October 15, 1987

He was in a meeting at the Conseil de l'Entente in Ouagadougou on the afternoon of the fifteenth of October 1987 with a handful of advisers. He was thirty-seven years old and had governed the country for four years and two months.

A vehicle pulled up outside and armed men got out and opened fire on the building. Sankara is said to have told the people in the room with him to stay where they were - that it was him they wanted - and to have walked out with his hands raised. He was shot with twelve others.

He was buried the same night in an unmarked grave on the edge of the city, without a post-mortem. The death certificate said natural causes. His widow Mariam and their two sons left the country.

Blaise Compaoré, who had been his closest friend since Madagascar and his deputy since the revolution, took power that evening and held it for twenty-seven years, until a popular uprising drove him out in 2014. He was tried in absentia and convicted of the killing in April 2022 and sentenced to life. He lives in Ivory Coast.

The grave was opened in 2015. The remains were riddled with bullets.

Across west Africa, and beyond it, young people who were not born when he died wear his face on their shirts.