Burkina Faso Upright Down

To mark the first anniversary of the military coup that brought him to power in 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara changed the name of his landlocked West African country (pop. 7.3 million) from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which in the local Mossi and Dioula languages means "Land of Upright Men." The old moniker was no longer appropriate, said Sankara, because it was chosen not by Africans but by white French colonists. Last week Sankara, 37, a popular and charismatic leader who was every inch an upright man, was himself replaced. He was ousted and killed in a bloody rebellion led by his second-in-command, Captain Blaise Compaore.

The new coup was announced over national radio following an outbreak of gunfire near the presidential palace in Ouagadougou, the capital. Government officials said Sankara was shot to death and hastily buried, along with a dozen others killed in the coup, in a mass grave on the capital's outskirts. Members of the murdered President's family watched the burial in tears. A populist who religiously consulted with village leaders before embarking on new policies, Sankara made personal probity a point of honor in a country that has had more than one corrupt leader since winning independence in 1960. He boasted that he was the world's lowest-paid chief of state, with a salary of just $450 a month.

But the leader evidently shaped his regime into more of a one-man show than his fellow coup leaders found tolerable. Following Sankara's execution, Radio Ouagadougou accused him of having built up a "concentration of power" and of harboring the "ambitions of a madman." In seizing power last week, Compaore, 36, the Minister of State and Justice, used the same special commando unit he placed at Sankara's disposal in 1983. Western diplomats in Burkina Faso expect him to be a less flamboyant leader than Sankara but to continue most of his policies. Despite the death of their author, the national radio said, the policies' basic wisdom "is not called into question."