Burkina Faso
In 1984 the leaders of Upper Volta changed the name of this former French colony to Burkina Faso, a term combining two of the country’s many languages, and meaning “land of upright people.” As one of the world’s poorest nations, Burkina Faso counts people among its most important resources. Remittances from migrant laborers working in the more affluent
Côte d’Ivoire sustain the households of many of the approximately thirteen million citizens in Burkina Faso, 82 percent of whom live in rural areas. This tradition of southward migration became firmly established during the colonial era, when France incorporated the Volta region into its West African empire in order to turn the drought-prone but relatively populous Mossi plateau into a labor reserve. Because the French colonial administration invested little in developing Upper Volta itself, de jure independence in 1960 heralded a new era of de facto dependence on foreign donors, especially France. Steady infusions of aid, however, failed to prevent either the onset of two famines or the overthrow of six governments.
In 1983, flight commander Thomas
Sankara came to power promising an end to both neocolonialism and rural suffering. Although the Burkinabè revolution was cut short by Sankara’s assassination in 1987, it did initiate improvements in rural literacy, health, and food security, as well as women’s rights. The current regime of Blaise
Compaoré has deregulated the economy, mended relations with the West, and pledged a commitment (viewed skeptically by many Burkinabè) to democracy. Burkina Faso is still extremely poor, but it enjoys a reputation for religious and ethnic tolerance, as well as for its rich performing arts traditions.
Early History
Apart from Stone Age axes found in northern Burkina Faso, archaeology provides few clues about the region’s first human inhabitants. The ancestors of the
Lobi and
Bobo peoples were among the earliest agriculturists, settling the savanna west of the Mouhoun (or Black Volta) River perhaps around 1100
C.E.. While these lineage-based societies never developed centralized polities, migrants from the
Dagomba region (in present-day
Ghana) founded the
Mossi dynasties on the more arid plateau to the north. The most powerful Mossi kingdom, Ouagadougou, was founded in the late fifteenth century. Nineteen smaller but fairly autonomous Mossi states ruled over territories to the north, west, and east, and eventually assimilated many of the neighboring peoples into Mossi society. Both the Mossi and the southern peoples lived primarily from rainy-season agriculture, supplemented during the long dry season by
Hunting, foraging, and in some places fishing. Millet and sorghum were staples throughout the savanna; wetter conditions in the far south supported the production of root crops and, later, rice. In the far north, seasonal rainfall also shaped the migration patterns of Peul (or
Fulani) pastoralists.
Situated between the forest and
Sahel ecozones, the Volta region was traversed by caravan traders who dealt in kola, gold, and slaves from the forest regions, salt from the
Sahara, and luxury goods from North Africa. The traders brought weapons and horses to the court of Ouagadougou, but found the most lively markets in southern towns such as Sya (now
Bobo-Dioulasso), where
Mande-speaking Zara merchants had settled amongst the Bobo.
In the sixteenth century, the Mossi expanded northward into the Sahel, where they were rebuffed by the armies of the
Songhai empire, led by
Sunni Ali. However, neither Ali nor his successor,
Askia Muhammad, was able to convince the Ouagadougou king, the
mogho naaba, to convert to Islam. Although many Mossi traders eventually did convert, the Volta region has remained less Islamized than the rest of the Sahel.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Slavery became a common practice in the Volta region. Some Mossi kingdoms captured local peoples or bought slaves from other kingdoms to work as agricultural or domestic laborers. These slaves were often allowed to engage in wage-earning activities for themselves, such as cultivating food and raising cattle. At the same time, southern peoples were subjected to slave raids from the
Kong empire (northern Côte d’Ivoire). With no armies and few weapons, peoples such as the Bobo lived in large, densely settled villages for protection.
Colonial Conquest
By the late nineteenth century, Great Britain and France were racing against each other to establish spheres of influence in the West African interior. In 1887 the French explorer Louis Binger visited Ouagadougou during his trip across West Africa. He was unimpressed by the Mossi kingdom, noting that the Mossi cultivated only what they needed in order to subsist, “so that even if there are no paupers in their country, there are virtually no rich men either.” Yet the Mossi region was densely populated, and Binger suggested it would make a suitable “labor reserve” for French ventures elsewhere in West Africa. In particular, labor was needed for irrigated cotton production in the fertile but sparsely populated
Niger River basin, which French engineers believed had the potential to become a “new
Egypt.”
