Meet Blaise Compaoré’s Wife
Chantal Compaoré is the Wife and Former first lady of Burkina Faso.
Former President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso’s wife, Chantal Compaoré, is a Franco-Ivorian.
She was born in the Ivory Coast town of Dabou and spent much of her time in Burkina Faso after becoming First Lady in 1987.
Her husband was deposed in the 2014 Burkinabé uprising after a brutal military coup in 1987. Following this, Chantal Compaoré was compelled to flee to her homeland, where she and her husband went into exile.
For more than half a century, her family was intimately tied to that of Ivory Coast’s first President Félix Houphout-Boigny.
He was a staunch opponent of communism and kept close links with France, governing Ivory Coast as a single-party state.
Chantal may have been the child of Houphout-Boigny, who fathered a kid out of wedlock in 1961, according to some reports.
Blaise Compaoré, then Minister of Justice of Burkina Faso, visited Abidjan and President Houphout-Boigny on January 15, 1985, when Captain Compaoré was a young military officer.
In August 1983, Compaoré and other members of the “Communist Officer’s Group” seized power in Burkina Faso after a military coup against Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo in what was then the Republic of Upper Volta.
As a result of the coup, he appointed his good friend and close ally Captain Thomas Sankara as president.
A prior coup attempt against Saye Zerbo in 1980 had implicated both of these individuals.
Five months after initially meeting, Blaise and Chantal tied the knot.
In most accounts, President Houphout-Boigny had some role in arranging the marriage because he needed an ally in Burkina Faso’s revolutionary left-wing administration, which he constantly fought with.
Sankara’s “Democratic and Popular Revolution” had a prominent ideologue in former Minister of Higher Education and Research Dr. Valère Somé, who says Chantal Comporé had a falling out with the President and publicly referred to his “pretend revolution” during a dinner party after being denied permission by Sankara to serve him champagne
Chantal Compaoré As First Lady
Blaise Compaoré staged a military coup against Thomas Sankara on October 15, 1987, which resulted in Sankara’s death.
The coup’s leader, President Félix Houphout-Boigny, was heavily involved, and it’s conceivable that the French were involved as well.
Chantal became Burkina Faso’s First Lady after Blaise was elected President. Mariam Sankara, her predecessor, and her two sons departed the country. Most of Sankara’s policies will be rolled back under Compaoré’s presidency.
Chantal’s goddaughter, Désirée Delafosse, arrived soon after in Burkina Faso as the widow of Adolphus Tolbert, who was also Chantal’s “foster-sister.”
He was the son of Liberia’s President William R. Tolbert, Jr., who was slain in a coup by Samuel Doe’s soldiers in 1980.
It was because of her presence in the presidential entourage and the close ties between Houphout-Boigny and the Compaorés that Liberian-Burkinabé relations became so cold in the years that followed, as well as because of Burkina Faso’s involvement in the First Liberian Civil War on the side of Blaise’s close friend Charles Taylor.
