People & Culture

In the far southwest of Burkina Faso, near the town of Gaoua, stand the walls of Loropeni: laterite ramparts nearly six metres high enclosing eleven hectares of abandoned settlement. They became the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, and they remain, in the plainest sense, a mystery still being worked out. Archaeological dating places occupation of the site back to at least the eleventh century, but the walls in their present form belong to the centuries when it anchored the region's gold trade, roughly the fourteenth through the seventeenth. Historians generally attribute the construction to Koulango or Lohron populations who controlled the extraction and smelting of gold moving north across the Sahara, but oral tradition and the archaeological record do not fully agree, and no single account has closed the question of who exactly raised these walls or why they took the form they did. What is documented is the end: the settlement was abandoned in the nineteenth century amid slave raiding that swept through the region, leaving the ruins to stand empty until UNESCO recognition brought them back into view. Loropeni's mystery sits on top of an older one. Long before any of Burkina Faso's kingdoms took shape, an Iron Age culture archaeologists call Bura occupied the lower Niger valley, spanning what is now southwestern Niger and southeastern Burkina Faso, from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. The Bura smelted and forged iron, and buried their dead beneath terracotta funerary statuettes and coffins clustered into necropoleis, one of which runs nearly a kilometre across. Almost nothing is remembered of them by name. What survives is the material record: iron tools, clay figures, burial mounds, evidence of a settled and technically capable society predating the written history of the region by close to a thousand years. The history that visitors actually hear about on the ground begins later, with the Mossi. By the eighteenth century there were some twenty Mossi kingdoms across the country, the most powerful centred on Ouagadougou and Yatenga. The ruler of Ouagadougou held a title unlike any other Mossi chief's, unattached to a place name: the Mogho Naba, ruler of the Mossi world. What makes the Mossi kingdoms genuinely unusual in West African history is what they refused. When the Mali empire expanded under the banner of Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and when Songhai did the same afterward, most of the Sahel's ruling classes converted, whether through trade, diplomacy or conquest. The Mossi did not. Their kingship was bound to a system of ancestral and earth cults that gave their kings both political and religious legitimacy, and that fusion made conversion look like abdication. The Mogho Nabas held out for centuries, and when French forces finally reached Ouagadougou they still had to fight for it: Naba Wobgho, who had ruled since 1890 and had already rebuffed a French bid for a protectorate in 1891, saw his capital burned in 1896 and was formally deposed by French officers in 1897. Few Sahelian dynasties held their own religion and their own throne that long against both jihad and colonial conquest. Not every people in the territory organised around a throne, and it is worth being precise about what that meant. The Gurunsi peoples of the centre and south, the Lobi who settled the south around 1770, and the Bobo further west ran their affairs through lineage councils, earth-priests and consensus rather than through kings. This was not an absence of politics. It was a different solution to the same problem every society has to answer: how to hold authority, settle disputes and defend land without concentrating power in one office. The Gurunsi in particular were raided for slaves by Mossi cavalry for centuries and were never conquered outright, precisely because there was no single throne to topple and no capital whose fall would end the resistance. Lobi authority still runs largely through family and shrine, which is one reason so many Lobi sacred sites remain closed to outsiders today. Two smaller kingdoms filled in the map. In the far southwest, the Gan founded a kingdom near the end of the sixteenth century whose authority rested on a cult of royal ancestors, kept alive through bronze figures and oral memory rather than through written chronicle. In the east, the Gurma built something more centralised, a monarchy founded according to tradition by the thirteenth-century ruler Diaba Lompo at Fada N'Gourma and headed by a ruler called the Gurmu-Naba. It endured as one of the more stable political orders in the region until French forces dismantled its military structures in the late nineteenth century, though colonial administrators found it useful enough to keep the Gurmu-Naba on as a figurehead for indirect rule. France's colonial history here is stranger than the usual story of conquest and administration. The colony of Upper Volta was carved out in 1919 from territory taken from Upper Senegal and Niger and from Cote d'Ivoire. Thirteen years later, in 1932, France dissolved it outright, splitting the territory back among Cote d'Ivoire, French Sudan and Niger, partly because armed resistance was making the colony expensive to hold and partly because Cote d'Ivoire's plantations needed a captive supply of labour closer at hand. Upper Volta did not return to the map until 1947, revived after the Second World War when France needed its colonies' raw materials again. Few French West African territories were assembled, deliberately erased and then reassembled within a single generation. That dissolution in 1932 was not incidental to the labour question, it was the labour question. Colonial administrators treated the Mossi plateau as a reservoir of workers for Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa and coffee plantations, and folding Upper Volta into Cote d'Ivoire's administration made moving that labour south administratively simple. Between 1919 and 1946 that movement was substantially forced, as young men were conscripted or coerced off Voltaic land and put to work with little pay, far from their families, under a labour regime that persisted until the law of April 1946 formally abolished forced labour across French overseas territories. That coerced migration set a pattern which outlived colonial rule, since the roads Voltaic labourers walked south became the roads Burkinabe migrants still travel today, and Cote d'Ivoire's economy was built in real part on labour Upper Volta was never compensated for supplying. Upper Volta reached