Africa’s Most Honest President: The Untold Story of Thomas Sankara

He became president of one of the poorest countries in the world, and the first thing he did was sell the government's Mercedes.

Thomas Sankara ran Burkina Faso for just four years, from 1983 to 1987. In that time his government vaccinated about two and a half million children in a matter of weeks, planted millions of trees against the advancing Sahara, outlawed forced marriage and female genital mutilation, and renamed the country "the land of upright people." He cut his own salary, made the Renault 5 the official government car, and stood before Africa's leaders to tell them to stop paying their colonial-era debts.

But his revolution had a hard edge too: limits on the press, striking teachers fired, and revolutionary courts that didn't always look fair. And at 37 he was killed in a coup led by his best friend, Blaise Compaoré.

This is the story of the guitar-playing soldier who is still talked about almost forty years later.