Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
Burkina Faso's insurgent grammar has not disappeared--it has been absorbed. Today, revolutionary slogans serve the very power structures they once opposed.
The constitutional coup
In 2014, Burkina Faso erupted into protest. What began as resistance to a proposed constitutional amendment became a sweeping rejection of Blaise Compaoré's 27-year rule. At the time, I described the moment not merely as a revolution, but as a constitutional coup--a nonviolent seizure of political authorship by the people, and particularly by Burkinabè youth.
Follow us on WhatsApp | LinkedIn for the latest headlines
The proposed amendment to remove presidential term limits was only the trigger. Beneath it lay years of exclusion, generational frustration, and the systematic erasure of youth from formal governance structures. This uprising did not merely demand leadership change. It demanded symbolic, political, and epistemic recognition. It challenged not only the permanence of power, but the grammar through which power had been historically justified.
Protest slogans such as "Hands off our Constitution" and "We are the future" weren't just rhetorical flourishes. They marked a collective rejection of political invisibility. This moment was about authorship: the demand by a generation to redefine sovereignty--not as something inherited, but as something made, spoken, and re-authored in the streets.
Relative deprivation and the uprising
At the core of the 2014 uprising was what political theorists call relative deprivation--the deep frustration that arises when people feel they are entitled to more than they're receiving, especially when expectations are high. For Burkina Faso's youth--who make up the majority of the population--expectations had shifted. They were globally connected, politically conscious, and socially organized.
But their lived reality was one of unemployment, marginalization, and exclusion from decision-making. This dissonance produced not only anger--it produced rupture. The revolution was as much about dignity as it was about democracy.
The semiotics of resistance (Signs)
The 2014 uprising was not just a political confrontation--it was also a revolt against the visual and symbolic language of state power. Semiotics, or the study of how meaning is created through signs and symbols, helps us understand the deeper currents of this resistance.
Burkinabè citizens rejected not only Compaoré's rule, but the imagery and rituals that sustained it: the uniforms, parades, slogans, and visual displays that legitimized state authority. Protesters reclaimed these codes of power. Military fatigues--once symbols of repression--were worn by demonstrators as emblems of liberation. The long-silenced image of Thomas Sankara, the assassinated former leader, re-emerged on T-shirts, graffiti walls, and social media--not as nostalgia, but as defiance.
Even hashtags and chants became tools of authorship. Slogans like "Too young to remember another president" and "Hands off our Constitution" did more than express protest--they performed it. They redrew the boundary between ruler and ruled, legitimacy and resistance.
This "insurgent grammar"--the use of language, imagery, and visibility to assert political presence--was a generational act of redefinition. Through words, attire, murals, and memes, a new claim to sovereignty was being made.
From protest to presidency
Nearly a decade later, the language of that insurgency echoes from the very platforms it once opposed. President Ibrahim Traoré--like his predecessor from the transitional period--publicly aligns himself with Sankarist symbolism. He wears military fatigues, speaks in the idioms of anti-imperial defiance, and has fostered partnerships with non-Western actors like Russia and Turkey. The mausoleum of Thomas Sankara has been renovated and rededicated under his regime. On the surface, these gestures suggest continuity with revolutionary ideals.
But what has emerged is not insurgent governance--it is symbolic continuity without structural change. The slogans of 2014 are now part of the state's branding. The murals of protest have been institutionalized. What once disrupted the state now decorates it.
Traoré's government performs revolution while consolidating power. Youth inclusion remains rhetorical. Decision-making remains opaque. Journalists are detained, civil society is constrained, critics are silenced. The very signs that once contested the regime now authorize it. What has occurred is not political fulfillment--but semiotic reversal.
The semiotics of sovereignty
In many post-colonial African states, sovereignty is often asserted through symbols before it is realized through governance. The performance of autonomy--via flags, alliances, military attire, and revolutionary slogans--frequently stands in for actual reform.
Burkina Faso's expulsion of French forces and embrace of new global partners suggests a desire for decolonial sovereignty. But these symbolic actions occur amid internal contradictions: vast regions outside state control, continued extremist violence, and more than 6.5 million people in need of humanitarian aid. A state may declare itself sovereign through posture and rhetoric. But unless sovereignty is experienced through inclusion, redistribution, and accountability, it remains only a sign.
This is where semiotics--the analysis of how meaning is produced--remains essential. The regime's anti-colonial displays operate through what I call discursive substitution: the replacement of substantive change with rhetorical continuity. The language of revolution is retained, but its meaning is inverted to justify new forms of control.
Discursive substitution and structural inertia
Burkina Faso's current regime has not erased the revolution. It has absorbed it. This is not absence--it is appropriation. The language of rupture survives, but it has been hollowed out. Slogans of protest have become campaign tools. Sankara's image hovers over institutions whose power remains unchecked.
This inversion is not accidental. It is strategic. It allows the regime to cloak itself in revolutionary legitimacy while avoiding revolutionary demands. Military uniforms now signal sovereignty, not resistance. Youth participation is invoked as rhetoric, not policy. Sovereignty is performed--but not shared.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
What emerges is a symbolic regime: one that rules not only through institutions, but through imagery, slogans, and strategic appropriation. The semiotics of sovereignty has replaced its practice. But language alone cannot govern. And symbols alone cannot reconstruct legitimacy.
When symbols supplant reform
Burkina Faso is not alone. Across West Africa--from Mali to Sudan to Guinea--the appropriation of revolutionary language has become a tool of governance. But symbolic sovereignty is not a substitute for structural transformation. A revolution invoked but not enacted is not continuity--it is contradiction. And where redistribution does not follow rupture, the legitimacy claimed through slogans may eventually be contested not in language, but in uprising.
Dr. Swani R. Keelson, D.I.A., is a Doctor of International Affairs and a semiotician whose research examines the symbolic architecture of global governance. Her recent doctoral thesis, Paper Tigers: Deconstruction and Semiotics of Gender Equity as Signifier in Water Governance Policies - A Case Study in Ghana (Johns Hopkins SAIS, 2025), introduces a pioneering framework that applies Derridean deconstruction and semiotic theory to interrogate how policy language performs gender equity without enforcing it. Dr. Keelson's work bridges post-structuralist theory, critical policy analysis, and African development studies, offering new tools for decoding performative governance and the semiotics of institutional reform.
