Thomas Sankara

President of Burkina Faso for four years, and the man who gave the country its name.

He was born at Yako in Upper Volta on the twenty-first of December 1949, the son of a gendarme. He trained as an officer in Madagascar, where he watched a popular uprising bring down a government, and came home a revolutionary who played the guitar and rode a motorcycle.

He took power in a coup in August 1983 at thirty-three. In four years he renamed the country Burkina Faso - the land of upright people - and did more than most governments manage in twenty.

He vaccinated two and a half million children against measles, meningitis and yellow fever in a week. Literacy went from thirteen per cent to seventy-three. He planted ten million trees against the desert. He outlawed forced marriage, polygamy and female genital cutting, put women in his cabinet when almost nobody in Africa did, and told the men to go to market and cook for a day so they would understand.

He sold the government's Mercedes fleet and made the Renault 5 the official car. He refused to have his portrait hung in public buildings, saying there were seven million Thomas Sankaras. He cut his own salary to four hundred and fifty dollars a month and listed his possessions as a car, four bicycles, three guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer.

He told the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 that the debt could not be repaid and should not be, and that if Burkina Faso alone refused, he would not be at the next conference.

He was killed three months later by soldiers sent by his closest friend and deputy, Blaise Compaoré, who then governed for twenty-seven years. He was thirty-seven.

His wife Mariam and their two sons.