Long before any border existed, the central plateau of today's Burkina Faso was home to farming peoples related to the Gurunsi, Lobi, Bobo and Senufo, who worked the land and iron and lived in societies without a centralised state. On top of that ancient foundation arose, around the 15th and 16th centuries, one of the most solid and enduring political formations in West Africa: the Mossi kingdoms.
Mossi tradition traces its origins to Princess Yennenga, daughter of a king of Dagbon (in what is now northern Ghana). A horsewoman and warrior, Yennenga rode away, joined a hunter called Rialé and had a son, Ouedraogo — "stallion", in honour of the animal that carried her — whom legend regards as the founder of the Mossi people. His descendants created several kingdoms, the most powerful of which was Ouagadougou (Wogodogo). Its ruler, the Mogho Naba ("lord of the world"), governed as emperor over the other Mossi kingdoms, with a court of dignitaries and ministers and a remarkably stable political and military organisation. Alongside Ouagadougou, the kingdoms of Yatenga, Tenkodogo and Fada N'Gourma stood out.
To the east, the Gurma (or Gourmantché) people organised their own kingdom around Fada N'Gourma, related to the Mossi but with an identity of its own. These monarchies, backed by a formidable cavalry, dominated the region for centuries and fought off their neighbours' attempts at conquest. To this day, the figure of the Mogho Naba — whose court holds the Nab-Yita or "false departure" ceremony in Ouagadougou every Friday — survives as a traditional authority and a living symbol of that age-old heritage.
The Mossi kingdoms did not live in isolation. Around them, the great empires of the western Sahel — Ghana, Mali and, above all, Songhai — rose and fell. These powers controlled the trans-Saharan trade routes that carried gold from the south, salt from the desert, textiles, beads and also slaves. The region of today's Burkina Faso lay on the southern fringe of that system, a frontier zone between the Islamic Sahelian world to the north and the animist forest peoples to the south.
That position brought both wealth and conflict. The Mossi horsemen of Yatenga went as far as launching daring raids northwards, sacking Songhai cities such as Oualata and Timbuktu between the 14th and 16th centuries. But unlike their neighbours, the Mossi firmly resisted the Islamisation advancing across the Sahel: for a long time their rulers kept the traditional beliefs, while tolerating Muslim merchants and advisers at their courts. That mix of openness to trade and loyalty to their own religion partly explains their longevity.
The gold trade left monumental traces. In the south-west, the imposing stone walls of Loropéni — now the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site — were part of a network of fortifications linked to gold mining and trade, active for centuries and probably associated with the Lohron or Koulango people. These ruins, more than a thousand years old, are the clearest evidence that these lands, far from being a forgotten corner, were fully woven into the great economic networks of medieval Africa.
The colonial carve-up of Africa, which sped up after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, reached the Mossi plateau at the end of the 19th century. In 1896, French troops occupied Ouagadougou and deposed the Mogho Naba Wobgo (Boukary Koutou), who resisted and eventually fled into British territory. By around 1898, having also defeated the Gurma and other peoples, France had subdued most of what is now Burkina Faso and folded the region into the vast French West Africa federation.
Colonial rule was harsh. It brought taxes, forced labour and conscription that tore men from their villages to build roads and railways, or to work on plantations in Côte d'Ivoire. Thousands of Voltaics were also sent as tirailleurs (colonial soldiers) to the fronts of both world wars. In 1919, France organised the territory as a separate colony, Upper Volta (Haute-Volta), named after the three rivers — the Black, Red and White Volta — that cross it.
But Upper Volta had an on-and-off existence that shows just how artificial a creation of the coloniser it was. In 1932, to cut costs, France dissolved the colony and split its territory between Côte d'Ivoire, French Sudan (today's Mali) and Niger. Only in 1947, under pressure from the Mossi elites — who saw their identity being diluted — and for administrative convenience, was the colony re-established within its former borders. That back-and-forth left its mark: an awareness of a territory whose very existence had to be defended.
