Thomas Sankara never needed a microphone to make a point. He had a signature look—a natty red beret pulled low over military fatigues—and he understood that style, in the right hands, is politics. Sankara was the radical, anti-imperialist prime minister of Upper Volta who, after his arrest in 1983 sparked street protests and a coup, emerged as president and renamed his country Burkina Faso, “the land of upright people.” He built a new national identity in his own image: he turned away from French, promoted local languages, preached economic self-reliance, and urged ordinary Burkinabè to take pride in themselves. In 1986, he famously lectured French President François Mitterrand on live television in a fiery speech broadcast on both sides of the Mediterranean, and the image of this handsome, angry young officer became iconic. He was called “Africa’s Che Guevara.” But in October 1987, he was murdered in a coup led by his former friend Blaise Compaoré, a man the old colonial power, France, quickly supported and propped up for decades. That potted history matters because Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s current president, is a man who has built an entire political career on the memory of Sankara. On September 30, thousands gathered in Ouagadougou’s Place de la Révolution to celebrate Traoré on the fourth anniversary of his own coup, and many saw him as the second coming of Sankara. Traoré is now arguably the face of contemporary African anti-imperialism—a meticulously cultivated image that, in truth, has almost nothing to do with his record of achievement.
Traoré came to power in September 2022, not as Sankara had, by being installed after a coup, but as the leader of a putsch himself. Within months, he had terminated Burkina Faso’s military accord with France, given French special forces one month to leave, and by June of this year severed all diplomatic relations with the former colonial power. He turned toward Moscow, and his actions fit a broader pattern across the Sahel: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have all swept away French influence, first with help from the mercenaries of the Wagner Group and later with the Russian state’s Africa Corps. But the Russia story is complicated. In April and May 2026, Africa Corps forces were humiliated in northern Mali by a coalition of Tuareg separatists and Islamist fighters, and the Malian defense minister was killed by a suicide bombing near Bamako. Ukraine, eager to hit Russia wherever it can, admitted to assisting the rebels, prompting Mali and Niger to cut ties with Kyiv, and Traoré to name Ukraine as part of Burkina Faso’s “map of enemies.” “We need to prepare,” he said. And yet it is not Moscow signing the most consequential economic deals with these juntas—it is Beijing. China has been quietly locking up access to the Sahel’s vast mineral wealth: lithium, gold, copper, zinc, bauxite, and uranium. Alarmed, the United States re-engaged, and in early 2026 Burkina Faso signed a nearly $150 million healthcare deal with Washington, in exchange, it seemed, for favorable access to minerals. Traoré presents his economic program as nationalist and self-reliant, increasingly taking over mining operations, cracking down on gold smuggling, and opening the country’s first gold refinery. The World Bank even reported growth: 5.3% in 2025, a shrinking fiscal deficit, and falling inflation. But economists attribute these gains to the global gold rally, favorable rainfall, and cheaper energy, not necessarily to visionary governance.
The darker story, however, is one of crushing repression. Human Rights Watch documented 1,840 civilian deaths between January 2023 and April 2025, more than 1,200 of them directly attributable to government forces. Even while acknowledging atrocities by Islamist militants, the group said the Burkinabè military’s actions “amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Traoré has banned over 100 civil society organizations, dissolved every political party, suspended the constitution, and made it clear that democracy, in his words, “isn’t for us.” Nowhere is the chill more acute than in the press. Reporters are forced into self-censorship just to survive, or into exile. “Burkinabé journalists have two options,” says Harouna Simbo Drabo, a disinformation analyst and director of programs at Faso Check, who fled Burkina Faso after threats on his life. “Either practice self-censorship or go into exile.” Since 2022, at least seven journalists have been forcibly conscripted into the army after criticizing the junta. Some have simply disappeared. Atiana Serge Oulon, editor-in-chief of L’Événement, is among the missing. As conditions deteriorate, the only information available to many Burkinabè is government propaganda, amplified by social media and Russian misinformation networks. The result is a closed information ecosystem in which reality is whatever the algorithm says it is.
