IBRAHIM TRAORE’S VIRAL Interview In Russia that Got Banned By Media
Captain Ibrahim Traore – The myth and the man
There is a man who is now so popular in many parts of Africa and the black diaspora that many people are comparing him to Liberation heroes of yore. Musicians are composing songs about him, and crowds are gathering in African and even European cities to hold rallies in his support. He reminds some people of another Burkinabe by the name of Thomas Sankara, who was young and handsome, with a swashbuckling attitude and a holstered pistol that made him a crowd puller anywhere he went. Nigerians of a certain age would remember what happened several years ago when Thomas Sankara visited Abuja for an African leaders’ Summit after the 1983 putsch that brought him to power. He had launched an ambitious social and economic reform programme and had become an icon of Pan-Africanism with his anti-France, anti-imperialist rhetoric. The geriatric African leaders with whom he was meeting were suspicious, not knowing what to make of this irrepressible stripling. Ladies crowded around him to take photographs and get a handshake with the young President, or just to bask in the penumbra of his presence.
There was great mutual admiration between Sankara and the radical Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, based on their shared ideology. Sankara was an avid listener to Fela’s incendiary music. Fela, in turn, was twice Sankara’s guest in Ouagadougou.
Almost predictably, it did not end well.
Soon afterwards, Sankara was assassinated, in a coup abetted by the old colonial power France. The groundwork he had laid to take his impoverished country away from France’s economic and cultural domination was promptly reversed.