Decolonisation came in a chain reaction after the Second World War. On 11 December 1958, Upper Volta became an autonomous republic within the French Community, and on 5 August 1960 it achieved full independence. Its first president was Maurice Yaméogo, leader of the Voltaic Democratic Union, who soon drifted towards a one-party regime and a government marked by corruption and authoritarianism.
Discontent soon boiled over. In early 1966, a wave of popular and trade-union protests forced Yaméogo out, and the army took power with General Sangoulé Lamizana at its head. So began a long cycle of instability in which military governments, brief civilian openings and fresh coups would take turns. Lamizana ruled, under various arrangements, until 1980, when he was overthrown by another coup.
The following years were a merry-go-round of military juntas. The country, one of the poorest in the world, depended on cotton exports, foreign aid and remittances from hundreds of thousands of Voltaics who had emigrated to Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. The Sahel droughts of the 1970s made hunger and poverty worse. In that climate of chronic crisis and frustration with a political class unable to deliver, a new generation of young, educated and politicised officers began to stand out — and among them, one charismatic captain shone: Thomas Sankara.
Thomas Sankara was born on 21 December 1949 in Yako. A soldier by training, a pan-Africanist and a Marxist, he became popular for his honesty, his austerity and his fiery speeches. On 4 August 1983, a coup led by his friend and comrade-in-arms Blaise Compaoré brought him to power at the head of the National Council of the Revolution, aged just 33. It was the start of one of the most singular and best-remembered political experiments in recent African history.
The most symbolic gesture came on the first anniversary: on 4 August 1984, Sankara changed the country's name. Upper Volta — a colonial name — became Burkina Faso, "the land of upright people", combining Mooré, the language of the Mossi (burkina, "integrity", "dignity"), and Dioula (faso, "homeland"); he called its inhabitants Burkinabè, using a suffix taken from the Fulfulde of the Fulani, so that the new name would bring together the country's main languages. He also adopted a new flag and a national anthem of its own.
Sankara's programme was radical and ambitious. He launched mass vaccination and literacy campaigns, planted millions of trees against the advancing desert, built schools, clinics and housing, promoted the production and consumption of local goods, slashed the privileges of civil servants — he sold off the luxury official cars — and became one of the first voices in the world to denounce foreign debt as a tool of domination. He was a strong champion of women's rights, banned female genital mutilation and forced polygamy, and appointed women to government posts. His personal austerity was legendary. But the revolution also had an authoritarian side: people's tribunals, Committees for the Defence of the Revolution that sometimes committed abuses, and restrictions on trade unions and the opposition. That double edge, together with tensions with France and powerful neighbours, gradually eroded his support.
The end came brutally. On 15 October 1987, Thomas Sankara was killed along with twelve aides in a coup led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré. He was 37. Hastily buried in an unmarked grave, he instantly became a martyr and a pan-African icon whose image — red beret and all — still inspires the continent's youth. In 2022, a Burkinabè military court sentenced Compaoré in absentia to life imprisonment for his complicity in the crime.
After Sankara's assassination, Blaise Compaoré set up a regime he called the "Rectification", which would last 27 years, until 2014. He dismantled much of the revolutionary reforms, moved closer again to France and the international financial institutions, liberalised the economy and entrenched himself in power by winning repeatedly disputed elections. He turned Burkina Faso into a regional diplomatic player, mediating in West African conflicts, although he was also linked to arms and diamond trafficking networks in neighbouring wars.
Over the years, the wear and tear became inevitable. Corruption, impunity — the Sankara case and the 1998 murder of journalist Norbert Zongo, who had been investigating the president's inner circle, went unpunished — and a lack of prospects fuelled deep discontent. The spark came when Compaoré tried to amend the Constitution to scrap term limits and stay in power indefinitely.
In October 2014, hundreds of thousands of Burkinabè took to the streets in a popular uprising. Protesters even set fire to the National Assembly in Ouagadougou. Facing unstoppable pressure, Compaoré resigned on 31 October 2014 and fled to neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire. The fall of "Beau Blaise" was celebrated as a second civic awakening, and it put the figure of Sankara back at centre stage. A year later, in September 2015, the elite presidential guard (the RSP) attempted a coup to halt the transition, but popular mobilisation and pressure from the army itself made it fail. Elections were held in 2015 and Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was elected president, then re-elected in 2020.
