Revolution as a Mode of Study: The Radical Pedagogy of Thomas Sankara

• In Event: Transnational Political Thought

Abstract

When teaching Paulo Freire, I often find myself asking: Is a pedagogy of the oppressed possible within an institution designed to teach the next generation of elites? And, in this context, what is the purpose of teaching African anticolonialism? To engage these questions, I start with Meyerhoff’s (2019) argument that education—formal learning within a classroom—is but one particular “mode of study.” For Meyerhoff, a mode of study is “an activity in which people devote attention to the world” in order to alter one’s “capacities and dispositions for understanding the world,” and possibly also transforming it. An education-based mode of study, therefore, is one mode of study that privileges vertical ascension through grades, involves a romantic narrative of students confronting and overcoming obstacles, and is predicated on a separation between students and experts. If this is formal education, what mode of study do revolutionaries engage in? Focusing on the Burkina Faso’s revolutionary president, Thomas Sankara, I first investigate what education looked like within Sankara’s colonial and neo-imperial context, and what lessons Sankara learned from his schooling. I then examine the alternative modes of study he engaged in outside the classroom, as a soldier-student in Madagascar, in radical reading groups, and ultimately as president. Through a careful reading of his speeches, I then examine how lessons from his engagement in a revolutionary mode of study helped shape how he governed, and his anti-austerity and anti-imperial stances. I conclude by asking how reading Sankara can help answer the question: How does one teach Sankara in a neoliberal university? How does the impossibility of teaching a revolutionary within the university create a space to collectively think through how to understand, navigate, and political engage the neoliberal and imperial institutions of higher education we currently inhabit?

Author

• Isaac Kamola, Trinity College