Sankara mausoleum’s impact on Burkina Faso: a family’s ordeal and a nation’s memory

A mausoleum for Sankara, consequences for a family

On 17 May 2025, the Burkina Faso authorities inaugurated the Thomas Sankara mausoleum at the former Conseil de l’Entente site in Ouagadougou, in a ceremony overseen by Captain Ibrahim Traoré and led by Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouédraogo. The event 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 were fired. Solemn speeches, revolutionary symbols, and an eye-shaped architectural design by Francis Kéré all combined to lend the event an international dimension.

It was there, before the cameras, that Nathalie Yamb was awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Étalon by the Burkinabè authorities. A strong tribute to a figure of contemporary pan-African activism, in the name of Sankara’s memory.

Neither Yamb nor any of the personalities present mentioned 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 not there. As in February 2023, during the reburial of the remains.

A global ceremony dedicated to Thomas Sankara, under the spotlight, where the man is celebrated without a glance for the woman who carried his name and his struggle alone for over thirty years.

But 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 intends 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 struggle?

It is precisely in this contradiction that the unease lies. Thomas Sankara has gradually moved from the status of victim of a political assassination to that of national hero, then 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 marginalising the voice of those who experienced his disappearance intimately?

From exile to official recognition: the long marginalisation of Mariam Sankara

Under Blaise Compaoré, the man 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. It was only after Compaoré’s fall in 2014 that she could return, and that the trial of the alleged assassins could finally open in 2021.

During those long years, Mariam Sankara nevertheless 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 was also part of the search for truth and justice around 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 moment when this memory finally becomes official, the voice of the one who defended it when doing so carried considerable personal risk seems to be relegated to the background.

Political instrumentalisation under successive regimes

Under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, Sankara’s official rehabilitation accelerated. The memorial project was launched. But in a context where the government was also seeking to woo Compaoré’s nostalgic electorate, going so far as to mention 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, originate with Ibrahim Traoré. The International Committee of the Thomas Sankara Memorial recalls that the project had been officially launched as early as 2 October 2016. It therefore went through several political sequences before culminating in the mausoleum inaugurated in 2025.

This clarification is important: the memorial’s history cannot be entirely rewritten as a work born with the current regime. It is the result of a much longer process, driven both by civil society actors and by different governments.

Under Ibrahim Traoré, the memorial became a mausoleum. The appropriation of the Sankarist figure turned into a state doctrine. Sankara’s name served to legitimise a power born of a coup, before being gradually distanced once power was consolidated. The shift is visible: first claiming Sankara, then asking that comparisons with him cease.

Above all, the transformation of vocabulary must be observed. Sankara is no longer presented merely as a former assassinated president or as the father of the 1983 revolution. He has become an official reference, a national hero, a central element of Burkina’s contemporary political and historical narrative. The mausoleum itself is presented by its promoters as an instrument for safeguarding and promoting his political legacy.

In other words, memory is no longer merely preserved: it is organised, staged and institutionalised.

And that is where another question arises: when a state officially appropriates the memory of a former leader, what becomes of his 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. Sidestepped under Traoré.

The family’s opposition and the 2023 reburial

The Sankara family never endorsed the staging of 2023 or that of 2025. As early as February 2023, it had declared that it felt “crushed by the force of public authority”. It had refused that Thomas Sankara’s remains be buried at the very site of his assassination, considering that this place, too heavily charged, could not be a place of appeasement. It had 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 had proposed several alternatives: the Dagnoën cemetery, the Jardin de l’Amitié or the Jardin Yennenga. They especially asked that the site of the murder remain a preserved historical space and not necessarily become the burial site.

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 trivial. It creates a symbolic fracture that remains today: the state organises Thomas Sankara’s public memory, while his family contests part of the modalities by which that memory is staged.

Whether one wants 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.

The paradox of a pan-African memory without its guardians

There is a historical irony that is difficult to ignore. Thomas Sankara had 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 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 personalities 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 should not, however, be merely a succession of speeches, symbols and ceremonies. It should also question the way individuals, families and communities concerned are associated with decisions taken in the name of their memory.

For the risk, by dint of turning Sankara into a continental icon, is to make the real man disappear 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, meanwhile, continues to pay the price.

The question is therefore no longer only how Burkina Faso honours Thomas Sankara. It is whether, by turning 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 ground, the Sankara file remains far from closed.