Burkina Faso's young democracy barely had time to take root. From 2015 onwards, the jihadist violence already ravaging Mali spilled over into Burkina Faso. Armed groups linked to Al Qaeda — grouped under JNIM — and to the self-styled Islamic State in the Greater Sahara began operating in the north and east of the country, attacking villages, schools, churches, mosques and military posts. Insecurity spread like a stain: thousands dead, more than two million internally displaced people and large parts of the territory outside the state's effective control, especially in the Sahel and the north, around towns such as Dori and villages such as Gorom-Gorom.
The governments' inability to stop that spiral of violence led to two coups in a single year. On 24 January 2022, a group of soldiers led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba overthrew President Kaboré, accusing him of failing to deal with terrorism. Eight months later, on 30 September 2022, another coup — this time led by the young captain Ibrahim Traoré — toppled Damiba on the same grounds: the security situation was still getting worse. Traoré, just 34, took office as transitional president.
These events are best told soberly, because they are recent and still unfolding. The new military government turned to a sovereigntist, pan-Africanist rhetoric that revives the figure of Sankara, distanced itself from France — whose troops left the country — and forged closer ties with Russia. In 2023, Burkina Faso formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with Mali and Niger, and in 2025 the three countries completed their withdrawal from ECOWAS, the regional bloc. Jihadist violence, however, has not eased, and the transition to civilian rule still has no firm date. The country is living through a time of deep uncertainty.
Burkina Faso is today one of the poorest countries in the world in economic terms, but also one of the richest in West Africa culturally. With more than twenty million inhabitants and some sixty ethnic groups — Mossi, Fulani, Bobo, Lobi, Gurunsi, Senufo, Gurma and many more — it is a human mosaic that has managed to live together with remarkable tolerance between Muslims, Christians and followers of traditional religions.
Its cultural standing is huge. Ouagadougou hosts FESPACO, Africa's biggest film festival, and SIAO, the great African crafts fair; the country is famous for its music, its masks, its bronze and wood sculpture, and its textiles. Across the region, the Burkinabè are known as hospitable, hard-working people with an integrity that does justice to their nation's name. Gold has become its main export, alongside cotton, although its mineral wealth doesn't always translate into well-being for the population.
The present, however, is marked by emergency. Jihadist violence keeps millions of people displaced and has made large parts of the country inaccessible, especially the whole Sahelian north. The future of democracy after the 2022 coups is uncertain. For travellers, this means that large regions — the Sahel, the north and the east — are strongly advised against for security reasons, while cultural life is now concentrated in the capital and the calmer south-west. Even so, the history of Burkina Faso — the Mossi kings on horseback, Sankara and his revolution, a people who chose to call themselves "upright" — still beats with a strength that no conflict has managed to extinguish.
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Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso's second city, is a leafy, unhurried place in the southwest of the country, in the land of the Bobo people and on the Dioula (Diula) trade axis. Its name brings both peoples together: the Bobo, farmers and blacksmiths settled here since ancient times, and the Dioula, Mande-speaking Muslim traders who turned the region into a commercial crossroads. For centuries, this area was a hub on the routes linking the savannah with the forest and with the great trade in gold and kola nuts.
The city's emblem is its Grand Mosque, built around 1880 in the characteristic Sudano-Sahelian style: mud walls bristling with wooden beams (the toron) that serve as permanent scaffolding for the yearly replastering. It is one of the finest examples of the earthen architecture that defines the Sahel. Next to it lies Kibidwé (Kibidoué), the historic quarter beside the sacred river, where, according to tradition, sacred catfish protect the community.
During the French colonial period, Bobo-Dioulasso was even more important than Ouagadougou as an economic centre, thanks to the railway linking it to Abidjan, in Côte d'Ivoire. Today it keeps that air of a laid-back commercial capital, with its colonial architecture, its musical life — it was the birthplace of many Burkinabè musicians — and an atmosphere more relaxed than bustling Ouaga.
