Francis Kéré was the first African architect to win the Pritzker prize when he scooped the “Nobel prize of architecture” in 2022. A native of Gando, a small village in Burkina Faso’s Central-East region, Kéré was once criticised by his neighbours for building a school for the village before constructing a house for his parents. But that project has led to commissions including the new parliament building in Benin, the Goethe Institute Dakar and the Las Vegas Museum of Art.
“I wanted to give something to my people, and that has given me an international career,” he says of his decision to build the school.
Today, Kéré is back in his home country to take on a project close to his heart – designing a mausoleum in Ouagadougou for Thomas Sankara, the great pan-Africanist leader and former president of Burkina Faso.
“My God, what a project, what a challenge!” Kéré recalls thinking when he first received the proposal. “This is the first time I’ve been asked to take on the responsibility of constructing a building in memory of such a great figure.”
Sankara, often referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara”, was president of Burkina Faso from 1983 until 1987, and is credited with transforming the former French colony by waging war on corruption, championing education, health and gender equality, and building homes, roads and railways. He was assassinated at the age of 37 during a coup on 15 October 1987 by soldiers led by Sankara’s former second-in-command, Blaise Compaoré, who remained in power for 27 years.
The mausoleum in memory of Sankara and the 12 aides murdered alongside him is part of a larger project: the Thomas Sankara Memorial, conceived by Burkina Faso’s president, Ibrahim Traoré. Building the mausoleum is the first stage of the project.
The 14-hectare (35-acre) site is envisioned as a place of “life and gathering”, according to Kéré, a green space where students can study, people can celebrate weddings and visitors can discover the ideals of Sankara’s revolution. “After all, we want this to belong to the people,” he says. The building where the attack took place is preserved at the heart of the memorial, surrounded by water, and the design includes an 87-metre-high tower “to serve as an urban landmark for the Burkinabè capital”, as well as an amphitheatre, restaurants and conference rooms.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter the mausoleum is the cool breeze flowing through the space. “It is all built with laterite and earth, which helps maintain a fresh interior,” says civil engineer Nataniel Sawadogo. “Do you know Burkina Faso’s traditional refrigerator? It’s the same principle but in a building,” he adds. Traditionally, and still in some villages, water is cooled in clay jars made from the same type of earth – laterite – that was used to make the mausoleum’s orange-hued bricks. These are cut directly from the ground, in this case, from the city of Kaya, 60 miles (100km) away.
“I want people to come in and wonder where the air conditioning is, only to realise there isn’t any,” says Kéré. “That’s my mission – to show that with traditional techniques, we can also stay cool.”
This is not the first time Kéré has used laterite in his buildings, as he aims to minimise cement usage, reduce transport costs and ensure social benefits. “If we extract the earth from a village, the villagers will benefit from the work, rather than a big company,” he says.
Mounds of laterite and limestone pepper the site, while workers race to complete the project. “I want it to be simple, playing with shadows and light,” says Kéré. The domed building has small openings, allowing light to filter in during the day and shine out at night, making it visible from the outside. Luc Damiba, secretary general of the International Thomas Sankara Memorial committee, says: “Visitors will enter from one side and exit from the other, like in Egyptian mausoleums.”
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A transporter working onsite tells Sawadogo: “The earth we’re using isn’t the same colour as the other, you know?” Sawadogo thanks him for the observation and says: “Here, everyone has to learn something – he’s a transporter, but now he also knows how to distinguish the type of earth we need.” The laterite is analysed in a laboratory to determine its consistency before being used.
The mausoleum is oval, shaped like an eye. Inside, at the lower level, lie the bodies – still encased in concrete – of the 12 people killed with Sankara. “The international committee for the Thomas Sankara Memorial held a lottery to decide who would rest beside Sankara. The only request I got was to make his tomb slightly larger,” says Kéré, who feels “proud to serve the memory of this great figure”.
After his death, Sankara’s body was hurriedly buried in a mass grave in the Dagnoën neighbourhood of Ouagadougou. It wasn’t until 2014, during the popular uprising that toppled his successor, Compaoré, that his slogans began to echo in the streets again, and under Traoré, Sankara has been officially recognised as the first national hero of the country. Boulevard Charles de Gaulle has been renamed Thomas Sankara Boulevard, and his remains were exhumed and reburied in a more dignified space.
Kéré, who is adamant that “we don’t want a place of death and suffering, but rather one full of vitality and life”, remembers meeting Sankara when he came to speak to students in Fada Ngourma, the capital of Burkina Faso’s Eastern region. “That day, my legs, hands and heart were trembling, but I had to ask President Sankara what the revolution meant to him and what we, as young people, should do after finishing our studies,” Kéré recalls.
“Who could have known 40 years later, I would be building his place of rest. This is the power of architecture. This is what architecture can do.”
