clarification in our country, reaching a level whereby the popular masses as a whole made an important, qualitative leap in their understanding of the situation. The 17 May events greatly contributed to opening the eyes of the Voltaic people. In a cruel and brutal flash, imperialism was revealed to them as a system of oppression and exploitation.
There are days that hold lessons incomparably richer than those of an entire decade. During such days, the people learn with such incredible speed and so profoundly that a thousand days of study are nothing in comparison.
The events of May 1983 allowed the Voltaic people to get to know its enemies better. Henceforth in Upper Volta, everyone knows who’s who; who is with whom and against whom; who does what and why.
This kind of situation, which constituted a prelude to great upheavals, helped lay bare the sharpening class contradictions of Voltaic society. The August revolution thus came as the solution to social contradictions that could no longer be suppressed by compromise solutions.
The enthusiastic adherence of the broad popular masses to the August revolution is the concrete expression of the immense hopes that the Voltaic people place in the rise of the CNR. They hope that their deep-going aspirations might finally be achieved – aspirations for democracy, liberty, independence, genuine progress, and the restoration of the dignity and grandeur of our homeland, which twenty-three years of neo-colonial rule have treated with singular contempt.
THE LEGACY OF TWENTY-THREE YEARS OF NEO-COLONIALISM
The formation of the CNR on 4 August 1983, and the subsequent establishment of a revolutionary government in Upper Volta opened a glorious page in the annals of the history of our people and our country. However, the legacy bequeathed to us by twenty-three years of imperialist exploitation and domination is weighty and burdensome. Our task of building a new society cleansed of all the ills keeping our country in a state of poverty and economic and cultural backwardness will be hard and arduous.
In 1960 French colonialism – hounded on all sides, defeated at Dien Bien Phu, and grappling with tremendous difficulties in Algeria13 – drew the lessons of those defeats and was compelled to grant our country its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This was greeted positively by our people, who had not remained impassive, but rather had been developing appropriate struggles of resistance. This move by French colonial imperialism constituted a victory for the people over the forces of foreign oppression and exploitation. From the popular masses’ point of view, it was a democratic reform, whereas from imperialism’s point of view, it was merely a transformation of the forms of its domination and exploitation of our people.
This transformation nevertheless resulted in a realignment of classes and social layers and the formation of new classes. In alliance with the backward forces of traditional society, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia of the time – with total contempt for the great masses, who they had used as a springboard to power – set about laying the political and economic foundations for the new forms of imperialist domination and exploitation. Fear that the struggle of the popular masses might radicalise and lead to a genuinely revolutionary solution had been the basis for the choice made by imperialism: From that point on, it would maintain its stranglehold over our country and perpetuate the exploitation of our people through the use of Voltaic intermediaries. Voltaic nationals were to take over as agents of foreign domination and exploitation. The entire organisation of neo-colonial society would be nothing more than a simple operation of substituting one form for another.
In essence, neo-colonial society and colonial society do not differ in the least. Thus, we saw the colonial administration replaced by a neo-colonial administration identical to it in every respect. The colonial army was replaced by a neo-colonial army with the same characteristics, the same functions, and the same role of safeguarding the interests of imperialism and its national allies. The colonial schools were replaced by neo-colonial schools, which pursued the same goals of alienating the children of our country and reproducing a society fundamentally serving imperialist interests, and secondarily serving imperialism’s local lackeys and allies.
With the support and blessing of imperialism, Voltaic nationals set about organising the systematic plunder of our country. With the crumbs of this plunder that fell to them, they were transformed, little by little, into a genuinely parasitic bourgeoisie that no longer knew how to control its voracious appetite. Driven only by their own selfish interests, they no longer hesitated at employing the most dishonest means, engaging in massive corruption, embezzlement of public funds and properties, influence-peddling and real estate speculation, and practicing favouritism and nepotism.
This is what accounts for all the material and financial wealth they’ve been able to accumulate on the backs of working people. Not satisfied with living off the fabulous incomes they derive from shamelessly employing their ill-gotten wealth, they fight tooth and nail to monopolise political positions that will allow them to use the state apparatus for their own exploitative and wasteful ends.
Never do they let a year go by without treating themselves to extravagant vacations abroad. Their children desert the country’s schools for prestigious educations in other countries. At the slightest illness, all the resources of the state are mobilised to provide them with expensive care at luxurious hospitals in foreign countries.
All this unfolds in full view of the honest, courageous, and hard-working Voltaic people, mired nonetheless in the most squalid misery. While Upper Volta is a paradise for the wealthy minority, for the majority – the people – it is a barely tolerable hell.
As part of this great majority, the wage earners, despite the fact that they are assured a regular income, suffer the constraints and pitfalls of capitalist consumer society. Their entire wage is spent before it has even been received. And this vicious cycle goes on and on with no perspective of being broken.
Within their respective trade unions, workers join in struggles around demands to improve their living conditions. The breadth of those struggles sometimes compels the neo-colonial authorities to grant concessions. But they simply take back with one hand what they give with the other.
Thus a 10 per cent wage increase is announced with great fanfare, only to be immediately taxed, wiping out the expected benefits. After five, six, or seven months, the workers always end up seeing through the swindle, and mobilise for new struggles. Seven months is more than enough for the reactionaries in power to catch their breath and devise new schemes. In this never-ending fight, the worker is always the loser.
Among this great majority are the peasants, the “wretched of the earth”, who are expropriated, robbed, mistreated, imprisoned, scoffed at, and humiliated every day, and yet are among those whose labour creates wealth. Thanks to their productive labour, the country’s economy stays afloat despite its frailty. It is from their labour that all those Voltaics for whom Upper Volta is an El Dorado line their pockets.
And yet, it is the peasants who suffer most from the lack of buildings, of road infrastructure, and from the lack of health care facilities and personnel. It is the peasants, creators of the nation’s wealth, who suffer most from the lack of schools and school supplies for their children. It is their children who will swell the ranks of the unemployed after a brief stint on benches in schools that are poorly adapted to the realities of this country. It is among the peasants that the illiteracy rate is the highest – 98 per cent. Those who most need to learn, in order to improve the output of their productive labour, are again the ones who benefit the least from investments in health care, education, and technology.
The peasant youth – who have the same attitudes as all young people, that is, greater sensitivity to social injustice and a desire for progress – end up rebelling and they desert the countryside, thus depriving it of its most dynamic elements.
These youths’ initial impulse drives them to the large urban centres, Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. There they hope to find better-paying jobs and enjoy, too, the advantages of progress. The lack of jobs drives them to idleness, with all its characteristic vices. Finally, so as not to end up in prison, they seek salvation by going abroad, where the most shameless humiliation and exploitation await them. But does Voltaic society leave them any other choice?
Stated as succinctly as possible, such