Further southwest, the Banfora region is the wettest and most fertile side of Burkina Faso. Here, close to the border with Côte d'Ivoire, rainfall is more abundant and the landscape is covered with sugar cane fields, plantations and woodland, in sharp contrast with the dry Sahelian north. The town of Banfora, capital of the Cascades region, is the natural base for exploring some of the country's most beautiful spots.
The area was historically inhabited by peoples such as the Karaboro, Gouin and Turka, and fell within the commercial orbit of the Dioula. Its modern agricultural prosperity rests on sugar cane and irrigated crops that draw on the region's rivers and lakes.
Banfora is the gateway to a triangle of natural wonders: the Sindou Peaks, the Karfiguéla Falls and Lake Tengrela. Together with Bobo-Dioulasso, it is the main draw of a southwest that today accounts for much of the tourism still possible in the country, being more sheltered than other regions from the insecurity of the Sahel.
A few kilometres from Banfora, the Sindou Peaks (the Chaîne de Sindou) form one of the most striking skylines in West Africa: a chain of sandstone cones, needles and ridges sculpted over millions of years by wind and water erosion. Walking among these formations — especially at sunset, when the rock glows in shades of orange — is one of the most memorable natural experiences in the country. For the local people, these rocks also hold spiritual value, tied to ancestral myths and rites.
Not far away, the Karfiguéla Falls (sometimes called the Banfora Falls) are a series of cascades tumbling into natural pools amid the greenery, fed by the Comoé River. At their best, at the end of the rainy season, they offer a cool, green refuge for a swim, surrounded by palm trees that contrast with the surrounding savannah.
These places sum up the surprise of Burkina's southwest: a country many picture only as dusty savannah hides, in its wettest corner, cathedrals of stone and oases of water that rival the continent's great landscapes.
A short distance from Banfora, Lake Tengrela completes the southwest's trio of natural wonders. It is a calm lake, surrounded by vegetation and fishing villages, famous above all for its colony of hippos. A pirogue trip guided by local fishermen lets you get close — with due caution — to these huge animals, which are considered sacred here and protected by the community, allowing them to live alongside people for generations.
The lake is also a paradise for waterbirds and a meeting point between rural life and nature. The area's fishermen keep traditional techniques and a close bond with the ecosystem, and community tourism around the hippos has become a modest source of income for the lakeside villages.
Tengrela, Sindou and Karfiguéla, together with nearby Bobo-Dioulasso, make the southwest the most complete and accessible region for travellers in Burkina Faso: urban culture, mud architecture, spectacular nature and a hospitality that lives up to the Burkinabè reputation.
Ouagadougou (or simply "Ouaga") is not a makeshift colonial town but the old capital of the main Mossi kingdom, founded as the seat of the Mogho Naba several centuries ago. Its name comes from Wogodogo, "the place where people receive honour and respect". When the French occupied it in 1896, they built on that existing status as a capital, and the city remained the centre of power through the colony, independence and the revolution.
Today it is a metropolis of around three million people in its urban area, the political, administrative and economic heart of Burkina Faso. A city of red earth, wide avenues, bustling markets and traffic dominated by tens of thousands of motorbikes, Ouagadougou keeps the court of the Mogho Naba, whose weekly Nab-Yita ceremony (the emperor's "false departure", every Friday morning) is one of the most singular traditional rituals in West Africa.
In its recent history, its streets have been the stage for the country's great upheavals: this is where Thomas Sankara governed and was killed, where the National Assembly burned during the 2014 uprising and where the 2022 coups were decided. Ouagadougou is, in every sense, the place where the nation's pulse beats.
If anything has given Ouagadougou a reputation beyond its borders, it's cinema. Since 1969, the city has hosted FESPACO (the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), the continent's biggest film festival, which every two years (in odd-numbered years) turns the Burkinabè capital into the mecca of African film. Directors, actors and audiences from across the continent and the diaspora gather to compete for the Étalon de Yennenga, the "Stallion of Yennenga", the top prize, which evokes the founding princess of the Mossi.
