Freedom Can Be Won Only Through Struggle

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 feels the blow struck against any man, anywhere in the world”. Until now we have turned the other cheek. The blows were redoubled. The evil heart did not soften. 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.

We must state categorically that there is no salvation for our people unless we turn our backs on all the models that charlatans of all types have tried to sell us for twenty years. There is no salvation outside of this rejection. There is no development separate from a rupture of this kind. All those new intellectual giants who are emerging from their slumber – awakened by the dizzying rise of billions of men in rags, aghast at the threat of this hunger-driven multitude weighing on their digestion – are beginning to rework their speeches.

Rather than looking to us, they are once more anxiously searching for miracle concepts and new forms of development for our countries. A reading of the numerous publications of innumerable forums and seminars is ample illustration of this.

Far be it for me to ridicule the patient efforts of honest intellectuals who, because they have eyes to see, are discovering the terrible consequences of the devastation imposed on us by so-called specialists in the development of the Third World. My fear is to see the fruits of so much energy coopted by Prosperos of all kinds who – with a wave of their magic wand — spirit us back to a world of slavery dressed up in today’s fashions.

My fear is justified even more by the fact that the educated petty bourgeoisie of Africa – if not of the entire Third World – is not prepared to give up its privileges, either because of intellectual laziness or simply because it has tasted the Western way of life. Because of this these petty bourgeois forget that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous, theoretical debate, and they refuse to rise to the intellectual effort of conceiving new concepts equal to the murderous struggle that lies ahead of us. Passive and pathetic consumers, they wallow in terminology fetishized by the West just as they wallow in Western whiskey and champagne in shady-looking lounges.

Ever since the concepts of negritude and African Personality, now showing their age, the search for ideas that are genuinely new produced by the brains of our “great” intellectuals is in vain. Our vocabulary and our ideas come from elsewhere. Our professors, engineers, and economists are content to simply add colour – for often the only things they brought back with them from the European universities that produced them are their degrees and their velvety adjectives and superlatives!

It is both necessary and urgent that our trained personnel and those who work with the pen learn that there is no such thing as neutral writing. In these stormy times we cannot give today’s and yesterday’s enemies a monopoly over thought, imagination, and creativity.

Before it is too late – and it is already late – this elite, these men of Africa and of the Third World, must come home to themselves, that is, to their societies and to the misery we have inherited. They must understand that the battle for an ideology that serves the needs of the disinherited masses is not in vain. But they must understand, too, that they can only become credible on an international level by being genuinely creative – by portraying a faithful image of their people, an image conducive to carrying out fundamental change in political and social conditions and to wrenching our countries from foreign domination and exploitation, which leave us no other perspective than bankruptcy.

This is what we, the Burkinabe people, understood the night of August 4, 1983, when the first stars began to sparkle in the skies of our homeland. We had to take the leadership of the peasant revolts that were breaking out in a countryside driven wild by the advancing desert, abandoned and exhausted by hunger and thirst. We had to give direction to the rumbling revolt of the urban masses who were without work, frustrated, and weary of watching the limousines driven by estranged elites that take turns heading the government and offer them nothing but false solutions conceived by the brains of others. We had to give an ideological soul to the just struggles being waged by the popular masses as they mobilised against the monster of imperialism. We had to replace forever the short-lived brushfire of passing revolt with revolution, the permanent struggle against all forms of domination.

Others have explained before me, and others will undoubtedly explain again, the extent to which the chasm has widened between the affluent peoples and those whose only aspiration is to eat their fill and quench their thirst, to survive and preserve their dignity. BUT THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE CROPS OF THE POOR HAVE FATTENED THE RICH MAN’S CATTLE IN OUR COUNTRIES IS BEYOND IMAGINATION!

Homeland or death, we will triumph!

Source:
Thomas Sankara, “Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983–87”, Pathfinder, 1988.

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!🙏🏾✊🏾👊🏾