full independence on 5 August 1960 under Maurice Yameogo, who moved quickly to turn his own party into the country's only legal one. By January 1966, austerity measures and a general strike had turned into a popular revolt, and the army stepped in, installing Lieutenant Colonel Sangoule Lamizana. It was the first of what became a long pattern, since Lamizana tried twice, in 1970 and 1978, to hand government back to civilians, and each time the arrangement collapsed within a few years, ending with his own removal in a coup in 1980. That officer was toppled in turn in 1982, and the man who took power then was himself removed in August 1983 by a coup that put a thirty-three-year-old captain, Thomas Sankara, in the presidency. Sankara's four years in office remain the most argued-over stretch of Burkinabe history, and the argument is worth having honestly rather than smoothed over. What is documented: his government ran a nationwide vaccination campaign that reached roughly 2.5 million children against measles, meningitis and yellow fever; pursued land reform aimed at agricultural self-sufficiency; renamed the country Burkina Faso, land of upright people, in 1984; and pushed one of the more far-reaching women's rights programmes any African government had attempted to that point, outlawing forced marriage, polygamy and female genital cutting, appointing women to cabinet posts and mandating their participation on local governing committees, culminating in a speech of March 1987 on patriarchy and economic exploitation that is still taught as a landmark text. Sankara also refused most foreign aid, pressed African governments to repudiate debt he considered odious, and moved to nationalise land and mineral wealth, positions that put him at odds with the IMF, the World Bank and France. He was killed in a coup on 15 October 1987 led by his former close ally Blaise Compaore. What is contested is not whether he was killed in that coup, which the record and eventually a court established, but how to weigh his economic programme against its costs, how much responsibility France bore alongside Compaore, and what his four years would have become had he lived past thirty-seven. That last question sat unresolved for thirty-four years. A military tribunal finally opened the case in October 2021, heard from around a hundred witnesses over six months, and in April 2022 convicted Compaore, tried in absentia after he fled to Cote d'Ivoire, along with two co-defendants, sentencing all three to life imprisonment, while eight other defendants received lesser terms and three were acquitted. The verdict settled legal responsibility. It did not settle the politics, since Sankara remains a live symbol in Burkinabe public life, invoked by nearly every government since, including the current one, in ways his family and former colleagues do not always recognise as faithful to what he stood for. Compaore governed for the next twenty-seven years, and it was an attempt to extend that run further, a constitutional amendment in 2014 scrapping presidential term limits, that finally brought him down. Protesters set fire to the parliament building on the day of the vote, youth movements and civil society groups that had been organising for years found their moment, and Compaore resigned on 31 October 2014, going into exile in Cote d'Ivoire. The country that emerged from the uprising held elections and then, from 2015 onward, absorbed a jihadist insurgency that had been building in neighbouring Mali and increasingly spilled across the border. Armed groups expanded through the north and east, exploiting local grievances and the state's thin presence outside the towns. The elected government's failure to contain that expansion cost it power twice in 2022, in January and again in September, with both coups justified explicitly by the deteriorating security situation. The crisis has not resolved since. Reporting on how much territory sits outside government control and how many people have been displaced varies by source and by the month it was gathered, but every serious count agrees on the direction: large, contested and still moving, with well over a million people displaced inside the country's own borders. This is what a visitor stands in front of today, when the ground allows it. Loropeni's walls, quiet and largely unexcavated beyond what has already been cleared. The Grand Mosque of Bobo-Dioulasso, raised around 1880 in Sudano-Sahelian mud brick by residents of twenty-two surrounding villages, Muslim, Christian and traditionalist working side by side, its wooden beams still bristling from the walls above the old quarter's narrow streets. The Sindou peaks, wind-carved sandstone spires rising out of scrubland near the border with Mali, best seen at sunset. The Karfiguela falls and the domes of Fabedougou near Banfora, with Tengrela lake close enough for an afternoon on the water. The Nazinga game ranch south toward Po, where elephants still gather at the waterholes. The Laongo sculpture park outside Ziniare, granite outcrops carved by international artists invited back every year or two since 1989. And FESPACO, founded in 1969 and now Africa's largest film festival, held every two years in Ouagadougou, still drawing filmmakers from across the continent even through the years the state itself has been unstable. None of this is currently visited casually. Most foreign governments rate travel to Burkina Faso at their highest risk level, a state of emergency covers parts of several regions, and government personnel are commonly barred from travelling outside the capital at all, so anyone planning to see these places in person needs to check current advisories rather than assume the access described here still holds. Where travel is possible, move through this history as a guest of it rather than as a consumer of it. Sankara belongs to an argument still being had by people who lived it rather than to a settled museum narrative, so hold his name lightly in conversation. Sacred groves and Lobi family shrines are not backdrops, and where a community keeps them closed that closure is the whole point, holding whether or not a guide offers to open one for a fee. And never point a camera at a military checkpoint, barracks or government building, a rule enforced here more strictly than the postcard version of the country might suggest. What is left standing, from Loropeni's walls to the mosque at Bobo-Dioulasso, has survived slave raids, colonial partition, coups and now an insurgency, and it is still there to be seen by whoever reaches it with that history in hand.