Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso

Early life and military academy

Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako, a town in the colony of French Upper Volta. His father was a gendarme, meaning that, as the son of one of the few African functionaries employed by the colonial state, he enjoyed a relatively privileged position and lived in a brick house in a posher area of town. Sankara applied himself seriously to his schoolwork and achieved good results, later advancing into secondary education. His parents wanted him to become a priest, but Sankara chose to enter the popular military, which was seen as an institution which could help discipline the bureaucracy and modernise the country.

Rosa Luxemburg: life and thought

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist theorist, political thinker, philosopher and socialist revolutionary. She was critical of both the Leninist and the more moderate social democratic schools of socialism. Luxemburg was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) before co-founding the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She was an ardent anti-war activist and had supported the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and the Spartacist uprising of January 1919. Soon after, government-sponsored paramilitary units captured and summarily executed her before throwing her body in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

Saddam Hussein was Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born on the 28th of April 1937 in Tikrit, Iraq. Before his birth, his father and older brother both died of cancer. This led Hussein’s mother to say that she was carrying “Satan”, and she even tried to have an abortion and commit suicide. In fact, ‘Saddam’ is a title which means “one who confronts”. Saddam’s mother didn’t want anything to do with him, so the future-leader was raised by his uncle, Khairallah Talfah, a nazi sympahist. It was he who made the statement “Three that God should not have created: Persians, Jews and flies”, which his nephew also lived by. Saddam studied law for three years before dropping out of university at the age of 20 to join the Ba’ath Party in 1957.