Burkina Faso’s military ruler is not a radical economic liberator; his so-called “populist anti-Western nativism” is a smokescreen to conceal the suppression of activists, journalists, and queer people, argues Rosebell Kagumire.
On a recent flight to Dakar, a cabin crew member from an African airline warmly greeted a Burkinabè passport holder ahead of me: “Welcome and greetings to Captain Traoré! We love him.” The passenger smiled and quietly took their seat, declining to return the fanfare. Such enthusiasm for a young leader is understandable on a continent marked by struggling economies and a predominantly youthful population (average age: 19)—especially when the country has long endured the shadow of colonial rule by France, and its new leader appears unflinching in confronting former powers head-on.
France still maintains its monetary empire, centred around the CFA franc, which, in a book co-authored by Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, is called “Africa’s Last Colonial Currency.” France is recognised for its decades-long political interference in the region. Fighting neocolonial powers that control African states’ political economies is indeed a struggle of our time, just as generations before fought to decolonise Africa.
The Cult of a Military Man
The current glorification and glamorization of military leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Guinea—countries where military regimes are still in their infancy—on our social media feeds, along with the fabricated achievements attributed to them, should alarm anyone invested in our continent’s struggle for liberation.
Far too many African people have direct or indirect experience of living under militarized rule and understand the immense, multigenerational costs of militarism—from the colonial era to the post-colonial period. This is a familiar pattern that has seldom culminated in genuine freedom. Yet today, there is a growing tendency to support military regimes and the fabricated messianic figures who lead them.
As a Ugandan who has only known the rule of President Yoweri Museveni—who seized power in a 1986 coup and, 39 years later, maintains a firm, almost monarchic grip on the nation alongside his family—I tend to approach military takeovers with measured pessimism. Across the continent, the grim irony of ‘liberators’ transforming into despots remains a recurring tragedy. Whether military coup leaders, elected officials who dismantle constitutions to unlawfully extend their terms, or outright election thieves, the pattern persists.
Professor Amina Mama, a Nigerian-British feminist intellectual, has observed that “African ‘liberated’ states have never liberated women. It’s been an edifice of male complicity engaged in pacification forever—colonial, post-colonial, neoliberal, theocratic.” It is from this critical perspective that my hesitation and low expectations toward yet another military regime are rooted. I take seriously the work of African feminists on decolonisation, demilitarisation, and peace. Military rule continues to obstruct freedom and dignity, even when later disguised behind a civilian veneer of elections.
“The long-term effects of militarization and military rule persist even after civilian governments are established,” says Professor Mama, “Politics tend to be violent, as competing interest groups organize gangs of thugs to secure elections; protests against dispossession are met with military force, which in turn leads to the militarisation of people’s struggles for justice.”
When ‘Liberators’ Become Rulers for Life
Freedom is both a struggle to transform material conditions and a fight to live free from violence and the fear it engenders. Military rule can never guarantee this freedom. To conflate or equate military rule with a people-led uprising does a profound disservice to the cause. Our post-colonial histories are replete with instances of military-male power complicit in exploiting legitimate grievances and hopes, only to impose new forms of oppression—sacrificing our land, resources, lives, and futures at the altar of the very imperialists they purport to resist. Anchoring our aspirations for liberation solely on militarism and remaining tethered to a military-industrial complex we do not control, will swiftly drown us in debt as we are compelled to pursue one arms dealer after another. That is not freedom.
Ugandan researcher and cultural critic Kalundi Serumaga once observed the symbiotic relationship between the leaders of Uganda and Rwanda, stating, “Illegitimate power cannot rule legitimately, and remains permanently insecure, in crisis and in need of self-validation.” Under Colonel d’Armée Assimi Goïta, the junta in Mali has constructed a “new social contract based on a strongman narrative,” positioning himself as the country’s defender. On April 29, he orchestrated the dissolution of all political parties and imposed a stringent requirement for registering new ones—a deposit of 100,000,000 FCFA—effectively stifling political pluralism. Similar tactics have been employed across Sahelian states. Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, who seized power at the age of 34 in 2022, has cultivated a mass, almost cult-like following online, with endorsements from notable Black celebrities. Much of the online discourse surrounding Burkina Faso centres on Traoré, often rife with misinformation, half-truths, and exaggerations that feed a widespread hunger for a ‘saviour.’
