The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | Gertrude Kamya Othieno | In many African cosmologies, time is not a straight line but a sacred circle. Life and death are not opposites but phases of a continuum. The departed do not disappear. They live on as ancestors, guiding the living, and sometimes returning through them. It is through this spiritual lens that the uncanny proximity between the death of Thomas Sankara in 1987 and the birth of Ibrahim Traoré in 1988 demands reflection, not simply as history, but as ancestral recurrence.
While this may seem illogical to some, belief in reincarnation and ancestral return is not unique to Africa. In Judaism’s mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the concept of gilgul teaches that souls can transmigrate across lifetimes to complete divine missions. In Hinduism and Buddhism, reincarnation is central, a soul returns in different bodies, shaped by karma, until enlightenment is attained. Even indigenous Native American and Andean cosmologies recognise the cycle of soul rebirth. The idea that Sankara’s revolutionary spirit might have returned through Traoré is not just African—it is part of a global human intuition that life echoes itself when justice is left undone.
In African traditions, reincarnation is not always linear or literal. It’s spiritual, symbolic, and often confirmed through community observation. A child born with unusual boldness, speaking like an elder, questioning power too early, is said to carry the soul of an ancestor. Sankara’s life, cut short by betrayal at the age of 37, left a gaping void in Burkina Faso and beyond. Then, almost poetically, Traoré was born, a child destined to rise in a time when the continent needed Sankara’s voice again. Whether or not he is Sankara reincarnated, many feel he is Sankara remembered, a memory that speaks, resists, and reawakens through him.
Both men hail from the same land, rose through the military, and ascended in moments of national despair. Both rejected Western paternalism and inspired a continent through unapologetic truth-telling. Sankara named the nation “Burkina Faso”, Land of Upright People. Traoré, decades later, walks in that vision, not as an imitator, but as one moved by the same ancestral drumbeat.
Of course, modern political science offers little room for such metaphysics. But, African philosophies do not separate the sacred from the civic. Leadership, in many traditions, is a calling, and the spirit world has a stake in earthly justice. When Sankara spoke, he disturbed colonial ghosts. When Traoré speaks, those ghosts tremble again, not because he claims to be Sankara, but because his presence suggests the ancestors are not done yet.
The idea that a soul returns when its mission remains incomplete is not folklore; it’s theology. Theology, in many ways, is the original politics. Whether through Christ’s promise to return, the Buddhist Bodhisattva who delays nirvana to serve others, or the Jewish soul that travels across lifetimes to repair the world (tikkun olam), humanity has long understood that some spirits don’t simply die, they return when most needed.
In that light, Traoré is more than a president; he is a vessel. This is a reminder that Africa’s revolution was never buried with Sankara. It was planted. And now, it grows again, not in identical form, but with familiar fire.
We need not all believe in reincarnation to grasp its power. What matters is that in times of moral decay, the past does not stay silent. It speaks through the brave, moves through the willing, and sometimes rises again through the bloodline of resistance.
And so, in Burkina Faso, the spirit returns, not to repeat history, but to finish it.
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Gertrude Kamya Othieno | Political Sociologist in Social Development (Alumna – London School of Economics/Political Science) | Email – gkothieno@gmail.com
