On October 31, 2014, after twenty-seven years in power, Burkina Faso’s president Blaise Compaoré resigned. Compaoré had seized power in a 1987 coup that killed Thomas Sankara, and by 2014 he was trying to change the constitution so he could rule beyond his term limits. The people answered in the streets: thousands marched on the parliament in Ouagadougou, stormed it, and set it ablaze. Faced with an uprising he could no longer contain, Compaoré stepped down and fled the country, and the military took charge of the transition as a wave of relief swept the capital.

His fall did not come from a rival army or a palace plot. It came from ordinary Burkinabè who refused to watch a president rewrite the rules to stay in power — and from soldiers who would not be the instrument of holding him there. The burning parliament became the image of the day: a building meant to house the nation’s laws, torched by citizens who felt those laws were being bent against them. Within hours, a ruler who had held power for nearly three decades was gone.

That is why October 31 still matters. Burkina Faso’s uprising warned other African strongmen that term limits are not a technicality to be amended away — the streets are watching, and a people who have waited long enough will take their country back.