Sankara on Debt as Continuation of Slavery

Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso, delivered an address to the Organization of African Unity summit in Addis Ababa in July 1987 in which he proposed a unified African refusal to pay external debt. He was assassinated in a coup three months later. The address is one of the most-cited speeches in the modern history of pan-African thought, and the analytical frame it advanced has remained operative in subsequent African and Latin American debt scholarship.

Sankara's argument was specific and historical. The African debts that international financial institutions and private creditors held in the 1980s, he argued, were not obligations freely contracted by the African states for their own development purposes. They were the residues of loans contracted by colonial administrations to finance colonial-era infrastructure that had served extraction rather than indigenous welfare, and of loans extended to post-independence governments under conditions that directed the borrowed funds into projects favored by the lenders rather than projects the borrowers would have chosen on their own. The debts therefore did not represent the kind of arms-length commercial relationship that would create a moral and political obligation to repay.

The further argument was about origins. The accumulated wealth of the lending countries, Sankara argued, included the extracted value of African labor and resources during the slave-trade and colonial-extraction periods. Any balance-sheet accounting of who owed what would have to incorporate that history. Once incorporated, the direction of the historical flow reverses: the lending countries owe Africa, not the other way around. The framing was moral and historical rather than narrowly legal, but it rested on documentable historical record about the extractive structure of colonial economies and the post-independence economic relationships that succeeded them.

The political proposal a coordinated African refusal to pay was not adopted by the OAU summit. The reasons were various and visible. African states that depended on continuing access to international credit could not credibly refuse to pay existing debts without losing the credit access. African states with closer alignment to Western capitals were not inclined to follow Sankara's lead. African elites who had benefited from the borrowing structure even when the broader populations had not had personal stakes in the maintenance of the existing relationships. The continental coordination Sankara's proposal required was foreclosed by the actual political composition of the OAU member states.

Subsequent debt scholarship has elaborated the analytical framework Sankara's address sketched. The jubilee movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, the subsequent Argentine and Greek debt restructurings, the current scholarship on reparations have each engaged questions Sankara raised. The political constraint that blocked his immediate proposal remains operative in many of these contexts. The analytical frame he advanced the historical-extraction account of African debt has not been displaced and continues to organize substantial scholarly and political work on the question of who owes what to whom across the long history of colonization and its aftermath.