That role is no accident: Burkina Faso, despite its poverty, bet on cinema very early on as a tool of identity and pan-African affirmation, nationalising cinemas and supporting its filmmakers. The city proudly displays its monument to filmmakers and an avenue dedicated to the stars of African cinema.
FESPACO is joined by SIAO (the Ouagadougou International Arts and Crafts Fair), the great African crafts fair held in even-numbered years. Between the two, Ouagadougou has earned a reputation as the cultural capital of West Africa, a place where artistic creation lives alongside everyday hardships and stands up to them.
About forty kilometres north of the capital, the village of Manéga is home to one of the country's most original museums, created by the Burkinabè writer and lawyer Frédéric Titinga Pacéré. The Manéga Museum brings together masks, sculptures, musical instruments and ritual objects from the cultures of Burkina Faso, with special attention to the Mossi world, and seeks to preserve and pass on an intangible heritage that modern life puts at risk.
The complex includes reconstructions of traditional villages, a space devoted to the music of the griots (the bards and keepers of oral memory) and tributes to the history and spirituality of the region's peoples. It's an ideal window onto the country's largest ethnic group, whose social, religious and political organisation revolved for centuries around the Mogho Naba and the values of honour and respect that give the nation its name.
Manéga complements the urban experience of Ouagadougou with an immersion in the rural, traditional Mossi world, a reminder that behind the modern capital beats an ancient civilisation deeply rooted in the central plateau.
The central Mossi plateau, densely populated and dotted with baobabs across its savannah landscapes, is home to a large share of the country's population. Its third city, Koudougou, is a commercial and railway hub with an authentic feel, colonial-era architecture and a large market; it hosts Les Nuits Atypiques, a cultural festival that champions local music and traditions. Koudougou also has a place in recent political history: it was the scene of major protests, such as those of 2011, which foreshadowed the unrest of the following decade.
Half an hour from the capital, the Laongo site offers something different: an open-air sculpture museum where, since the 1990s, artists from Burkina Faso and around the world have carved more than two thousand works directly into the huge granite outcrops of the land, as part of an international stone sculpture symposium. The result is a forest of rocks turned into art, right in the middle of the savannah.
Between markets, festivals, carved granite and the imperial court of Ouagadougou, the Mossi plateau sums up the best of an accessible, culturally vibrant Burkina Faso: the centre of gravity of a country that, despite everything, keeps creating and celebrating.
Northern Burkina Faso belongs to the Sahel, the great semi-arid belt that fringes the Sahara and forms the transition between desert and savannah. It is a land of vast horizons, budding dunes, thorny acacias and contested wells, where life depends on water and livestock. Here the dominant peoples have pastoral and nomadic traditions — the Fulani (Peul), the Tuareg, the Bella and the Songhai — and are very different from the Mossi farmers of the central plateau.
For centuries, this region was a crossroads of the caravan routes linking sub-Saharan Africa with the north of the desert, carrying salt, livestock, textiles and also enslaved people. The Sahelian markets, where herders, traders and farmers of different ethnic groups met, were true cultural melting pots, and some became famous far beyond the region.
This Sahelian world, extraordinarily rich in human terms, is also one of the most fragile and hard-hit on the planet: recurring droughts, desertification and, in recent decades, armed violence have struck its people hard. Telling its story also means acknowledging its current situation honestly.
Two names sum up Burkina Faso's Sahelian north. Gorom-Gorom was long famous for its weekly market, one of the most colourful in West Africa, where Tuareg in indigo turbans, Fulani women with their gold ornaments, Bella and Songhai came together in a display of colours, livestock and goods that drew travellers from all over the world. It was the great showcase of the ethnic mosaic of the Burkinabè Sahel.
Dori, a little further east, is an old caravan town and capital of the Sahel region, for centuries a trading crossroads and a centre of Islam in the area, historically tied to the Fulani of Liptako. Both towns embodied the most deeply Sahelian and Muslim side of the country, very different from the Mossi centre or the animist south.