As one African feminist friend wryly noted about our hunger for big men politics, “people are so desperate for heroes that they will even take Satan himself if he says two correct words.” The internet has been a vital tool for young Africans to build community and learn about each other’s experiences, bypassing decades of Western media dominance and racist lenses. Africans can create their own narratives, debunk historic bias, and offer counter-narratives. However, when the masses access information engineered by Big Tech through algorithms that prioritise popular engagement over fact, and profit over proof, it becomes easy to capitalise on people’s sentiments and amass devotees overnight. Alongside foreign corporate-controlled and influenced platforms, limited digital literacy makes it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Today, AI and deepfakes allow government communication—or its simulacrum—to be taken at face value and circulated unchallenged.
This kind of cult following always arises in moments of heightened foreign interventionist actions, as seen with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The internet’s mass reach and its ability to drown out alternative or dissenting voices make manipulating reality far easier today. Critics are quickly labelled, attacked, and dismissed as ‘foreign agents’—both by governments and by the very people whose freedom is at stake. This environment is fertile ground for dangerously oversimplified, binary discourse that deliberately obscures the complex realities of any given country.
In September 2019, former president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe died at the age of 95, two years after the military overthrew him. The end of Mugabe’s 37-year rule was greeted with jubilation on the streets and online by many Zimbabweans, even amid an uncertain future. Yet far too many outside observers still admired the man. After all, he had confronted the West—specifically the US and Britain—to address the legacy of white settler colonialism through land redistribution, albeit at a significant cost to his country and economy. His admirers overlooked the misrule, mass atrocities, and how, with each election, Mugabe increasingly became a mockery of the popular will.
Dr Panashe Chigumadzi, a Zimbabwean-born writer and historian, articulates that “the brutal history of colonialism and imperialism has created a strain of pan-Africanism that largely defines itself by opposition to the West and ignores the excesses of Africa’s post-colonial rulers.” In her book These Bones Will Rise Again, Chigumadzi emphasises that, in search of answers, we must lower our eyes from “the heights of Big Men who have created a history that does not know little people, let alone little women, except as cannon fodder.”
What’s Pan-Africanism Got To Do With It?
So, what moves many of us to deem the lives of everyday Africans expendable in the pursuit of big men’s power, packaged as liberation? What sustains the illusion that patriarchal power will liberate us from ongoing neocolonial destruction? Kenyan researcher and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola raised similar questions in 2016, when Sudan’s dictator Omar al-Bashir, defying ICC warrants, was welcomed in South Africa. Three years later, in April 2019, he was deposed by a mass popular uprising. But in that moment—when Pan-Africanism was needed most—it either tilted toward the military strongman who had built his power on impunity, mass graveyards, and genocide across Sudan and South Sudan, or it remained silent.
“Rest in peace, Pan-Africanism. Long live Man-Africanism.”
“Everyone can tell you what Pan-Africanism stands for when juxtaposed with the West. But no one seems to know what Pan-Africanism means when it is self-referential.” Then she declared, “Rest in peace, Pan-Africanism. Long live Man-Africanism.”
And indeed, Man-Africanism lives on across our timelines today, while the stories and cries of the “little people” are buried. As we navigate multiple crises and a rapidly changing global geopolitical landscape, there is a pressing need for collective sense-making. We live psychologically vulnerable and anxious lives, with televised genocides, forced displacement, ecological plunder, and mass human suffering on the continent and beyond. In the aftermath of COVID-19, amid economic crises, global power clashes, and a new era of proxy wars on the African continent, the answers we seek do not lie in devotion to a new military ruler. We will need more than “a better coup leader.”
In his book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, British-Egyptian political activist and comrade Alaa Abd El-Fattah—who has been imprisoned by the Egyptian military dictatorship since September 2019, and whose mother is currently on a hunger strike protesting his unlawful detention—warns us: “Siding with the stronger party is generally not useful. The powerful need nothing from you but to parrot their propaganda.”
