Upstream - [TEASER] Alliance of Sahel States Pt. 2: A View from Within w/ Inem Richardson

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

This is a free preview of the episode "Alliance of Sahel States Pt. 2: A View from Within w/ Inem Richardson." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. It can be quite difficult for someone on the left in the United States or the UK—or in any Western state for that matter, to feel patriotic. Patriotic? About what, exactly? I mean, for most of us, the American flag is a symbol that represents nothing but pain, immiseration, destruction, genocide…so it’s hard to imagine what it must feel like to be a part of a state project that you’re actually proud of. One that’s standing up to that blood-drenched American flag—standing up to the flags of all the imperialists and genocidaires across the globe.  But there are countries where national pride is well-deserved, where patriotism is appropriate, and where hope for a better future is alive and well. And in Part 2 of our series on the Alliance of Sahel States, we’re going to be in conversation with someone who is right in the middle of one of those countries.  Inem Richardson is the President and Co-Founder of the Thomas Sankara Centre for African Liberation and Unity, a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, and a journalist with African Stream based out of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In this conversation, Inem tells us about the journey which brought her to Burkina Faso and led her to co-founding the Thomas Sankara Centre. We talk about what it was like to live through Burkina Faso’s revolution, some of the undertakings and achievements of Ibrahim Traore’s government, what the Alliance is up against, and what its future might hold, and why the world should be paying attention to what’s happening right now in the Sahel.   Further resources: The Thomas Sankara Centre The All-African People's Revolutionary Party The Coalitioin for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa (Instagram) Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Related episodes: Our onging series on the Alliance of Sahel States Our ongoing series on Iran Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill Listen to our ongoing series on China The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely could not do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. As somebody who grew up in the United States, to be in a position where I was like, I now

have to defend the government of the country I'm living in, like I have to do everything I can to defend and protect the government. I have never been in that position in my life. Like that didn't feel like a real thing to me, you know, having grown up in the US, I have never been in that position in my life. That didn't feel like a a real thing to me, having grown up in the US. To be like, I love the president, we have to do everything to make sure that the leaders stay empowered. It's just a different, it's a totally different reality. Also just the context where having this deep patriotism and going out all the time with the flag is a revolutionary thing and is about anti-imperialism. It's a very different context from how I grew up considering

how things are in the US. You are listening to Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. It can be quite difficult for someone on the left in the United States or in the UK or really in any western state for that matter, to feel patriotic. Patriotic? About what, exactly? I mean, for most of us on the left,

the American flag is a symbol that represents nothing but pain, immiseration, destruction, genocide. So it's hard to imagine what it must feel like to be part of a state project that you're actually proud of. One that's standing up to that blood-drenched American flag. That's standing up to the flags of all the imperialists and the genocide heirs across the globe.

But there are countries where national pride is well deserved. Where patriotism is appropriate, and where hope for the future is alive and well. And in part two of our series on the Alliance of Sahel States, we're gonna be in conversation with someone who is right in the middle of one of those countries. Enam Richardson is the president and co-founder of the Thomas

Sankara Center for African Liberation and Unity, a member of the All African People's Revolutionary Party and journalist with African Stream, based out of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In this conversation Enem tells us about the journey which brought her to Burkina Faso and led her to co-founding the Thomas Sankara Center. We talk about what it was like to live through Burkina Faso's revolution, some of the undertakings and achievements of Ibrahim Traore's government, what the Alliance is up against, what its future might hold, and why the world should be paying attention to what's happening right now in the Sahel.

And now here's my conversation with Inam Richardson. All right, Inem, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm super happy to be on. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, yeah. I'd love it to maybe just start with an introduction if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Okay, cool.

So my name is Inemesed Richardson. I am based in Wagadjugu, Burkina Faso, though I go often between Burkina Faso and Niger now. I am the president and co-founder of the Thomas and Kara Center for African Liberation and Unity, which is based in those two countries I just named. I'm also a member of the All African People's Revolutionary Party, aka the AAPRP, and I am a journalist with African Stream. Amazing. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And you know, I think you're doing such important work, both as a journalist with Africa Stream,

and also, of course, with the Thomas Sankara Center, right, which is actually, I think, where I first got connected to you through the Burkina Books Instagram. And so I'm going to ask you a bit more about the center in a second. But I think just kind of my first question for you, I'm just very curious about like your story, because I know that you're originally from the Bay Area. And if I don't have this wrong, I was listening to an interview that you did and the host suggested that you're from San Jose. Mm hmm. And if I don't have this wrong, I was listening to an interview that you did and the host suggested that you're from San Jose? Mm-hmm, yeah, I grew up in San Jose.

