In the 1980s, Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, offered one of the most lucid and forceful critiques of the international cooperation system. In a brief speech to the Western media, the African leader dismantled the official narrative: so-called development "aid" was no such thing. In his view, it was a structured mechanism to perpetuate the dependence of the countries of the global south.
Sankara did not speak from theory, but from experience. In his country, he denounced the fact that foreign aid - especially food aid - undermined self-sufficiency and dismantled local economies. He claimed that such assistance, far from solving structural problems, reinforced a logic of economic and cultural subordination vis-à-vis donors.
In his historic 1987 speech to the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa, he went further, calling foreign debt a new form of colonisation. "We cannot pay this debt," he said, demanding that African countries unite in refusing to pay what he saw as an illegitimate burden inherited from corrupt governments and foreign powers.
For Sankara, so-called international aid was a political tool. It did not respond to solidarity, but to strategic interests of domination. It fuelled imbalance and perpetuated a model in which Africa had to resign itself to being a supplier of raw materials and a recipient of externally imposed plans.
Decades later, his legacy lives on. Sankara's figure is today an unavoidable reference for emerging African leaders such as Ibrahim Traoré, also from Burkina Faso. Both embody a pan-Africanist current that demands sovereignty, dignity and a new way of relating to the world.
This video recovers, in just one minute, the relevance of that message. A testimony that, despite the time that has passed, continues to challenge those who still confuse dependence with help.
Source: historiadeafrica.com; youtube.com