Thomas Sankara was 33 years old when he came to power in Burkina Faso on August 4, 1983. The country he led had been called Upper Volta, a name given by French colonisers that referenced a river, not the people who lived there. One of his first major acts was to rename it Burkina Faso: in the Moore and Dioula languages of the country, it means "land of upright people." In the four years he governed before being assassinated on October 15, 1987, Sankara coordinated the vaccination of 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles in one week. He built 100 schools using community labour. He planted 10 million trees to fight the advancing Sahara. He banned female genital mutilation and appointed women to senior government positions. He sold the government fleet of Mercedes-Benz cars and replaced them with Renault 5s, the cheapest cars available in the country at the time, and required officials, including himself, to use public health services. He publicly tracked and published these achievements so that no one could deny what had and had not been done. He died at 37. He had led for four years.