Epistemology and History in Central Ghana

Abstract

the West during the 1980s. But for Burkina Faso, France’s socialist President François Mitterand embodied Western intervention in Africa. When Mitterand was elected in 1981, Peterson explains, there was much overlap between his and Sankara’s political positions. Yet by 1983, ‘the Mitterand government was forced into an abrupt change of course, embracing Thatcherite austerity measures that seemed to disavow Mitterand’s entire program’ (82). On the opposite end of the spectrum of political engagement, Sankara’s relationship with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi unsettled Western powers and served as a source of military support for Burkina Faso against threats from neighboring countries, a basis for Sankara to claim political independence in foreign affairs, and he hoped, economic assistance. ‘Libya would support Sankara’s seizure of power through the provisioning of arms, but Sankara would also denounce Libyan intervention in Chad and rebuff Qaddafi’s efforts to expand Libyan influence in Burkina Faso’ (96). I found Peterson’s narrative of Sankara’s efforts to forge a radical foreign policy and strengthen diplomatic ties with nations of the Global South fascinating, but Peterson’s rapid tour through these events lacked clarity at times. It would have been more productive if he had widened his analytical aperture to position Sankara as a window into the decade’s changing political landscape, in order better to display for his readers how unique and tenuous the final bursts of revolutionary politics in the Global South were, from Grenada, to Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Burkina Faso, during the last decade of the Cold War. I wanted to know more about Sankara’s relationships with the leaders of these countries, particularly Grenada’s Maurice Bishop and Ghana’s Rawlings. They and Sankara were together part of the last generation of truly revolutionary anti-imperialists. That said, Peterson’s impressive book will be a foundational text for future studies of Africa during the late Cold War and the promise and perils of revolutionary change. Peterson has made a welcome and overdue contribution to the limited scholarship on Sankara and Burkina Faso, with a text that is in equal parts biography of Sankara and of Burkina Faso during the 1970s and 1980s. Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa is an outstanding example of how a skilled historian can explore a region’s history through the biography of one remarkable individual.