Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man

Doc Watchers - Curated by Hellura Lyle

Dir. Robin Shuffield, 2006, 52 min

Sankara, a charismatic army captain, came to power in Burkina Faso, in 1983, in a popularly supported coup. He immediately launched the most ambitious program for social and economic change ever attempted on the African continent. To symbolize this rebirth, he even renamed his country from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, “Land of Upright Men.”  This film offers a detailed history of Sankara’s  revolutionary program for African self-reliance as a defiant alternative to the neo-liberal development strategies imposed on Africa by the West, both then and today.