Yeah, me too, partially. So that's kind of cool to hear that. And so I was like, wow, yeah, that's so cool. So you grew up in San Jose and then you moved to Burkina Faso and you live there now. So I would love to just hear the story behind like what led you to want to move to Burkina Faso or what took you there originally and made you stay

or whatever the story is. I would love to hear that. Yeah, sure. I mean, I feel like I have the potential to make this a very long story. And I know the show is not all about me. It's really about Burkina Faso. So I'll try my best to keep this as concise as I can but I

I'll say a few things so I started to become politicized when I was in high school I would say I followed like a a typical trajectory for a lot of black people or as you say in the A, P, and P as we should say Africans in America so I was studying a lot of, as a student, I mean, personally, like Malcolm X and Asada, and you know, I was starting to become sort of radicalized in that way. And when I was 18 years old,

I participated in my first international delegation. This is making it still a kind of a long story, but I'm getting to where I need to go. I participated in an international delegation. Mind you, this is the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. And I had some framings, I guess, around that and some concerns more linked to some of the,

I'm trying to think of the best way to put it, it was deeply oppressive systems within the United States, like the carceral system and these kinds of things that were very central to that movement. And so I was invited as a college student by a friend who went to another school, the Claremont schools in LA area, even though I didn't personally attend

those schools, I had a close friend that did and they did an international delegation to the Garifunda communities in Honduras, which if listeners are not familiar, these are like an African maroon community that live in Central America. It was just after, you know, a few years after the United States had backed a coup in Honduras and so I was, you know, I was 18, I was very young and it really broadened my worldview because I came to understand that the system we're fighting against is an imperialist

system. It's not just an issue that's, you know, internal to the United States. It's an issue that African people, colonized people, oppressed people face all around the world. And we have the same enemy and that's, you know, U.S. imperialism and Western imperialism. And so I joined this student group that brought me there basically. The name is called Chiapas Support Committee. It was founded first in solidarity with the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico. But it became basically an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial organization that supported largely socialist struggles across the Americas. So this organization took me to Cuba.

I think I was like 19 at the time. Maybe I was 20 this organization took me to Cuba. I think I was like 19 at the time, maybe I was 20. It took me to Cuba, it took me to Chiapas, Mexico, and I mentioned Honduras. So I was traveling around the Americas, but my own family personally is from Nigeria. And so I had a very deep interest in the African continent and I wanted to understand how imperialism connected to Africa.

And I was learning so much about the Monroe Doctrine. I was learning a lot about how the US has historically meddled in the Americas. And I didn't have much of a framework to understand what was going on in Africa, but I was really, really, I had like a thirst to understand that. So when I was in college, I studied abroad two semesters. I went first to Senegal and the organization that I was part of at the time,

Chakra Support Committee, sent me with a mission. They basically were telling students, you have to go and study in the Global South and you have to connect with anti-imperialist organizations that are waging some sort of struggle wherever you find. So I went there, but I had an assignment. And so I was really intent on figuring out, you know, this question of what is imperialism looking like in the context of Senegal and how is it manifesting there?

And this was in 2018. And I connected with an organization called FRAP, which is FRAP means to like hit or to strike in French, but it's actually an acronym. It means the acronym is the front for an anti-imperialist popular and Pan-African revolution. And I learned a lot that really brought me close to, you know, the context that I'm in now, in the sense that Senegal was really, and has been also a center of Pan-African

and anti-imperialist struggle, albeit a little bit different from other parts of the Sahel for particular historic reasons. But long story short, so Dakar Senegal is very cosmopolitan in the sense that I was meeting Africans who were coming from Chad, Togo, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, or like Ivory Coast, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Senegalese people. And they had these stories of what they called La France Afrique.

