At a Glance
The Burkinabè Left and the Politics of Theory
The radical political culture from which Valéré Somé emerged was a specific product of the late colonial and early independence period in Upper Volta — a culture shaped by the student movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, by the influence of French Marxist theory on the educated class of a francophone country, and by the specific experience of one of the world's poorest countries watching its poverty reproduce itself through a succession of governments that all claimed to be working for its alleviation and all failed to deliver meaningful change.
Upper Volta's radical left in the 1970s was not large, but it was serious and divided — as Marxist lefts in small countries almost always are, between organisations that differed on questions of strategy, on the relative importance of the peasantry versus the working class, on the relationship between national liberation and socialist transformation, and on the appropriate attitude to the military as a political actor. The Organisation Communiste Voltaïque, the Ligue Patriotique pour le Développement, and other groupings had distinct positions on these questions and maintained the sometimes intense internal debates that characterise intellectual political traditions everywhere.
Somé navigated this world with a combination of political conviction and intellectual seriousness that prepared him for the more practical demands of participating in a revolutionary government. His Marxist formation gave him analytical tools — the vocabulary of class analysis, of mode of production, of imperialism and dependency — that he brought to his understanding of Upper Volta's specific condition. But he was also, like the best Marxist intellectuals, attentive to the ways in which the general framework needed to be specified and modified in the light of particular historical circumstances, and his knowledge of Burkinabè society and politics gave his theoretical work a grounding that purely abstract Marxism lacks.
The Military-Civilian Alliance: Theory Meets Governance
The decision to build the CNR as a military-civilian alliance was one of the most politically significant choices of the revolution's formation, and it reflected Sankara's understanding that military governance alone — without the intellectual resources and organisational capacities of the civilian left — was likely to reproduce the pattern of Upper Volta's previous coups. What distinguished the 4 August 1983 intervention from its predecessors was precisely the presence of civilian organisations whose political programme gave the coup a content that the previous interventions had lacked.
The civilian organisations brought several things to the alliance. They brought theoretical frameworks for understanding Burkina Faso's political economy — the analysis of neo-colonialism and dependency, the understanding of the colonial commodity export structure, the account of how international financial institutions perpetuated African underdevelopment — that the military officers, however politically committed, often lacked in systematic form. They brought mass organisational experience and cadres who could be deployed in the CDR system and in the mass political education work the revolution required. And they brought a tradition of intellectual debate and self-criticism that was, at its best, a counterweight to the military tendency toward hierarchy and command.
Somé's participation in this alliance placed him at the intersection of theory and practice in ways that were both valuable and difficult. The theoretical clarity he brought was an asset; the gap between theoretical clarity and the messy realities of governing a poor country under significant external pressure was a constant source of tension. The revolution's programme looked cleaner in its theoretical statement than in its implementation, and the intellectual's role in that gap — acknowledging the limitations while maintaining the commitment — required a kind of intellectual honesty that not everyone in the CNR consistently displayed.
Reading the Revolution From Inside: What L'espoir assassiné Argued
The book that Somé published in 1990 — Thomas Sankara: l'espoir assassiné — was a remarkable document precisely because it was written by someone who had been a participant rather than an observer, and who brought to his analysis both the insider knowledge that participation provided and the critical intelligence that the analysis required. It was not, as he was at pains to establish, a work of hagiography — the kind of uncritical celebration that the political traditions surrounding martyred leaders typically produce. It was an attempt to understand what had actually happened, why, and what it meant.
The analysis of the revolution's achievements was substantial and specific — the vaccination campaigns, the literacy programme, the land reform, the railway, the women's liberation programme were all given their due as genuine transformations that had improved the lives of ordinary Burkinabè people in measurable ways. Somé did not minimise these achievements or treat them as incidental to the revolution's significance. But he also did not stop there, and the sections of the book that dealt with the revolution's internal tensions and its failures were equally important.
The most significant of the tensions he identified was the one between the revolution's democratic rhetoric and its actual governance practices. The CDR system was supposed to be an instrument of popular participation — a mechanism through which ordinary citizens could engage with the governance of their communities and through which the revolution's direction could be shaped by mass input rather than determined from above. In practice, the CDRs often functioned more as instruments of social control than as genuine participatory structures — channels through which the CNR's directives were transmitted downward rather than through which popular views were transmitted upward. The gap between the aspiration and the reality was real, and Somé acknowledged it without pretending it was inevitable.
