator of Sankarist history. She was one of the few surviving figures directly linked to the man, to his family and to his trajectory. Her struggle also took the form of a search for truth and justice surrounding the assassination of 15 October 1987.

This is what makes the present situation so paradoxical. For decades, Sankara’s memory was fought or stifled. Today it is everywhere: in official speeches, ceremonies, monuments, street names, pan-African references and institutional initiatives. His name has become politically and symbolically unavoidable.

Yet at the very moment when that memory finally becomes official, the voice of the woman who defended it when doing so carried considerable personal risk appears to have been relegated to the background.

Three governments, three uses of the same memory

From Compaoré’s erasure to Kaboré’s calculated rehabilitation

Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, the official rehabilitation of Sankara accelerated. The memorial project was launched. But this occurred in a context in which the authorities also sought to court the nostalgic electorate of Compaoré, going so far as to evoke a possible return of the former president. Sankara became a manageable symbol, useful according to the demands of the moment.

A project older than the current government

The memorial project did not, moreover, begin with Ibrahim Traoré. The International Committee for the Thomas Sankara Memorial recalls that it was officially launched on 2 October 2016. It therefore crossed several political sequences before culminating in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025.

That precision matters: the history of the memorial cannot be rewritten wholesale as the work of the current regime. It is the outcome of a far longer process, driven both by civil society actors and by successive governments.

Under Ibrahim Traoré, memory becomes an instrument of state

Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of the Sankarist figure was transformed into a doctrine of state. Sankara’s name served to legitimise a power born of a coup de force, before being gradually held at a distance once that power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first the claim to Sankara, then the request that comparisons with him cease.

Above all, the vocabulary itself has changed. Sankara is no longer presented merely 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 in the political and historical narrative of contemporary Burkina Faso. The mausoleum is presented by its promoters as an instrument for safeguarding and promoting his political legacy.

In other words, the memory is no longer simply preserved: it is organised, scripted and institutionalised.

And this raises a further question: when a state formally appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of his family’s moral right to contest the way that memory is arranged?

What the family requested, and what it was given

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. Circumvented under Traoré.

The Sankara family never endorsed the staging of 2023, nor that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it stated that it felt ‘crushed by the force of public authority’. It refused to allow Thomas Sankara’s remains to be buried at the very site of his assassination, judging that a place so heavily charged could not serve as a site of reconciliation. It asked for a space that would unite rather than divide. The state overrode that request.

The alternatives put forward in February 2023

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

The family explained at the time that its various attempts to reach a compromise had gone unanswered, and asked the president of the Transition to suspend the decision.

The reburial of 23 February 2023

Despite that opposition, the reburial went ahead on 23 February 2023 at the memorial site. The absence of Mariam Sankara from the ceremony was widely noted across Burkina Faso.

That detail is far from trivial. It created a symbolic fracture that persists today: the state organises the public memory of Thomas Sankara, while his family contests part of the manner in which that memory is staged.

Pan-africanism, public trust and the cost of an official narrative

Whether the intention is to use Sankara to shore up legitimacy, or to smother him in order to erase an inconvenient counter-model, the outcome 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 here that is difficult to overlook. 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, his family says it was confronted with a decision by public authority that it had not sought.

The paradox becomes even more striking when that memory is mobilised in the name of pan-Africanism. Political leaders, activists, intellectuals and public 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, after all, should not be reduced to a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also examine how the individuals, families and communities concerned are associated with decisions taken in the name of their memory.

The man behind the icon

For the risk, in turning Sankara into a continental icon, is that the real man disappears behind the historical figure. The husband vanishes behind the revolutionary. The father vanishes behind the national hero. The assassinated man vanishes behind the pan-African symbol.

And with him gradually disappears the woman 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 is useful for as long as he serves a purpose. His family continues to pay the price.

The question, then, is no longer simply how Burkina Faso honours Thomas Sankara. It is whether, by converting him into state heritage and a pan-African icon, the country is still willing to listen to those who lived his story before it became an official account.

For a genuinely reconciled memory is not measured by the number of monuments erected, the cannon shots fired or the list of dignitaries present at a ceremony. It is also measured by a state’s capacity to listen to those whose grief precedes the ceremonies.

And on that ground, the Sankara file remains far from closed.