A young writer, Bikontine, travels across Burkina Faso to expose the deplorable and inhumane conditions to which the country’s people were subjected after the twenty-seven years of disastrous rule by Blaise Compaore, a contemporary and supposed friend of Thomas Sankara. The whole documentary Sankara Is Not Dead is essentially defined by the pain and extreme hardship that the citizens were enduring. The incidents in it are not isolated but intimately related to the African postcolonial states’ predicament, which is vividly described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Chapter 3 of that book expresses a frustrated tone of betrayal by emerging African leaders. It highlights the failure of postcolonial governments to purge colonial institutional structures and their logic of rule. It further condemns the introduction of cosmetic and reformist changes that fail to challenge the tenets of colonial rule fundamentally. Given that this chapter was reflecting on disappointing political events that took place more than fifty years ago, it can seem either coincidently or prophetically relevant today. Amid all the suffering and bleakness that the people of Burkina Faso faced, there was a glimmer of hope flickering unceasingly around an impeccable legacy established by Sankara within a mere four years of reign.This is a story characterized by despair but paradoxically sustained by hope drawn from the achievements of a charismatic leader. The whole journey is clearly depressing, as evinced by the shameful state of the schools, which are crowded and whose infrastructure is dilapidated, and the deplorable working conditions in which sugarcane workers, small-scale miners, cotton growers, and men digging trenches live and work. All the workingmen in the documentary are subjected to a labor-intensive environment that undermines their humanity (and is equivalent to slave labor). In addition, women seem also to be at the receiving end of a patriarchal domination that begets abuse and forces them to take desperate measures, such as aborting of babies or looking for measures to prevent pregnancies under an ailing health system.As Bikontine arrives in Bobo-Dioulasso, the economic capital of Burkina Faso, he visits the city hall, which was burned during the protest prior to the removal of Blaise Compaore. This visit seems to be charged with emotional pain—an anguish that seems explicitly to express the sense of the betrayal of a generation. Bikontine goes to Sankara’s grave, which looks totally abandoned and dilapidated, further reflecting a betrayed national legacy. Despite all this sadness, Sankara’s legacy still stands to remind people that better days are possible and that the present predicament can be overcome. Among the statues in the street is one of a woman with a clenched fist, which replaced one of a woman with a broom. According to the documentary, such changes marked some of Sankara’s achievements in the furtherance of gender equality.Among the interviews in the documentary, one that stood out for me was that of a man calling himself Zero-Zero who understood Burkina Faso’s problem as systemic. He said: “My declaration isn’t against a person, but a system, which is harming the whole society.” He also believed that there are men in Burkina Faso “who know that the system is murky, that it isn’t right, but, if you dare to speak out aloud, you risk your life”: “And that hurts a lot.” He further pointed out that, after Sankara, things got worse as the colonial regime and its oppression were reenacted. Zero-Zero’s reflection points to the same sentiments that are highlighted in Fanon’s lamentation of the postcolonial state. According to Zero-Zero, the citizens of Burkina Faso have been reduced to a desperate people who have lost all their dignity. One of the last places that, as a young writer, Bikontine went was called Kaya, where the environmental degradation was evident, the rivers dry and filled with silt. In addition to that, there was a long stretch of unused railway track. This description shows that the economic and social networks are no longer functioning, which is a further assault on the legacy of Sankara.Amid this sad reality, the oppressed people of Burkina Faso always find ways of coping—through, for example, soccer and dance. Theorists like James Scott have viewed these coping mechanisms as, not just ways of accepting one’s predicament or trying to cope with the hardships of life, but forms of implicit resistance, which Scott called infrapolitics. This type of politics constitutes “low profile forms of resistance which dare not to speak in their own name” (Scott 1990, 19). It is a politics of the preservation of one’s sanity, one that makes possible a safe place for the oppressed to develop their own norms. It is in these spaces that the dignity of the oppressed, as human beings, is kept intact against an inhumane status quo.Despite all these depressing episodes, the documentary still highlighted hope amid hopelessness, and the key to this hope was the vivid memory of Sankara’s presidency, personality, convictions, and rule. Even though Sankara was dead, his prominence was unabated. Hence, protests in anticipation of the glorious days of his rule constituted the central theme of the documentary. This is not surprising because, when Sankara took over the presidency, he changed the name of the country from the Upper Volta, which was characterized as a land of people who are submissive to the dictates of the colonizers, to Burkina Faso, which means the land of the upright people. This transition signified a new state/country of “people who are convinced, not conquered, not people who are submissive and who suffer their fate.” This was not just a process of name changing but a significant clean break from colonial domination and subjugation. This clean break is expressed by one of the commentators in the documentary in response to the visit after the fall of Blaise Compaore of the French president, who argued that Burkina Faso citizens do not need to be saved by the French but that they “need to build [themselves] from bottom up for us to fly.” The same attitude reflected in the name Burkina Faso as wished by Sankara was expressed by Zero-Zero when he argued that he was no longer afraid of the intimidating tactics of those who fail to rule because “someone must be ready to talk about what is wrong so that others can aspire to freedom.” His courage is inspired by the sacrifice Thomas Sankara made to save the lives and dignity of Burkina Faso and its people. He lamented: “[When] Sankara died the country got off to a false start, and we are still on that same false start.”Sankara was the inspiration behind the sporadic protest for justice, despite Blaise Compaore’s attempt to discredit his legacy. Sankara’s prominence in Burkina Faso is overwhelmingly evident through his books and regalia sold in most parts of the country, as evinced by the documentary. This is further supported by the widely broadcast, iconic speech in which he declared the need for an independent Africa (see Thomas Sankara Speaksn.d.). In it, he openly declared that goods should be produced in Africa, processed in Africa, and consumed in Africa by Africans: “Let us produce what we need and consume what we produce rather than importing. Burkina Faso has come here to show you cotton fabric produced, woven, and sewn in Burkina Faso, to dress Burkina Faso. My delegates and I are dressed by our weavers and peasants. Not a single thread has come from Europe or America. I am not a fashion model. I simply want to say that we must accept to live African. It’s the only way to live free and with dignity.”As documented, Sankara’s unmatched achievements during his four-year reign as president tell a true and unique story of a successful ideal postcolonial state, something that Fanon alluded to in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon advocates for the formation of a true postcolonial state that is distinct from the nature and form of the colonial logic of rule. The process of decolonization propagated by Fanon suggests a clear break from the oppressive colonial regime. Sankara’s resounding success exemplifies an ideal postcolonial state proposed by Fanon as reflected by a true transitional process from the colonial Upper Volta to the postcolonial Burkina Faso. It also resembles Mahmood Mamdani’s idea of the postcolonial transition (beyond a bifurcated state), which constitutes both deracialization and detribalization, which most, if not all, so-called postcolonial African states failed to achieve (see Mamdani 1996/2017). A milestone achieved by Sankara, such as transferring the land from the custodianship of the traditional leaders to that of the farmers and peasants, is an achievement difficult to discern, especially in a postcolonial African environment that keeps on failing the people.Those who killed Sankara forgot to realize that his legacy will remain immortal in the memory of the people of Burkina Faso. This documentary refuses to accept his death and insists that he is still alive.