Assassination
"Sankara’s assassins were guided by imperialism, which could not allow a man with the ideas and actions of Sankara to lead a country on a continent so exploited for hundreds of years by international imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonial governments that do their bidding. Sankara’s political ideas will endure, like those of Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, also assassinated by traitors at the behest of the empire."
— Ulises Estrada, a key organizer of Che Guevara's 1966-67 guerrilla mission to Bolivia
On October 15, 1987 Sankara was killed by an armed gang with twelve other officials in a coup d'état organised by his former colleague, Blaise Compaoré. Deterioration in relations with neighbouring countries was one of the reasons given, with Compaore stating that Sankara jeopardised foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighbouring Ivory Coast. Prince Johnson, a former Liberian warlord allied to Charles Taylor, told Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that it was engineered by Charles Taylor. After the coup and although Sankara was known to be dead, some CDRs mounted an armed resistance to the army for several days.
Sankara's body was dismembered and he was quickly buried in an unmarked grave, while his widow and two children fled the nation. Compaoré immediately reversed the nationalizations, overturned nearly all of Sankara's policies, rejoined the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to bring in funds to restore the “shattered” economy, and ultimately spurned most of Sankara's legacy.
A week prior to his death Sankara gave what would become his own epitaph, remarking that "while revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas."
Read more about this topic: Thomas Sankara