October 4, 1984: The Sankara speech that shook the UN

On October 4, 1984, 34-year-old Thomas Sankara, President of the National Council of the Revolution of Burkina Faso, took the podium at the 39th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He spoke for about forty minutes on behalf of a country of seven million people, among the poorest in the world.

Two months earlier, on August 4, 1984, Upper Volta had become Burkina Faso, the "land of upright men" in Moore and Dioula, on the first anniversary of the coup that had brought Sankara to power. The program was in the name: to break with the colonial legacy, even in vocabulary.

An unvarnished assessment

At the podium, Sankara did not plead; he laid out the facts. According to the text published by thomassankara.net and the translation by World-Outlook, he cited a 98% illiteracy rate, an infant mortality rate of 180 per 1,000 births, a life expectancy of 40 years, and one doctor for every 50,000 inhabitants.

He refused, however, to treat this as a fatality or a call for charity, linking these figures to history: the slave trade, colonization, and then aid mechanisms that, according to him, maintained dependency. Hence his call for a new international economic order. "Only struggle liberates," he summarized.

A platform for the causes of the Global South

His remarks went far beyond Burkina Faso: Sankara defended the ANC against apartheid, the rights of the Palestinian people and those of Western Sahara, demanded an end to the veto power of the major powers, and dedicated a long passage to the emancipation of women, a condition for the revolution.

Actions followed: bans on forced marriage, dowries, and female genital mutilation; approximately two million people vaccinated between 1983 and 1985; ten million trees planted in fifteen months; and more than 700 kilometers of railway laid without foreign money during the "battle of the rails." On July 29, 1987, before the OAU in Addis Ababa, he would call on African states to collectively refuse to pay the debt.

A debated legacy, a living memory

Assessments differ: 98% illiteracy before the UN in 1984, but literacy rates rose from 13% in 1983 to 73% in 1987 according to encyclopedic sources, an estimate debated by historians. The infringements on freedoms during those four years, including special courts and muzzled unions, are also part of the record.

Sankara was assassinated on October 15, 1987, in Ouagadougou along with twelve of his companions. On April 6, 2022, a Burkinabe military court sentenced Blaise Compaoré, tried in absentia, and two co-defendants to life imprisonment.

Key takeaways

On October 4, 1984, Thomas Sankara transformed the report of his country's poverty into an indictment of the global economic order. His speech proves that an African voice can impose its narrative on the most listened-to platform in the world.