In the months after the 1987 coup in Burkina Faso that killed President Thomas Sankara, screen printers in the capital, Ouagadougou, began to churn out shirts with Sankara’s face on them. The image soon spread throughout the country. Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s former minister of justice, went on to rule the country until 2014. He was suspected from the outset of orchestrating Sankara’s murder, but it would take the Burkinabé courts until 2021–2022 to find him guilty. By then, he had long fled to Côte d’Ivoire, where he remains a fugitive. Throughout his time in office, Compaoré claimed to be a follower of Sankara – a political legacy he could not afford to disavow.

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