Just as Alaa remains imprisoned in an Egyptian jail, many voices that played a crucial role in the 2014 popular uprising against Burkina Faso’s former president, Blaise Compaoré—ending one of Africa’s longest-running regimes—now face censorship, suppression, enforced disappearance, and exile. The Burkinabe people have a longstanding history of resisting both colonial powers and their oppressive leaders; it has never been a matter of either/or.
By the time Captain Traoré took power, Burkina Faso had a vibrant media landscape. Today, however, journalism has become a perilous profession. Journalists contend not only with dire security conditions caused by jihadist armed groups controlling about 40 per cent of the country, but also with violence from the military junta.
Disinformation and the Erasure of Dissent
This manufactured image of a revolutionary military leader crumbles once you dare to seek out the brave voices of Burkina Faso’s revolution. The silencing of Burkinabe journalists, political dissenters, and civil society voices has, to date, received little attention.
In March 2025, Guézouma Sanogo and Boukari Ouoba, president and vice-president of the Association des Journalistes du Burkina (AJB), were abducted by the military regime three days after publicly denouncing the deterioration of press freedom. On 5 April 2025, the two, along with journalist Luc Pagbelguem, appeared in a video circulated on social media, dressed in military uniforms and accompanied by mocking commentary from supporters of the ruling junta. What is a revolution without empathy and justice?
Other journalists and media figures—such as Atiana Serge Oulon Bienvenu Apiou, James Dembélé, Mamadou Ali Compaoré, Kalifara Séré, and Adama Bayala—are still missing. Prominent activists from Balai Citoyen, including Ousmane Lankoande and Amadou Sawadogo, were also kidnapped and remain unaccounted for. Even magistrates have not been spared in this state-sponsored campaign of enforced disappearances: seven magistrates were arrested and forcibly deployed to the front lines.
In April 2025, more than eight African citizen movements and civil society groups, primarily from West Africa, condemned this repression and the ongoing shrinking of civic space in the country. Amnesty International’s The State of the World’s Human Rights Report, released that same month, documents many of these violations. Despite this, these voices continue to be sidelined, with alarm bells muted amid our noisy feeds.
Journalists Kalifara Séré (left), Adama Bayala, and Serge Atiana Oulon have been forcibly disappeared.
In a televised speech on April 1, 2025, Captain Traoré declared the end of “democracy in Burkina Faso” and proclaimed a “progressive popular revolution.” A new charter now mandates ‘patriotism’ for membership in the government and assembly, effectively barring opposition, reminiscent of President Museveni’s ‘movement system’ in Uganda in the late 1990s.
The Burkinabe authorities are considering criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual relations through amendments to the Personal and Family Code. Ballet Brice Stephane Djedje, a Queer scholar, recently challenged this move, stating: “It is imperative to distinguish between pro-Black African liberation ideologies and mere anti-Western sentiment. The former demands full acceptance of all Black African peoples, including LGBTIQ+ communities, and acknowledges the historical presence of sexual and gender diversity within traditional African social structures. This approach honours indigenous African value systems rather than perpetuating colonial-era prejudices often imposed through European contact.” In Burkina Faso and beyond, African queer bodies and lives continue to be instrumentalized in hegemonic masculinist nationalist struggles—recycling the same colonial European moral and legal codes under the guise of African authenticity. This reflects a selective amnesia regarding the fact that post-colonial states themselves frequently function as oppressive structures against diversity, deploying categories of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity to marginalize and instrumentalize identities within nationalist agendas.
In Africa’s Populist Trap, Minna Salami, author of Can Feminism Be African? A Most Paradoxical Question, recently identified the phenomenon we are witnessing as “PAWN: Populist Anti-Western Nativism.” Salami rightly cautions that opposing this form of populism should not be conflated with dismissing “African anger or denying the legitimate desire for repair.” She argues that “the emotional appeal of PAWN not only divides the world into heroes and villains but also undermines the public’s capacity to think beyond simplistic binaries.” According to Salami, “Populism centres on people’s cultural, economic, and political wounds, promising to heal them.” She underscores the urgent need to distinguish “between decolonization and PAWN… because ultimately, true decolonization cannot be achieved through populism and nativism.”
