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His message has resonated across Africa and beyond, with his admirers seeing him as following in the footsteps of African heroes like Burkina Faso's very own Thomas Sankara - a Marxist revolutionary who is sometimes referred to as "Africa's Che Guevara".

"He is media-savvy, and uses the past to build his popularity as a reincarnation of Sankara," he told the BBC.

Sankara rose to power in a coup in 1983 at the age of 33, rallied the nation under the motto "Fatherland or death, we will win!"

James said the jihadists also expressed the view that if Sankara and Nkrumah had "lived long", then "the whole of Africa would have been a better place - nobody would have travelled from Africa to the West. People would have been travelling from the West to Africa".

In a sign that the jihadists were also influenced by pan-Africanism, James said some of them invoked the names of revolutionaries like Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and told him that people should "rise up" against "bad leaders" and free themselves from "bondage".