The Mogho Naaba Wogbo refused Binger’s invitation to make his kingdom a French protectorate. The explorer did, however, manage to secure a protectorate agreement from the Ouattara leader of Kong, whose empire by then included much of the southern Volta region. Over the next several years the French conquered regions to the east, west, and north of the Mossi kingdoms, and in 1895 French troops occupied Bobo-Dioulasso, overcoming resistance from the town’s Zara warriors. The following year the French defeated Ouagadougou’s Mossi army and burned down much of the city. Wogbo escaped and later sought British protection.
Colonial Rule
In 1898 France and Great Britain reached an accord, granting France dominion over Upper Volta. The territory was initially designated a military zone, but in 1904 it became part of the colony Haut-Sénégal-Niger, administered from
Bamako. After their earlier experience with the recalcitrant Wogbo, the French were determined to undermine the authority of the Mossi kingship. When Wogbo’s successor Sighiri died in 1905, the French replaced him with a sixteen-year-old
naaba, who posed little threat to the colonial regime. They also replaced lower-level Mossi chiefs, where necessary, with more compliant appointees, and imposed the indigénat, a legal system that effectively placed all judicial power in the hands of French administrators.
The French could not afford to dismantle the Mossi kingdom or other preexisting authority structures entirely, however. Although French officials were posted to each of the colony’s administrative districts (known as
cercles), they needed chiefs to collect taxes and recruit labor, and thus appointed them to these duties even in regions with no prior tradition of centralized authority. This was the case, for example, in the Bobo-Dioulasso cercle, where appointed Ouattara chiefs were usually unpopular and ineffective, and known for embezzling taxes.
The first quarter of the twentieth century was a period of extreme hardship for the peoples of Upper Volta. Although the French officially ended slavery in 1901, tens of thousands of Voltaics were forced each year to labor in cotton fields and construction sites, while others were conscripted into the military. Such policies, coupled with a punitive system of taxation, provoked popular revolts throughout the colony. These ranged from a 2,000-person anti-tax march in Ouagadougou in 1908 to a series of village revolts west of Bobo-Dioulasso in 1915–1916. Thousands also fled south to the British colony of
Gold Coast, where labor laws were less coercive.
In 1919 the French made Upper Volta a separate colony, in order to better control its people and develop its economy. As in the previous decades, thousands of laborers were forcibly recruited to build an administrative post in the new capital,
Ouagadougou, as well as roads and rail lines intended to facilitate the export of cotton—a crop that peasants in many cercles were forced to cultivate. But the French invested little in irrigation, fertilizer, or other agricultural improvements in Upper Volta, since it was still considered primarily a labor reserve for neighboring colonies’ projects. Consequently, cotton farming in more arid areas led quickly to soil degradation, especially since many rural households—having lost their most able-bodied members to compulsory labor projects—were too short-handed to tend their land properly. Forced cash-crop cultivation also took time and land away from grain farming, leaving rural areas dangerously vulnerable to food shortages.
This vulnerability became tragically obvious in the late 1920s, when a series of droughts coincided with plunging world prices for cotton and commodities after 1929. Famines in 1926 and 1930 led one French colonial official to warn of demographic collapse. By 1931 Upper Volta was not only famine-stricken but also bankrupt, and in September 1932 the country was dismantled and divided up among neighboring French colonies. Most of the territory went to Côte d’Ivoire, where Voltaic labor was needed for coffee and cocoa plantations as well as for the
Abidjan-Ouagadougou railway.
The rail line reached Bobo-Dioulasso in 1934, and several European trade firms soon followed. Besides a handful of French administrators and soldiers, most of the town’s other European residents were Roman Catholic missionaries known as
Pères Blancs (White Fathers). As elsewhere in the Volta region, the Bobo mission was hurrying to win converts during a time of rapid Islamization. The Pères Blancs targeted village youth, in particular; they offered catechism classes and staged festivities at the mission, and spoke out openly against forced labor.
When World War II began, more than 10,000 Mossi volunteered for active military service. Some served in Europe or North Africa, but many remained in the Bobo-Dioulasso military camp, or were used for forced labor. Soon after the war ended, the French government agreed to grant its colonies representation in the French National Assembly. Côte d’Ivoire received three seats, and in November 1946 Ivoirian Félix
Houphouët-Boigny and two Voltaics, Daniel Ouézzin Coulibaly and Philippe Kaboré—all members of the radical
Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA)—were elected its deputies. In that same year, Mossi chiefs asked France to restore Upper Volta as a separate colony. They were primarily interested in reinstating their own political influence, but France agreed to their request. France was primarily interested in cutting the region off from the anticolonial politics of Houphouët-Boigny and the RDA. The charismatic Ivoirian was already extremely popular around Bobo-Dioulasso, especially after he convinced the French National Assembly in April 1946 to abolish forced labor.
