Thomas Sankara by Ernest Harsch

Author:Ernest Harsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ohio Short Histories of Africa
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

6: Development for the People

Sankara’s vision of Burkina Faso’s economic transformation was a basic one: improve the lives of its people. When the US magazine Newsweek asked him how a poor country like his could develop, he did not lay out a sweeping agenda of industrialization or land redistribution, as the interviewer might have expected from someone who spoke of revolution. Sankara talked instead about building irrigation dams to help grow more food, constructing schools and health clinics, and setting up networks of small stores throughout the countryside so that villagers could secure their daily necessities. “Our economic ambition,” Sankara explained, “is to use the strength of the people of Burkina Faso to provide, for all, two meals a day and drinking water.”

Most people in richer countries might take for granted access to safe drinking water and more than one meal a day. But in Burkina Faso that was indeed a revolutionary notion.

When I visited the northeastern region of Yatenga, on the edge of the Sahara Desert, it was obvious just how painstaking and incremental economic and social development would be. Even on the outskirts of Ouahigouya, the regional capital, the ground was hard and sunbaked, covered here and there by patches of sandy soil that could support little more than a few shriveled stubs of grain. Only an infrequent jagged tree or parched brown bush dotted the landscape. Yet Traoré, a local farmer, had been able to harvest a modest crop of millet and sorghum a few months earlier. He showed off the rows of rocks that he and his two brothers had piled up along the contours of the land to slow soil erosion and retain crop debris, a new technique he had just learned to marginally improve fertility. Not far from Traoré’s farm there were some new wells, a few hand pumps, and numerous small dams and channels to capture and direct water on the rare occasions when it did rain. A few miles farther away the scenery turned unexpectedly green. Farmers tended gardens of carrots, okra, cabbage, and other vegetables. A nearby water reservoir built a couple years before provided the irrigation.

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