What does the name Burkina Faso mean?

Land of upright people, or incorruptible people - and it was constructed deliberately in 1984 from two different local languages, burkina from Mooré and faso from Dioula, with the demonym Burkinabè taking its ending from a third, Fula. The name is a piece of national engineering: it belongs to no single group.

It replaced Upper Volta, which was a French colonial administrative label describing the country's position on a river system. The change was made by Thomas Sankara, a Marxist army captain who took power at 33 and governed for four years - during which he nationalised land, ran mass vaccination campaigns that immunised millions of children in weeks, banned female genital cutting and forced marriage, appointed women to senior positions, sold the government's Mercedes fleet and made the Renault 5 the official ministerial car.

He was assassinated in 1987 in a coup led by his closest colleague Blaise Compaoré, who then ruled for 27 years. Sankara was buried in an unmarked grave, and the investigation was suppressed until Compaoré himself was overthrown in 2014; Compaoré was convicted in absentia in 2022. Sankara remains a significant figure across West Africa, and the argument about him - visionary or authoritarian, both being defensible - has never settled.