That’s where Ibrahim Traoré’s true genius lies. He is not simply a military strongman; he is a pan-African leader built for a digital age, and his most powerful tool is the deepfake. His face is everywhere—on buses, in parks, on posters across West Africa. In Accra, Ghana, supporters cheer him at a presidential inauguration; the Ghanaian president joked that Traoré had stolen the show. Online, AI-generated videos show Traoré alongside Beyoncé, Rihanna, and even Pope Leo XIV, all supposedly endorsing him as a hero holding the line against the West. When a US AFRICOM commander criticized Traoré’s handling of gold reserves, a network of 165 Facebook accounts began repeating the same claim that Putin had sent special forces to foil an American assassination plot; the posts pulled in nearly eleven million views in ten days. One of the most persistent myths is that Traoré rejected IMF billions because he believes in Sankara-style self-reliance. Fact-checkers proved the story false—Burkina Faso actually negotiated a 48-month IMF loan program in 2023—but it is repeated constantly and believed widely, even by journalists. On a street in Accra, I met a bus driver named Kofi, who proudly showed me Traoré’s portrait on his bus. When I told him about exiled reporters, disappeared editors, and refugees, he said softly that “good things take sacrifice,” including the death of a free press. When I asked what good things, he pulled out his phone and showed me AI-generated videos of a smart city Traoré had supposedly built. The city was a fantasy, but Kofi believed in it because he had seen it with his own eyes—or thought he had.
The tragedy of this is that Traoré is genuinely adored by many ordinary Africans. In Ivory Coast, which hosts tens of thousands of Burkinabè refugees, at least 69,000 people have been granted refugee status. Yet when I traveled to Ghana and Ivory Coast, several sources who had fled Burkina Faso decided not to speak to me at all; one Burkinabè journalist helping me stopped responding the day after I arrived in Accra. Those who did talk refused to be named, terrified that accusations would reach Ouagadougou and hurt family left behind. In Abidjan, I met Oumar, a Burkinabè taxi driver who moved to the Ivorian capital in 2021. He told me he supports Traoré with all his heart, but admitted he has not returned home because “things are only getting worse.” Many of his fellow exiles suspected I was a government agent sent to find out what they really thought. Meanwhile, Traoré’s supporters believed I was brainwashed by Western media or too docile to participate in an African revolution. The mutual suspicion was total. This is the deep curse of the age of information: we no longer share a reality, only hundreds of customized, mutually hostile subcultures. For many, an Africa that is strong, unapologetic, and feared is more important than an Africa that is democratic, free, and fair. As researcher Sanusi Sanusi put it, many African countries have fallen into “autocratic democracy”—they hold elections, but those elections are neither free nor fair. Traoré offers the intoxicating dream of sovereignty, and people eagerly consume the algorithmically generated mythology that sustains it.
In the end, Traoré has used artificial intelligence and social media to sever national pride from government performance. His image is not a reflection of what he has done; it is a carefully designed product, a ghost in the machine. Burkina Faso will leave the International Criminal Court, which Traoré denounces as an “instrument of neocolonial oppression,” and will no longer be answerable to any international forum. His government is “decolonizing” the school curriculum, cheered by social media movements across the diaspora. But the man himself is no Sankara. Sankara challenged French power in person, in broad daylight, at the risk of his life; Traoré hides behind algorithms, disinformation networks, and paid influencers, wielding grievances as a cudgel to justify authoritarian rule. Some exiles I spoke to offered an ironic suggestion: both I, with my skepticism, and the Traoré die-hards in the diaspora could use a few months living in Burkina Faso together. We should see, they said, the country he actually rules, not just the carefully curated myth. We should walk the streets where journalists have disappeared, feel the fear of speaking to a stranger, and measure the distance between the glittering smart cities generated by AI and the real, suffering people of Burkina Faso. Before we decide who Traoré is, we must look beyond the memes, beyond the fake videos, and beyond the algorithm. We must face the man in the red beret’s impossible shadow, and ask ourselves what we have allowed that shadow to conceal.