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friday 20 december 2024
Automatically translated from Basque, translation may contain errors. More information here. 
Thomas Sankara is born in Burkina Faso
75
years ago
21 December 1949,
Burkina Faso is born Fason Thomas Sankara. He led the revolutionary government of this country in the 1980s and undertook profound social and political transformations. And he was an important political figure across the continent, also called African Che Guevara. He argued that the colonizing countries did not have to pay the foreign debt. He was murdered at the age of 38 in the state against him.
During the four years he was in charge he carried out, among others:
- He lowered his salary to $450 a month and signed that his assets were a car, four bikes, three guitars, a refrigerator and a broken freezer.
- He sold the entire fleet of government-owned Mercedes cars and chose the cheapest official car in Burkina Faso.
- In a few weeks, he vaccinated 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles.
- He founded 350 schools.
- In 1983 he launched the national literacy campaign. Then there were 13% of the citizens who could read and by 1987 their number increased to 73%.
- He divided the lands of the large landowners among the peasants.
- It banned forced marriages.
- To contribute to the desertification of the Sahel, 10 million trees were planted.
- It built roads and railways that articulated peoples across the state.
- Waiver of international economic aid with the following sentence: "Whoever feeds you controls you."
- He worked for the union of African countries that would face external debt, arguing that the poor and oppressed need not pay the rich and oppressive countries.
- The area in charge of supplying food for the army made it a supermarket open to all citizens and was the first supermarket in the country.
- He refused to use air conditioning in his office, arguing that it was a luxury that only a few rich burkists could afford.
Source:
Pello Zubiria, that red captain of Thomas Sankara Burkina Faso (ARGIA, 7 June 2007).
This year in history:
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1949-06-06
1949-08-19
1949-12-21
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