I noticed her then, tall, elegant woman dressed completely in black, except for a soft kinte design scarf clinging to the back of her head with the ends loosely knotted near her neck. She wore no jewellery except a plain gold band on her left hand and a hint of gold that glinted about her neck as she moved.
We boarded the plane and met again in the aisle. We smiled and nodded a greeting without speaking as we waited. A man in the seat in front of us was wrestling his hand luggage into the overhead locker when there was a loud crash and a two litre bottle of sticky red syrup emptied onto the two seats we were about to occupy. The cabin steward consulted with one of his colleagues before showing us discretely to the first class cabin.
We finally sat, still together, but now in first class, silently celebrating our good fortune. After take-off I turned to discretely look at her but already she seemed to be completely absorbed by her book. I stared out the window wishing I had picked up a magazine from the front of the cabin.
When the meal was served she set her book aside, and turned to me. “You have sadness in your eyes,” she spoke with a soft French accent, concern in her voice. “I have sadness in my heart too.” I imagined my reply would lead to a polite but stunned silence but instead we began to talk. I told her of my betrayal and my heartbreak. I noticed that she too had great sadness in her face.
“And you? Do you have a husband, or a story?” I ventured.
She let out a sigh and leant back. She opened a heart shaped locket that hung discretely around her neck, hidden below her collar.
“Yes, I have a husband…but”
The colour drained from my face as I recognised the handsome man staring back from the locket
“Thomas Sankara!”
The woman smiled – she could not disguise that she was pleasantly surprised that I recognised him – he had died 18 years before this meeting. She snapped the locket closed and tucked it safely back near her heart.
For many years I had worked in a bookshop in Africa. We once received a consignment of books from a small left-wing publisher in Brick Lane, including a volume of Thomas Sankara’s speeches and writings. Large colour pictures of a disarmingly handsome young soldier in a red beret accompanied the books as promotional material, together with a pile of postcards. At the time his was the name on every one’s lips. Mandela was still in jail and Sankara was our African Che Guevara. He had liberated his country and soon he would come to liberate ours.
Soldiers from the army arrived in a Bedford truck and bought his books and their eyes shone with pride. He was the kind of man that many would follow to the ends of the earth and beyond.
There was great sadness and shock when he was brutally murdered, and disappointment when months later the man responsible, Blaise Campaore, visited our country to attend the Non-Alignment Movement Meeting without so much as a murmur of protest.
We despaired and we tried to cling to the memory of a man whose like we did not expect to see again in our lifetime.
I had so many questions.
“Madame Sankara, can I ask you….please will you speak to me of your husband?”
She smiled, pretending that remembering made her happy instead of breaking her heart. But she started speaking.
“Every once in a while someone is born into this world – someone who can change everything. My Thomas – he was one of those people. Ahhh! He was so handsome that women would fall at his feet – especially when he played in his band “Tout-à-Coup Jazz”. After we met and married I wanted him to settle down but in my heart I knew that he was not a man who could live quietly. He was a man who would not see old age but I could not think of that then.”
“I never wanted him to become involved in politics but he said politics was the blood in his veins. He was a radical socialist. He wanted to make things better for the ordinary people who suffered all their lives who lived without hope for themselves or their children.”
She was quiet for a while but I didn’t speak for fear of stopping her flow.
“You know he almost became a priest. If he had joined the priesthood instead of the army I am sure he could have been the first African Pope” She laughed.
“He was already political when we met. I suppose I can understand why – in those days Upper Volta as it was called then was one of the most corrupt countries in Africa – and one of the poorest. No one in the world seemed to care how the people suffered. No one except Thomas.”
“I lived in fear – everyone who truly loved him lived in fear because we knew that someone like him always lives in danger. He was head of the Commando Training Centre at 27 and after the military government was formed he was invited to join the cabinet. They were so shocked when he arrived at his first cabinet meeting on a bicycle – can you imagine – an African government minister on a bicycle!! But that involvement did not last long as he said he couldn’t stomach the way the government wanted to oppress the workers. He resigned.”
“Thomas told me the people had no strength to struggle on their own that was why military intervention was needed. After the coup at the end of 1982 he became Prime Minister for a few months. But he was too radical and he was dismissed and put under house arrest. He was very frustrated but for our sons and me it was a wonderful time. He was ours for the first time – no meetings, no politicking – he was all one hundred per cent ours.”