Upper Volta was reconstituted on September 4 1947. The RDA remained popular in the southwest, but in the north lost support to Mossi-dominated political parties, such as the conservative Union Voltaique (UV). Over the next decade, growing nationalist movements throughout Africa made
Decolonization inevitable. In Upper Volta, this was a time of relative prosperity; many World War II veterans invested their pensions in commercial agriculture, trade, and transport companies, and both Bobo-Dioulasso and Ouagadougou grew rapidly. Still, political factionalism during the 1950s, combined with the fact that Upper Volta was still landlocked and resource-poor, boded ill for independence.
In 1958, two years after universal suffrage was granted throughout French West Africa, France’s African colonies took part in a referendum on whether to become semiautonomous members of the French Community. Upper Volta, like all its neighbors save
Guinea, voted yes. That same year saw the rise to power of Maurice Yaméogo, a Mossi member of the newly formed Parti de Regroupement Africain. After he was elected president of Upper Volta’s Council of Ministers, Yaméogo moved to align himself with the now politically moderate RDA and its founder Houphouët-Boigny, who would soon be president of Côte d’Ivoire. A 1959 treaty of economic cooperation between the two leaders indicated that Upper Volta, long the labor reserve of its wealthier neighbor, would continue to depend on Côte d’Ivoire for employment and port access.
Unlike many emerging African leaders, Yaméogo argued that his people were not ready for total independence; as he told one French official in 1959, “We cannot even build matchboxes.” By then, however, France was committed to pulling out of all its West African colonies. Upper Volta became independent on August 5 1960, and Yaméogo became its first president.
Independence
The next two decades confirmed the political omens of the late colonial period. Yaméogo, an authoritarian leader even before independence, moved quickly to undermine the multiparty system and rein in the country’s young labor movement. This tactic worked until 1966, when the president’s attempts to cut government employees’ wages provoked a wave of strikes, followed by a military takeover led by Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana. Military coups subsequently became more the norm than the exception in Upper Volta’s politics. Meanwhile, one regime after another failed to invigorate the country’s stagnant economy, which remained heavily dependent on exports of cotton and migrant labor, as well as on foreign aid. Despite a sizeable community of international development and relief workers in the capital Ouagadougou, drought-stricken rural northern provinces suffered famines in 1973–1974 and 1984–1985.
Even as political and economic conditions were deteriorating, however, Upper Volta was developing a thriving state-sponsored film industry. Since 1969 the capital has hosted the biennial Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO). Ouagadougou has come to be known as the “Cannes of Africa,” and Burkinabè filmmakers such as Idrissa
Ouédraogo and Gaston Kaboré have won international renown. The state has also actively supported theater festivals, as well as Bobo-Dioulasso’s biennial “Bobo Fête,” a weeklong event featuring contests and cultural performances of all kinds (including cooking and hairdressing), drawn from traditions throughout the country.
Revolution and Rectification
In 1983 drama on the streets of Ouagadougou, not its cinema screens, caught world attention. In the previous year, military officials had overthrown the regime of Saye Zerbo, and established the 120-member ruling Conseil de Salut du Peuple (CSP). A left-wing faction within the CSP, led by the young flight commander Thomas Sankara and his long-time friend Blaise Compaoré had gotten Sankara appointed as prime minister in January 1983. In May the conservative wing of the CSP had Sankara arrested on trumped-up treason charges. Students protested en masse in the capital, and troops led by Compaoré launched a rebellion from the Ghanaian border. On August 4, they marched into Ouagadougou, freed Sankara, and captured the national radio, from where Sankara announced that the Conseil National de la Révolution (CNR) had taken over the country.
Upper Volta had seen many military rulers, but Sankara at age thirty-three was by far the youngest and most revolutionary. He initiated the renaming of the country Burkina Faso, “land of upright people,” and was considered by many, both at home and abroad, to be a morally upright leader, though not always a pragmatic one. Once in power, he cut the wages of top civil servants (including himself) and donated all the government’s luxury cars to the national lottery, using the proceeds for public spending. He was also an outspoken proponent of women’s liberation. He appointed five women to ministerial posts, launched a campaign against
Female Circumcision, and initiated changes in family law. The Sankara government’s investments in rural schools, clinics, and agricultural extension services brought modest improvements in living standards, and quite dramatic increases in food production. Sankara’s foreign policy, meanwhile, aligned his country squarely with left-wing regimes such as Cuba,
Libya, and North Korea. He rejected World Bank loan conditions, and promised to “fight against the forces of neo-colonialism and imperialist domination.”