The analysis of the Sankara-Compaoré relationship was perhaps the most politically sensitive part of the book — written while Compaoré was in power in Burkina Faso and while many of those who had been associated with Sankara were still alive and vulnerable. Somé argued that the divergence between the two men had been building for years before the coup, and that it reflected genuine political differences about the pace and direction of the revolution rather than merely personal rivalry. Compaoré's greater willingness to accommodate external pressure, his more pragmatic attitude toward the revolution's more confrontational stances toward France and international financial institutions, his different assessment of what the Burkinabè political situation required — these were real political differences that made the coup, in retrospect, less surprising than it had seemed at the time.
The Question of Democratic Institutionalisation
One of Somé's most important analytical contributions was his identification of the failure to build genuine democratic institutions as the revolution's deepest structural weakness. The revolution had mobilised mass participation — through the CDRs, through the women's organisations, through the political education programme — but it had not created the institutional structures that would have made this participation durable. The CDR system was an instrument of the CNR government rather than an autonomous structure of popular organisation; it depended for its political character on the CNR's continued commitment to its original programme, and when the CNR was replaced by a government with different commitments, the CDR system was easily converted into an instrument of the new order.
The lesson Somé drew was not that revolutionary governments should not mobilise mass participation — quite the contrary — but that mass participation without institutional form is vulnerable to reversal in ways that genuinely institutionalised popular power is not. A revolution that builds autonomous popular institutions — trade unions, women's organisations, cooperative structures, local governance bodies — that have their own organisational life and their own capacity for collective action independent of the government creates a political landscape that is harder to reverse than one in which all the political energy is channelled through government-controlled structures. The Burkina Faso revolution had done the latter rather than the former, and the coup's ease was partly a consequence.
This analysis had direct implications for the broader questions of revolutionary strategy in Africa that the Sankara period had made urgent. The failure of so many African revolutionary and socialist experiments — not only in Burkina Faso but in Mali, Guinea, Tanzania, and elsewhere — could be read not as evidence that the goals were wrong but as evidence that the methods of building toward those goals needed to incorporate stronger institutional safeguards against reversal. The question of how to build a revolution that creates its own institutional defences — that embeds its achievements in structures that survive the replacement of individual leaders — was the central strategic question that Somé's analysis of the Burkina Faso experience raised.
The Intellectual's Responsibility in the Aftermath
The specific contribution of an intellectual who participates in a revolutionary government and then writes honestly about what happened is different from the contribution of either the partisan defender or the hostile critic. The partisan defender tells the story that confirms what the true believer already knows; the hostile critic tells the story that confirms what the opponent already believed. The honest intellectual who was inside the process and is willing to apply critical intelligence to an experience they genuinely valued produces something different and more useful: an account that can teach rather than merely vindicate or condemn.
Somé's work represents this kind of intellectual contribution to the history of the Sankara revolution. By acknowledging the revolution's failures alongside its achievements, by identifying the internal contradictions that made it vulnerable to the coup that ended it, by raising the structural questions about democratic institutionalisation that the experience made urgent — he created an analytical legacy that the political traditions inspired by Sankara's memory can actually learn from, rather than simply a mythology to celebrate.
This is not a lesser contribution than the more visible achievements of the revolution's political and military leaders. If the Sankara tradition is to be more than a mythology — if it is to inform the actual practice of African political transformation in the decades to come — it needs exactly the kind of honest, self-critical intellectual work that Somé has done. The revolution cannot be only a legend; it must also be a lesson. Making it a lesson — drawing from the experience the analytical conclusions that can guide future practice without losing the commitment that made the experience worth having — is the work of the revolutionary intellectual, and it is work that Somé has done with unusual seriousness and unusual honesty.
Completing the Region's Intellectual Portrait
Valéré Somé stands at the end of the alphabetical list of profiles in this region — the last figure in a roster that has moved from Abdoulaye Ly's archival dissection of French colonial commerce through Cheikh Anta Diop's civilisational arguments, the independence organisers, the ministers, the martyrs, and the revolutionaries, to arrive here: at the figure who attempts, in the aftermath of the most intense revolutionary experience of the region's post-colonial history, to understand what happened and why. That position — at the end of the story, doing the work of comprehension — is not less important than the positions of those who made the story happen. It is, in some ways, the most important position of all, because the story has no meaning unless it is understood, and it cannot be understood without the kind of honest, rigorous, self-critical analysis that Somé has devoted his intellectual life to providing.
The region — Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso — contains within it almost every major theme of the African independence era: the first mass parties, the labour movements, the cultural nationalisms, the philosopher-presidents and the revolutionary soldiers, the governments that honoured their promises and the governments that consumed their own, the assassinations and the imprisonments and the coups, the extraordinary moments of collective courage and the long painful reckonings with what those moments produced. Valéré Somé's place in this history is as the figure who tries to hold all of it in view at once — who refuses to let either the achievements erase the failures or the failures erase the achievements — and who insists that the honest account of what happened is the necessary foundation for understanding what still needs to be done.