Freedom Can Be Won Only Through Struggle
(Extracts from Thomas Sankara’s speech to the Thirty-ninth Session of the UN General Assembly on October 4, 1984).
“The truth of the righteous was trampled under foot. The word of Christ was betrayed and his cross was transformed into a club. They put on his robe and rent our bodies and souls asunder. They obscured his message. They westernized it, while we understood it as one of universal liberation. Well, our eyes are now open to the class struggle, and there will be no more blows.” – Thomas Sankara
No one should be surprised to see us associate the former Upper Volta – today Burkina Faso – with this despised ragbag called the Third World, a world invented at the time of formal independence in order to better perpetuate foreign control of our intellectual, cultural, economic, and political life.
We place ourselves within this world, while giving no credence to this gigantic fraud of history nor accepting the status of the “hinterland of the satiated West”. We do so to affirm our awareness of belonging to a tricontinental whole and to acknowledge as a Nonaligned country and with the full depth of our convictions that a special solidarity unites the three continents of Asia, Latin America, and Africa in a single struggle against the same political gangsters and the same economic exploiters.
In acknowledging that we are part of the Third World we are, to paraphrase Jose Marti, “affirming that our cheek