France Afrique basically is a term that's used in French to mean French neocolonialism. So it's like a jab at France, France Afrique. It's like, you know, how the Monroe Doctrine has become a shorthand to understand US intervention and pureless intervention in the Americas. France Afrique is like a shorthand to reference historic French meddling in African affairs, particularly in West and Central Africa. And so I was with

these Africans from all over West and Central Africa, and they were telling these like horror stories of rigged elections, political assassinations, you know, French-backed coups. And I was realizing that this was like a really sort of broad general thing that France was doing in my head. You know, coming from the US, France was like kind of this minor player in the world stage. I wasn't thinking very much of France as like a country that was yielding much power at the time. But I learned a lot. I learned about something called the CFA franc, which is a monetary system that currently

holds 14 African countries hostage. I could talk about this for a while. I guess to keep it short, I'll just recommend a book. There's a great book on this called Africa's last colonial currency. It's by Ndongo Samba Silla and Pani Mfijo. I highly recommend it. And it talks about basically how France has direct control over Western Central African, central banks and economic and financial institutions and basically can make monetary decisions on their behalf for

this currency and there's another country of 15th called Comoros which the name of the currency is different and operates the same way. Anyways, long story short, I learned about these kinds of things when I was in Senegal. It was like a climate where things are really hot and this is the first time I met people from Burkina Faso and And I'd heard of Tomás Sancara before, a little bit in passing. I actually wrote a paper about him in high school because Burkina was in the news after the overthrow of Blas Comparé and I was required to like write something about a current event. I found it, I wrote about it. But this is my first time

meeting people from Burkina Faso. And you. And these people, a lot of them have grown into comrades. Actually one of them co-founded the Thomas Sankara Center with me, somebody that I met in Dakar. I'll just jump really quick. So I spent the next semester in Ghana. That's where I came across the All African People's Revolutionary Party. I studied a lot of Kwame Nkrumah's works at the time.

And this is when I really started to understand what Pan-Africanism was. Pan-Africanism is the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism and you know I was I had this framework where I was like against imperialism, I was against capitalism, I was against all these things but going to Ghana really gave me a framework to understand what I was for, you know was fighting for, something to construct and to build. And so with all these connections, I really felt inclined to go to Burkina Faso in particular. I had this feeling that the Tomasankara heritage

and legacy had the potential to rebirth something revolutionary. I had like this, I don't wanna say it's a hunch because it was an analysis, I guess. It was based off of real sort of observations and exchanges. I was like something could happen in Burkina Faso that has a potential to be interesting. And based off of my experience in Senegal, things were just so hot in the Sahel region beginning around 2018, 2019. Like I just to be in a space where so many people were just so well aware of

the way that they are exploited, the way the imperialist system operates. I mean, this hell has been an incredible period for several years now in terms of just the level of anti-imperialist consciousness across the region. It's really a region of the world where it's like if you go to, you know, get your hair braided in the salon or get your hair cut in the barber shop or, you know, go out for drinks with friends. Like in Burkina, we have like these bars called Macis where people hang out. Like all of those kinds of social spaces or whatever, people are talking about imperialism. Like that's really what people are talking about on the day-to-day. Like you walk around, these are what, you know, the neighborhood's talking about.

They're talking about how France owes us, how they've exploited us, the things they've done to us. And so it's been a while in the making and I could kind of feel like things are about to explode. And so that long story, long story short, it was kind of, those are the coming of the waves that brought me eventually to being in Burkina Faso. Wow, what a really fascinating and like inspiring story.

That's so cool and Yeah, so I guess that led you to once you moved to Wagadougou you began the Thomas Sankara Center Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about Sort of if you want to talk about the process of forming it But also would love to share with our listeners like what you guys do there, what your primary aims and intentions are.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't at the time when I first came to Burkina Faso, so I visited the country once for a month before I moved here. But when I did move to Burkina Faso, I guess I didn't know I was moving at the time. I was coming to work on a project and it was going to be a Pan-African socialist project that involved books. But it wasn't necessarily at the time like supposed to be a long-term thing. It was kind of like, let's do something.

I had through being a college student, I had access to some funding. And the funding was designed for college students to basically do like a short little project over the summer for, you know, one to three months and then you're supposed to come back to school and finish your degree and all of that. And I applied, I didn't think I'd get the funding, but I did. And because of COVID, basically my my award getting that money was pushed back by a year. And so I had already graduated by that time. I finished school and then I asked, you know,

could I still have the funding and do it? And I did it. And I did it, like I said, with a comma that I had met in Dakar. We realized, and this is just a general kind of phenomenon I've seen across West Africa. I'm sure other parts of the continent, it may be similar. But unfortunately, if you go to African countries, in my experience, at least, it's very hard to find revolutionary books

you know even from the region so like if you're in Burkina Faso you won't find very often like Thomas and Kara speeches they used to sell them like at a very high price mind you something totally out of the reach of working-class people but I haven't seen them in years and you know you won't find like Camille Cabral for sale, you won't find like, you just don't find it. And Africa unfortunately doesn't control most of its publishing.