As part of this agreement, the government committed to fiscal adjustment—potentially through reduced public investment—and pledged to control the wage bill while maintaining membership in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). This is not intended to assign blame to the country but rather to highlight the constraints on genuine economic sovereignty. In short, Burkina Faso cannot exit the CFA franc—the last colonial currency imposed by France—while subject to IMF programs. Another significant concern within the IMF agreement is the potential partial or full privatization of Air Burkina, into which the government is currently injecting substantial public funds.
Burkina gets only 15 percent of newly licensed mines, a Russian company takes 85 per cent.
Burkina Faso is the third-largest gold producer in Africa, with gold mining accounting for 8 percent of real GDP and 80 percent of export revenues as of 2024. While there is defiant talk of breaking away from the West and welcoming Russia, the deals remain almost the same—Burkina Faso receives only 15 percent from newly licensed mines, while a Russian company takes 85 percent. The struggle for economic independence for all African countries is still a long way off.
The online portrayal of Captain Traoré as a radical economic liberator clashes with the reality of IMF dependence and the well-documented impacts experienced by other African countries for decades. While social media presents the image of a radical economic policy, the situation is as complex as it is for many former French colonies in Africa. Economic freedom within colonial borders remains a mirage; collective resistance is the only viable option.
Insecurity remains a significant challenge for many Burkinabe. The Global Terrorism Index 2024 ranks Burkina Faso first among 163 countries most affected by terrorism. In 2023, terrorist attacks claimed over 2,100 lives and continue to disrupt daily life. Reports indicate that pro-government forces have unlawfully killed or forcibly disappeared hundreds of civilians during counterinsurgency operations, often targeting specific ethnic groups, while government military personnel have been accused of summarily executing civilians. According to the United Nations, in 2025, 6.3 million people—over 25% of the population—are in need of humanitarian assistance.
As old and new colonial powers continue to tussle over the exploitation of colonised peoples and their resources in the Majority of the World, it is worth remembering that resistance has never been a one-man act. African independence (and whatever remains of it today) was not a gift from a few unquestioned, untouchable military men. Contrary to what popular history books, statues, monuments, and street names in your country might suggest, all parts of society take part in true liberation.
When questions outnumber answers and traditional media falls silent, digital platforms can rapidly amplify narratives that exploit feelings of powerlessness. It is not inconceivable that populations held hostage by a dysfunctional and corrupt ruling elite—military or otherwise—might welcome the new and seemingly unknown. Public conscientization is urgently needed, yet those who would typically lead this charge—the artists, storytellers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and activists—remain silenced and constrained. Many, fearing reprisals, succumb to military pressure to align.
Reclaiming Pan-Africanism
In these precarious times, we need to seek out the stories of those who organised long before the military takeover—the Burkinabe people who rose again and again; the strong voices of civil resistance forced underground; the marginalized LGBTQI community; the families of disappeared journalists; and the political dissidents conscripted and sent to war fronts. It is imperative that our Pan-African discourse is not complicit in perpetuating these injustices. After all, what is a revolution that cannot withstand critique? One of Africa’s leading scholars of decolonization, Professor Sylvia Tamale, has urged that “What is important is to sharpen our consciousness about Western coloniality, and while it is impossible to reject everything Western in toto, we can certainly demand the ‘socialization of power.’” She insists, “This would mean prioritizing global and local struggles over state-centric power structures in order to achieve collective forms of public authority.”
True revolution arises from confronting power; it demands critical engagement and accountability, not wholesale adoration.
Rosebell Kagumire (she/her) is a Pan-African feminist writer and activist. She is the editor of African Feminism and is a regular columnist for New Internationalist magazine. Kagumire has been recognised for her contributions to digital democracy, justice, and equality across the African continent. She is the co-editor of Challenging Patriarchy: The Role of Patriarchy in the Roll-Back of Democracy, and her work on transnational feminist politics is featured in None of Us Is Free Until All of Us Are Free: New Perspectives on Global Solidarity.
This article was first published by the Liberation Allian Africa and is republished with the permission of the author.
