I speak not only on behalf of Burkina Faso… but also on behalf of all those who suffer… those millions of human beings who are in ghettos because their skin is black… those who have been massacred, trampled on and… confined to reservations… women throughout the entire world who suffer from a system of exploitation imposed on them by men… I wish to stand side by side with the peoples of Afghanistan and Ireland, the peoples of Grenada and East Timor… We wish to enjoy the inheritance of all the revolutions of the world, all the liberation struggles of third-world peoples. We swear that in future in Burkina Faso nothing will be done without the participation of the people themselves.
We want to democratize our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future… We believe that the United Nations should enable those countries affected by drought to establish a medium- and long-term plan to achieve self-sufficiency in food… We have established a vast house-building programme… and we are also building roads, small water collectors, and so forth. This is something that we, we the people of Burkina Faso, understood on that night of 4 August 1983, when the stars first began to shine in the heavens of our homeland… Instead of a minor, short-lived revolt, we had to have revolution, the eternal struggle against all domination… It must be proclaimed that there will be no salvation for our peoples unless we turn our backs completely on all the models that all the charlatans of that type have tried to sell us for 20 years. Now our eyes have been opened to the class struggle and there will be no more blows dealt against us. Thus to recognize our presence in the third world is, to paraphrase José Márti, to affirm that we feel on our cheek every blow struck against every other man in the world… Nobody will be surprised to hear us associate the former Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, with that despised rag-bag, the third world… We do so to affirm our awareness of belonging to a three-continent whole and to state, as one of the Non-Aligned Countries, our deeply felt conviction that a special solidarity unites the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa in the same battle against the same political traffickers and economic exploiters.
My only ambition is a twofold aspiration: first, to be able to speak in a simple language, the language of facts and clarity, on behalf of my people and, second, to be able to express the feelings of that mass of people who are disinherited – those who belong to what the world maliciously dubbed ‘the third world’ – and to state the reasons that have led us to rise up… I do not intend to enunciate dogmas here. I bring the fraternal greetings of a country covering 274,000 square kilometres, where seven million men, women and children refuse henceforth to die of ignorance, hunger and thirst even though they are not yet able to have a real life, after a quarter of a century as a sovereign state represented here at the United Nations. What has become of Sankara’s vision 35 years later? We reproduce an abridged version of the speech, followed by a reflection on Sankara’s words by Vijay Prashad, historian of Third World internationalism. In his speech, he argued for a New International Economic Order to improve the poor countries’ lot and spoke on behalf of all the oppressed across the world. Sankara was perhaps the last ‘Third World’ politician, a revolutionary Marxist who felt a ‘special solidarity uniting the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa’. In 1984, President of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara addressed the United Nations General Assembly.
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