Not surprisingly, such rhetoric discouraged foreign investment, just as Sankara’s public references to the “big, fat, and gross” bourgeoisie led many Burkinabé merchants and entrepreneurs to take their businesses across the border. More seriously, Sankara’s heavy-handedness alienated nearly all the country’s traditionally powerful constituencies. Mossi chiefs did not welcome his pledge to destroy rural “feudalism” and “patriarchy,” and the president’s harsh treatment of critics and striking workers eventually turned even the labor unions against him. Ultimately, however, it was Sankara’s own peers—soldiers loyal to his best friend and fellow CNR member Blaise Compaoré—who assassinated him on October 15 1987. Although Compaoré denied involvement in the murder, he did not hesitate to take power afterward.
Compaoré has ruled Burkina Faso since Sankara’s death. He took office pledging to “rectify” the Sankara revolution, and moved immediately to mend rifts with Mossi authorities, the army, the business community, and Western donor nations. His appointed government, the Front Populaire, announced the formation of a new umbrella party, the Organisation pour la Démocratie Populaire/Mouvement du Travail (ODP/MT) in 1989, and a year later it drafted a new constitution, allowing for multiparty elections. However, repression of political dissidents (including many university students) continued, and government control over preelection campaigning and media led opposition parties to boycott the December 1991 presidential elections. Compaoré won easily, but less than a quarter of the population voted.
Since the disputed 1991 elections, political parties in Burkina Faso have proliferated, but the ODP/MT has consistently dominated national elections. Compaoré captured the presidency again in 1998, in an election followed immediately by unrest over the murder of a journalist investigating the death of the president’s chauffeur. The killing remains unsolved. A constitutional amendment approved in 2000 lengthened the president’s term of office from five to seven years, but limited the president to a single term. These laws, however, were not enough to keep Compaoré from another term in office. He won resoundingly in 2005, securing more than 80 percent of the vote.
Like many other nations in West Africa, Burkina Faso has been caught up in the ongoing violence and civil unrest throughout the region. In the early 2000s Côte d’Ivoire’s president, Laurent Gbagbo, initiated a campaign to restrict citizenship in his country, a move that threatened the status of the many Burkinabè immigrants in the country. After civil war erupted in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002, Gbagbo accused Burkina Faso of supporting the rebels fighting against his government. This dispute led to a yearlong closure of the border between the two countries, which finally reopened in September 2003.
On the economic front, “rectification” brought an end to Marxist-Leninism as an official government ideology. Faced with falling world cotton prices and growing debt, Compaoré agreed to a World Bank
Structural Adjustment program in 1991. The accompanying austerity measures—including thousands of layoffs at state-owned factories and fee increases for education and other government services—provoked strikes by students and trade unions. The 1994 devaluation of the West African franc (the CFA) brought further price increases, especially for imported fuel, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods. Economic growth in recent years has been somewhat uneven, but the government’s adherence to World Bank reforms has put Burkina Faso near the top of the list of poor nations targeted for debt relief by international donors. The country is also counting on revenue from gold, which has become Burkina Faso’s second-largest source of foreign exchange (after cotton) since the Sankara government reopened the long-dormant Poura gold mine in 1984. Foreign mining firms and artisanal gold panners are now working at several different sites around the country, but gold reserves are small and will not last much beyond the year 2000. The government is also attempting to exploit other minerals such as zinc, and to diversify its agricultural exports. Burkina Faso is already Africa’s second largest exporter of French green beans (after
Kenya), and recent aid programs have secured European markets for sun-dried Burkinabè tomatoes and mangoes.
Despite its status as one of the world’s poorest countries, Burkina Faso has in many ways fared better than its wealthier neighbors. It has experienced no debilitating civil wars and is considered by many to be an oasis of ethnic and religious tolerance. Its economy has been competently managed, and rural areas—where approximately 80 percent of the population still lives—have begun to reap the benefits of soil conservation programs dating from the 1980s. In 1998 Burkina Faso hosted the
African Cup of Nations soccer tournament, Africa’s biggest sporting event. Even though the home team lost in the quarterfinals, positive international media coverage of the games’ host suggested that the Burkinabè had, at the least, scored a public relations victory.
See also Christianity: Missionaries in Africa;
Cinema, African;
Colonial rule;
Minerals and Mining in Africa; PASTORALISM; SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA.
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