Memoirs for popular reading

Had a nice chat this evening with Senegalese professor Babacar Fall, who was kind enough to give me a copy of a book he had published, Dialogue Avec Abdoulaye Ly, which is a transcription of a series of interviews done by Fall and some of his students, as part of an oral history project. Just had time tonite to read the introduction and skim through the contents... very nice job all around. Fall and I chatted about how much in demand memoirs are by the reading African public. I wish there were more of them. Oddly, last night in the hotel I could not sleep so I was watching Havana, with Robert Redford. Dreadful movie. But it got me thinking about what had happened to Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who fled Dec. 31, 1959. Turns out he went to Spain and wrote his memoirs! I love the title of one: To Rule is to Foresee. Hmmm. He surely must have been aware of how the title would "play"? Was it a work of self-criticism?

More on Thomas Sankara's speeches

I continue to read the speeches of Thomas Sankara, revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso from 1983-87. An interesting speech he gave in 1984 was at the inaugural session of the People's Revolutionary Courts. He argued that bourgeois justice was a sham, because it favored those in power. For example,

In a society such as ours, here the population is 95 percent illiterate and held in obscurantism and ignorance by the ruling classes, bourgeois law , defying all common sense, dares assert that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

The alternative? Some kind of informal and educational people's justice. he does not in the speech explain how this justice is to get by without written rules, nor how such written rules would once again quickly become the mechanism by which the powerful evaded the law. Sankara was a broad-brush thinker, operating in a small country; he seemed to think that the twenty of them who were in charge could basically make all the decisions about everything. For them, Burkina was like a medium-sized city. A firm hand could easily "master" order and justice. His rhetoric of people's justice I take to be basically rhetoric. If it were not rhetoric, he would at least have devoted some thought to what it would mean to have "people" judging complex cases. Did he think a tailor could investigate the complex financial transactions of a bank? Sankara was silent on these matters.

Another speech by Thom Sank

Sankara was a big reader, and largely self-taught. His second major speech was the radio address given on August 4, 1983 when his comrade Blaise Compaoré (who was to kill him, in 1987) freed him from arrest (the internal dynamics of the Voltaic army were very complicated!). For all the lament over Sankara's death in 1987 a the hands of Compaore, it should not be forgotten that he helped do the same thing to his former colleague, Colonel Gabriel Somé Yoryam, who was killed on August 9, 1983.

Anyway, back to the speech. My favorite line is about the traitors and betrayers of the nation, leaders of a "submissive and groveling regime"... imagine hearing this as a fifteen year old in Ouagadougou at night: "You know these individuals, because they fraudulently worked their way into the history of our people." The rest of the speech simply says that they are in power and will not do anything rash.

Two weeks later Sankara gave a news conference. The first part focuses on the personality of Sankara, that is, questioners try to ask whether he is in charge, whether this is what he wanted, and Sankara modestly denies much responsibility. He tries to blame the troubles of the past 9 months on Somé Yoryan. H then goes on to affirm a revolutionary character to the new military regime. He dichotomizes: either one is a revolutionary, or a counterrevolutionary to be battled.

A month later on October 2, 1983, Sankara gives the famous "Discours d'Orientation Politique", supposedly largely written by Valère Somé. The speech is thrity pages long... must have taken a couple hours to read. More on that later.

Thomas Sankara speaks

I'm writing a book review on a new edition of Thomas Sankara Speaks, from Pathfinder Press, which publishes revolutionary texts and is run by Mary-Alice Waters, a Trotsky-ist kind of person if you know what I mean...

Now, I was more Buenaventura Durruti than Andrés Nin, but who wants to talk about "old washed up terrorists" from 70 years ago? Anyway, reviewing a book of speeches involves basically making political critique, so I felt like I should be up-font about my background. Since I am an economist, albeit of the anthropological do-gooder variety (have you been reading this blog?) I get fairly impatient with meandering three hour speeches in the hot sun from the maximum leader. You can anticipate where I am going here in reviewing Sankara's speeches.

In the middle of what was a two year long struggle to the death for power within the Voltaic army (pitting Colonel Somé Yoryan against Sankara), on March 26, 1983, Sankara gave a speech whose title sends shivers down the spine, "Who Are the Enemies of the People?" Imperialism was trembling, Sankara affirmed, before the revolution that was unfolding in Upper Volta. (Sankara would rename the country Burkina Faso later that year.) But who exactly were the enemies of the people? A good speech, as is this, shouldn't be too clear, otherwise it becomes a list, like this:

1. Corrupt people who use public office for private gain
2. Politicians (he does not really explain why)
3. Forces of obscurantism
4. Unpatriotic people
5. Imperialism and neocolonialism... generally unnamed but presumably meaning France and the United States and the powers behind all oppression everywhere in the world that Sankara does not want to excuse (he does want to excuse Libya, the Soviet Union and Cuba) who are powerful enough to stop the revolution in Burkina.
6. And towards the end in what seems to be a throwaway line, people with diplomas (who are lumped together with "owls with the shady look in their eyes", "fence-sitting chameleons", and "lepers who know only how to knock things over" (unkind!))

Are these really the enemies of the people in the sense of requiring analysis and elucidation? Corrupt politicians? Who is in favor of them? Burkina at the time had been ruled for about 15 years by the military ruler Sangoulé Lamizana, and to judge by Lamizana's simply-written if troubling memoirs published a few years ago, Lamizana was not a diploma-holder, not a politician, not a force of obscurantism, not a corrupt person (to any large degree), and not a "shady owl"... so what was he: a supporter of French "status quo" in West Africa, basically.

Are there other enemies of the people? Now, I want to give Sankara the benefit of the doubt: he remains a charismatic and much-loved figure in Burkina Faso. He was murdered in a tragic and poignant way by his comrade in arms Blaise Compaoré in a coup in 1987. But still, I find his analysis insufficient. I can think, in hindsight, of four "enemies of the people" who were obvious to anyone in 1983:

1. Dogmatic leftists who insist on the primacy of ideological debates that bear little relationship to the realities and pragmatic governance needed in a country like Burkina Faso.
2. Urban elites who use their power to strike in Ouagadougou to ensure more comfortable living standards for themselves (better roads, schools, hospitals, parks) than the 80% rural population.
3. Traditional chiefs and rulers who brandish authority solely by virtue of their inherited status; surely such persons need to be immediately demoted and delegitimized, regardless of the cost. What egalitarian society can allow such privilege by birth, completely decoupled from any pretense of merit, to persist?
4. Men. It took Sankara four years before he gave his famous speech on the status of women, but gender issues had been the subject of political discourse for decades in colonial Upper Volta.

Sankara is unable to engage in clear dialogue on these points in this most important speech. What does that say about his revolutionary heart? It tells me he preferred oration to illumination. A politician, in other words.

The House at Sugar Beach

Helene Cooper's memoir has been widely promoted; I read about it in Entertainment Weekly (don't ask) and I just saw something saying it was a Starbuck's promoted book. Hey, it's OK. It is written in a breezy informal reporter's style. Much of it is frivolous fluff (a little too much about her clothes, and the globalizing pop culture she grows up in- Michael Jackson and romance novels). Since her childhood is in Liberia, there are truly horrific scenes. Would be a good book for an African politics class; bringing that personal/political mix that is so potent when learning. If you want to read a memoir both searing and literary though, then I recommend Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.