Joseph Ki-Zerbo (June 21, 1922 – December 4, 2006, Burkina Faso) was a Burkinabé historian, politician and writer. He is recognized as one of Africa's foremost thinkers.
From 1972 to 1978 he was a professor of African History at the University of Ouagadougou. In 1983, he was forced into exile, only being able to return in 1992.
Ki-Zerbo founded the Party for Democracy and Progress / Socialist Party. He was its chairman until 2005, and represented it in the Burkina Faso parliament until his death in 2006. A socialist and an advocate of African independence and unity, Ki-Zerbo was also a vocal opponent of Thomas Sankara's revolutionary government.
Early life
Ki-Zerbo was born in Toma in the province of Nayala, in what was, at that time, the French colony of Upper Volta. He was the son of Alfred Diban Ki-Zerbo and Thérèse Folo Ki. His father is considered to be the first Burkinabé Christian. In 1915 he intervened during the Volta-Bani War to stop Toma from being razed to the ground.
Between 1933 and 1940, Ki-Zerbo was educated at the Catholic primary school in Toma, then completed his secondary school at the preparatory seminaries in Pabré in the Province of Kadiogo and Faladié, a district of Bamako, Mali. He then attended the Grand Séminaire Saint-Pierre Claver at Koumi near Bobo Dioulasso, which trains young men for the Catholic priesthood.
However, Ki-Zerbo dropped out of the seminary and went to live in Dakar, Senegal for several years. In addition to teaching there, he worked for several months at the weekly newspaper Afrique nouvelle, and also as a railway construction labourer.
The aims of the MLN were immediate independence for Africans, the creation of a United States of Africa, and socialism. The MLN contacted nationalist leaders in many of the other French colonies, to persuade them to reject the referendum on the creation of a Franco-African community presented by the French president Charles de Gaulle. However, in the whole of West Africa at that time, only Guinea voted no to the referendum and, as a result, achieved its independence relatively early in 1958. As a result, Sekou Touré, the first president of independent Guinea, invited Ki-Zerbo and his wife along with other volunteers to come to Conakry to replace the French teachers who had left. From 1976 to 2001, Ki-Zerbo was the president of the African Historian Association and a professor at the University of Ouagadougou.
His conviction on education led him to found in 1980 the Centre for African Development Studies (CEDA) that has this goal “on ne developpe pas, on se developpe” ("we don’t develop, we develop ourselves"). Holenstein (2006) insisted that on the basis of a critique of North–South imperialism, Ki-Zerbo forecast an endogenous development that will take ecological and social skills, and the African cultural identity, seriously.