Thomas Sankara, political leader of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, was born on December 21, 1949 in Yako, a northern town in the Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso) of French West Africa. He was the son of a Mossi mother and a Peul father, and personified the diversity of the Burkinabè people of the area. In his adolescence, Sankara witnessed the country’s independence from France in 1960 and the repressive and volatile nature of the regimes that ruled throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

From 1970 to 1973, Sankara attended the military academy of Antsirabe in Madagascar where he trained to be an army officer. In 1974, as a young lieutenant in the Upper Volta army, he fought in a border war with Mali and returned home a hero. Sankara then studied in France and later in Morocco, where he met Blaise Compaoré and other civilian students from Upper Volta who later organized leftist organizations in the country. While commanding the Commando Training Center in the city of Pô in 1976, Thomas Sankara grew in popularity by urging his soldiers to help civilians with their work tasks. He additionally played guitar at community gatherings with a local band, Pô Missiles.

Throughout the 1970s, Sankara increasingly adopted leftist politics. He organized the Communist Officers Group in the army and attended meetings of various leftist parties, unions, and student groups, usually in civilian clothes.

In 1981, Sankara briefly served as the Secretary of State for Information under the newly formed Military Committee for Reform and Military Progress (CMRPN). This was a group of officers who had recently seized power. In April 1982, he resigned his post and denounced the CMRPM. When another military coup placed the Council for the People’s Safety in power, Sankara was subsequently appointed prime minister in 1983 but was quickly dismissed and placed under house arrest, causing a popular uprising.

On August 4, 1983, Blaise Compaoré orchestrated the “August Revolution,” or a coup d’état against the Council for the People’s Safety. The new regime which called itself the National Council for the Revolution (CNR) made 34-year-old Thomas Sankara president. As president, Sankara sought to end corruption, promote reforestation, avert famine, support women’s rights, develop rural areas, and prioritize education and healthcare. He renamed the country ‘Burkina Faso,’ meaning, “the republic of honorable people.”

On October 15, 1987, Thomas Sankara was killed with twelve other officials in a coup d’état instigated by Blaise Compaoré, his former political ally. He was 37 at the time of his death.

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  • asa_red_heathen [he/him]
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    10 months ago

    Within my own practice I interpret Hel as just one aspect of the afterlife, with Valhalla and Jotunheim being the other parts. So when you die three things happen, your conscious individual self dies, your body breaks down, and the memory of you fades. Each of these things correlates to different "realms" in the cosmology.

    long post time (note that this is all personal interpretation, I dont intend to present this as what the ancient Norse actually believed or what modern pagans should believe. Its just my own understanding)

    • Hel is the individual mind's resting place. During the last few minutes when your brain is still conscious but disconnected from reality, you experience yourself losing cohesion and becoming not alive. Your experience of Hel probably feels like it last a lot longer than it is, since its kinda like a dream.

    • Jotunheim is a bit of an odd choice but Ill explain. Jotunn are complex characters and not well defined. They can be physical manifestations of natural events and concepts, shapeshifters who take the forms of animals, or they can just be regular boogeymen-esque monsters. But overall I think the most important characteristic of what makes something a Jotunn is that its a thing that can be said to consume humans. (Logi, wildfire consumes all; Aegir and Ran, the sea and waves, consume those who die at sea; Elli, old age, consumes the lives of all men; and so on) So it tracks that Jotunheim would be a place inhospitable to human life, a place not strictly of death but of life that feeds on human death. Your body decaying after death is a part of this system, being consumed by rot and decomposing into nutrients that go on to feed other forms of life. Jörð, the Earth, is also a Jotunn and it is from her that we are born and it is to her that we must return.

    • And finally Valhalla/Valhöll is the part lf the afterlife that pertains to the part of us that connects to other people. We exist far beyond the limits of the meat and bone that makes our bodies. As part of humanity as a whole our connection to others, our actions in life, other people's perceptions of us, our "reputation" as it were, are all part of us. Once our lives are over these parts of ourselves remain, and that part is what it is to be in Valhöll. When we're remembered by our loved ones, or something we built or did continues to affect the world, our lives continue on in a small way. In this way Valhalla extends far beyond just "warriors who die in battle", though for those people the classic imagining of Valhalla as an eternal battle is a bit morbid, as, when we tell stories of their feats and death, we force their remnants to relive it over and over. An eternal battle, just like Valhalla. This aspect of our lives also connects humans to greater systemic entities, things that in their own way have a sort of life beyond the biological. These systems are, imo, what the Gods are, and so Valhalla connects us to Asgard.