“I don’t know why we are a country of coup d’etat – but in August the following year he became president after the peoples revolution – thanks to Blaise Campaore – that man who covered his heart so well that we could not see what an evil man lurked inside him!”
“With African politics there is always too much meddling and fiddling and our country was no different. But Thomas worked feverishly to change things. Maybe he too knew his time would be limited. He spoke directly to the people not the chiefs. He tolerated no corruption no excesses. He built schools and hospitals not white elephants. And I know he made enemies every day.”
“The first thing he did was to sell off all the fancy government cars and we had a Renault 5 – do you know those little cars?!!! “ She laughed as she remembered. “The other politicians – they were so distressed without their Mercedes Benz, but the people could see he was a man of his word. And then do you know what he did? Every minister had to go and work in the villages – and he lowered their salaries too.
Some were not very happy. We too lived modestly, never had air conditioning, even when it was sweltering hot – he said he would enjoy only what others could also enjoy.”
“He ordered the whole capital was painted white – gleaming. He wanted the people to be proud of their capital. We had been living in the presidential palace a year when he renamed the country ‘Burkina Faso’ – the land where incorruptible and honest people lived. He even wrote the new national anthem – for he was a musician, remember. And how we sang! Those were the days of hope. Not everything was perfect. After so many years under military regimes we had forgotten how to live without brutality.”
“Thomas focussed on the people who had least. He campaigned to empower women. He once ordered a day of solidarity with women and all men had to go to the market and buy food for a day to know something of the lives of women. Even he went to the market that day and he prepared food for his children and me. But it went further than that. He banned female circumcision and did away with polygamy for he wanted women to take their rightful place in our history.”
“Our small poor little country was the first in Africa to run a mass measles campaign to vaccinate every single child – the Cubans sent doctors and nurses to help us – ah my husband!”
By now I was willing this journey to go on and on. She continued her eyes lighting up.
“He wasn’t a saint, but he believed that you couldn’t change things for the better and be a hypocrite. He was never like other presidents – he earned less than US$500 a month and we owned very little. There were no Swiss bank accounts, no harems of women, no champagne and caviar. I tried to treasure every single minute of every single day I had with him. I lived in fear but he did not.”
“I know they say those who live by the sword die by the sword – but in spite of everything he was a gentle man.”
She was silent once more as she gathered her strength for the most painful part of her story.
“Ohh – that day” she shuddered, “That terrible day. “
“The night before I had a dream and it was full of darkness and fear. In the night we heard some shooting from a distance. When Thomas told me he wanted to go and defend the revolution with his people, I begged him not to leave the house. But he insisted that he had to be facing the same risks as any other of his people. We kissed our last goodbye and he left, his face was wet with my tears. I somehow knew I would never see him alive again.”
“In the end he was taken outside the city and shot dead on the orders of a man who called him a friend – what friend would do that? Imagine – one of Africa’s finest sons! His body was tossed into a hole but his people came to mourn him, calling for him. They said that no matter what he was always with them. The government grew frightened of what they had done and they made a better grave – as if it made any difference to Thomas by then.”.
“When the news came I drove in a Renault 5 to the airport with my children and we left. I could not stay. I never wanted to see the eyes of those who had killed my husband, I never wanted to hear their false words of comfort, and I was in fear of my life too. Things can get unpredictable very quickly in Africa. That terrible man reversed all the good that Thomas did. I heard he bought himself a jet to travel in. He is a very rich man now – but the people, they are poor and without hope again.” “ So I left the land that he loved with all his heart.”
She was quiet now, her emotions spent and a deep sadness engulfed us both as she mourned for her life’s companion, her soulmate. I thought of Africa – and how we still wait for the one who will lead us from the darkness of the forest to the light of the savannah.
The plane was descending now. I gave Madame Sankara my card. She scribbled her telephone number and address on the back of a Sankara postcard. We embraced. When I turned the paper over later it read ‘I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.”
When I arrived back in London I found this quote on the Internet.
‘I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organisation we deserve victory… You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.’
And I wept for Mariam and Thomas Sankara and for all that we Africans have lost.
Post published in: Arts