There is a reason I don’t take people who post pictures of this guy (Captain Ibrahim Traore) on social media serious. People who have not done anything substantial to make a revolution in their own country will post a photo of Traore to feel like they are part of something. That picture they have posted is often their biggest participation in the ‘revolution’ in Burkina Faso.
Someone is lazily role-playing the great Thomas Sankara in a way that will distort the history of radical military coups, while setting up his country to be the fcuktoy of another imperialist country (Russia), and we all lap it up because we want some appeal to authority to back up our activism. Is it not better to just read up about why your own African country needs a revolution and defend that perspective with the strength of logic, rather than just latch on to the ‘appeal to Traore’ as the case for revolution in Africa? That’s really lazy, I think. As much as Traore’s touted successes look fraudulent, you are worse! Traore is faking a revolution for power, you are faking a revolution for clout. It’s really miserable.
We no longer have a choice than to call out performative radicalism without any substance and any actual and current ideological connection with the blood and sweats of either the poor and oppressed class of Burkina Faso who are groaning under Traore’s dictatorship or the poor class of your own country. We should no longer tolerate keyboard activism that identifies with “revolutions” from a privileged place where slogans are regurgitated but does no serious organizing work in relation to that ‘revolution’ or any other revolution. That’s not how we will change the world.
Despite all of our revolutionary efforts, those of us who hold these opinions cannot make these opinions publicly without reminding our own comrades (who we struggle side by side with daily against capitalism and imperialism) that we are still activists who oppose the imperialist domination of the West. We have to add that caveat no matter how much our work in real life makes the caveat unnecessary. This is because we have created a binary cult of opinion around Traore that anyone critical of the Burkina Faso “Revolution” must be working for the West. This is despite (and sadly because of) the obvious connection between Traore’s coup regime and Russian imperialism. We cannot be critical of the Burkina Faso coup for the sake of learning how to do better in our own country, without having to appease the defenders of Traore who would dismiss all of our continuing activism just because we are critical of Putin’s favorite toy. We would have to face allegations that we are trying to cancel Traore and dismiss any modicum of anti-imperialist sentiment that he may or may not represent. This article is first important for just this reason – to remove this mental block and firewall that has been created to deflate any meaningful intellectual engagement of the impact of the Traore coup regime.
We will get the chance to then engage the economic naivety of categorizing a coup as a revolution just because someone severed economic ties with the West, while continuing a trade relationship with other imperialist nations of the world who themselves have a trade relationship with the West. That naivety is funny and sad! Assuming without conceding that Traore was a revolutionary, we will then be able to talk about his shortsighted definition of liberation that categorizes simplistic nationalist separatism as anti-imperialism, because even (especially) revolutionaries should be able to engage positively with criticism.
Despite having read about Lenin and the Russian Revolution; despite having taken power during the later days of the Cold War, Thomas Sankara (that Traore is trying to cosplay) made sure to make clear his non-alignment and self-sufficiency position known in his opposition to imperialism. As regards Russia (then-Soviet Union), Sankara said in frustration once that “We don’t understand this wait-and-see policy, this lack of interest, this lack of urgency to help us on the part of those who should most logically do so.” (1) This was his condemnation of how Russian imperialism put their geopolitical military strategy over solidarity despite the revolutionary history of Russia. Ibrahim Traore, Sankara’s modern day caricature, said in July 2023 that, “Russia is part of the family for Africa because we have the same history.” (2) He does not even remember the ‘silence of our friends’ history of Russia in relation to his own country.
Beyond theories, anti-imperialism is less about cutting ties with some imperialist countries and more about building sustainable systems in your own country. Such sustainable systems will be built on democracy and inclusiveness unlike Traore who has said a democratic election “is not a priority” in Burkina Faso and who recently ended LGBTQ rights in Burkina Faso at the behest of the country’s latest imperialist – Russia. If anti-imperialism was about just cutting external ties, it should have been impossible for the West to overthrow Gaddaffi in Libya. It was the lack of democratic space in Libya that became the basis for the West (the “evangelists” of democracy) to justify the overthrowing of Gaddaffi and his ideas for the average Libyan. That shows that dictatorship is not sustainable. Transformation can only happen when the rejection of external imperialist domination and the building of sustainable internal systems happen simultaneously, not when the rejection happens before the building.
Economically, building sustainable systems will recognize global interdependence and also the need for diversification, both of which are impossible without a re-imagined non-imperialist relationship with other countries and an economy that’s sustained by democracy, respectively. These are the practical issues that we need to engage with on the Burkina Faso coup. It is those sustainable institutions that we build that will actually let Africa unite beyond the departure of European imperialists. It is what can make us survive our own internal ethnic, political and economic divisions.
This is not the 19th century. This is the 21st century. Imperialism is in its neoliberal stage, and it largely survives on networks of tech and finance corporations with a base in their own imperialist nations. With technology and financialisation of capitalism, imperialism can own any indigenous company in any part of the world without stress. This is the type of sophisticated layering we see in the war over mining in Congo. The extraction of the resources of Africa will continue through African faces and nothing will change. This is the practical way to see the revolutionary and intellectual fraud that the Traore coup is committing in Burkina Faso, alongside its “panafricanist” armchair revolutionary friends who made him the contemporary example of a Panafrican revolution.