It doesn't control its intellectual property, quote unquote, it's a part of the neocolonial system. It's just kind of how the publishing world is set up. So Africa's cut out from having access to its own sort of intellectual developments. And so anyways, kind of how the publishing world is set up. So Africa's cut out from having access to its own sort of intellectual developments. And so anyways, kind of looking at that problem, we were like, hey, we could use this maybe in bringing in some of these Pan-African books. And so it was like we had a little bit of funding for just a few months and it was going to be like,

OK, let's do this and see where it goes pretty much. And then, you know, after that, I don't know, we'll see. And hopefully this grows and I'd like to see where it goes and that kind of thing and it really took off. I mean, it's kind of incredible. I really was in the right place at the right time. People, like I said, I kind of already saw it coming because I had experience in the region and particularly in the Sahel, but I mean people are really thirsty for this sort of ideological education, for understanding their position in the world, for having access to these kinds of revolutionary resources and materials. And so we just had like so many young people kind of flocking towards

us and coming. And so we were like, you know, we have to keep this going. So basically, let me talk a little bit about what the Tomasankara Center is. So we currently exist now in two locations. We started in Waka Dugu, Burkina Faso going on four years, four years ago. So it started in October of 2021. And then now like three months ago, I think it's been like, yeah, and like in the month of April. So we opened our second location in Niamey, Niger. The Tomasankara Center is a revolutionary,

Pan-African political and ideological education center. It is founded on four main principles, which are Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, scientific socialism, and women's emancipation. These are principles that we have judged are aligned with the ideas of Thomas Sankara and what he was fighting for. And we basically, we do all sorts of things. So we have a lot of political education programming. That's really like the focus of our work. So we have multiple work-study circles which are like these study cells that meet every week. So

basically throughout the week we have multiple circles going on of people coming and studying revolutionary materials collectively as a group. Right now we have two groups studying books by Nkrumah. One group studying a book by a great Pan-Africanist called Sheikhanda Joke. Another one studying a book by Sankara. We recently finished How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Vani in one of the groups.

We've read Ahmed Zekouture. So you have an idea. We have a young pioneer program for children in Burkina, we say like primary, secondary school, but in the United States, that's the equivalent of like elementary and middle school basically. They come after school of their own volition. So just to give you an idea of what it's like

in Burkina Faso, like kids have a lot of freedom. I think, you know, if you're in the U.S., like it's probably how, if you're like a young listener, maybe from my generation, like, imagine maybe how your, like, parents or grandparents described growing up, where it's like, you know, be back by supper, but other than that, you're kind of free to go around and do what you want to do. And that's kind of how the kids are. So a lot of the kids in the neighborhood go and choose to play soccer or football, depending on where you're from or how you call it. But a lot of the kids have decided instead that they want to come to the Tomas and Kara Center and learn about pan-africanism.

We teach them about these important pan-african leaders that I've mentioned. We also teach them about mass struggle, you know, at the grassroots level, understanding that, you know, that's what makes the struggle possible. We talk to them about the different resources that are found across Africa and where those resources go, who controls them, who should control them, what's produced with those resources. So we're teaching them this at a young age and we give the kids you know free meals every time they come. We give them school supplies and these kinds of things. We do regular film screenings so you know we try to do them as often as we can.

Our goal is usually to do it about once a month, give or take. But, you know, we screen films about, you know, Palestine, Haiti, Congo, Sudan, just different international struggles. And we have a practice of trying to call somebody to join us virtually and talk about the film. So sometimes it would be like the direct director

of the film, or sometimes it might be like the direct director of the film or sometimes it might be somebody who comes from, you know, that country that's part of some sort of anti-imperialist or socialist organization that could represent and speak to the struggle that's happening in those different places. So we do that. We do it at the Thomas and Kara Center,

but we've also developed the practice of kind of moving around and doing it in different neighborhoods across the city so we can engage people in different areas. And then we have all sorts of big events. We do a big event for African Liberation Day. This year in Burkina Faso we had a three-day event in Niger. We had a two-day event. It was our first time doing it in Niger.

So yeah, I mean, I think that's the core. I mean, oh, I didn't mention, I don't know if I mentioned like our library. So it's a free lending library. You know, people can come and they check out books. And there aren't many free lending libraries. I don't want to say that there's none, but I don't think that in any case, there's not very many, especially like that are free, but we, we're trying to, you know, we're doing that. That's our practice. And, you know, people come and they check out these books that they basically can't access or find anywhere else. So that's really the core of our work. Anything to do with political and ideological

education. That's our contribution to the struggle within this to help. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with NM Richardson. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this whole project going.

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