Today, however, this whole region is among the worst affected by the security crisis. Jihadist violence has emptied villages, cut off roads and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and much of the north lies outside the effective control of the state. That is why these destinations, once a dream for travellers, are now strongly advised against and are included here mainly as a cultural and historical reference, in the hope that one day they will be accessible again in peace.
The north and east of Burkina Faso are today the epicentre of the jihadist insurgency that, from the mid-2010s, spilled over from Mali into the country. Groups linked to Al-Qaeda (JNIM) and the Islamic State have attacked villages, schools and markets, imposing their rule across large rural areas and causing one of the world's largest displacement crises, with more than two million Burkinabè forced to leave their homes.
This emergency was precisely what triggered the recent political instability: the failure of successive governments to stop the violence was used to justify the two military coups of 2022 and the sovereigntist turn of the current transition. Entire regions that welcomed travellers only a few years ago are now off limits, and the lives of their inhabitants — herders, farmers, traders — have been turned completely upside down.
Remembering the history of the Burkinabè Sahel — its caravans, its legendary markets, its extraordinary diversity of peoples — is also an act of dignity in the face of adversity. These lands have known centuries of exchange and coexistence, and their culture lives on in the memory of their people and in the hope of a future in which Gorom-Gorom and Dori become once again what they once were: crossroads of life, not of conflict.
In the far south of the country, by the border with Ghana, the village of Tiébélé holds one of West Africa's artistic treasures: the Cour Royale, the royal compound of the Kassena, a Gurunsi people settled in the region for centuries. Their mud houses, with curved, compact shapes, are hand-decorated by the women with spectacular geometric murals in white, black and reddish ochre, painted with natural pigments and polished with stones until they shine.
Each symbol has a meaning — protection, fertility, status, spiritual beliefs — and the decoration is renewed collectively before the rainy season, in a community effort that is both art and ritual. The architecture itself responds to defence and climate: thick walls, low doorways you have to stoop through (designed to slow down an enemy), and few, small openings to keep the interior cool.
The Kassena, like other Gurunsi peoples, traditionally lived in societies without a centralised monarchy, organised around lineages and local chiefdoms, and long remained outside the rule of the Mossi kingdoms. Tiébélé is today one of the country's great cultural attractions and living proof that earthen architecture can also be a fine art.
Deep in the southwest stand the Ruins of Loropéni, the best-preserved stone walls in a wide region spanning parts of Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo. In 2009 they were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first in the country to receive that distinction. Their imposing laterite walls, up to six metres high, enclose a compound estimated to be at least a thousand years old, although its heyday is placed between the 14th and 17th centuries.
Loropéni was part of a network of fortifications linked to the mining and trade of gold, within the great trans-Saharan exchange. It is associated with the Lohron or Koulango people, who are thought to have controlled the production and working of the metal at a time when this gold fed the caravan routes to the north. The site was eventually abandoned, and much of its history remains a mystery that archaeology is only beginning to unravel.
These silent ruins, partly swallowed by vegetation, are monumental proof that southern Burkina Faso was part of continent-wide economic circuits long before the arrival of Europeans. A stone reminder of the historical depth of this land.
Gaoua, capital of the Sud-Ouest region, is the heart of Lobi country, home to one of the most distinctive peoples in West Africa and one of the most protective of its identity. The Lobi arrived in this region from present-day Ghana around the 18th and 19th centuries, and stood out for their fierce independence: they stubbornly resisted both Islamisation and French colonial conquest, which only managed to subdue them well into the 20th century and at a high cost.
The Lobi are famous for their art and spirituality. Their religion revolves around the thila, protective spirits to whom altars and wood and bronze sculptures are dedicated — the bateba, figures of great expressive power that are today highly sought-after pieces of African art. They traditionally live in scattered fortified farmsteads, the soukhala, mud houses with hardly any openings, reflecting a warrior society without centralised power.
The Musée des Civilisations du Poni, in Gaoua, displays statues, altars, ritual objects and tools that offer a glimpse into this cultural world. Alongside the Lobi, the region is home to other peoples such as the Birifor, Dagara and Gan, in an ethnic mosaic that makes the southwest one of the most culturally rich and least "Mossi" areas of the country.
In the south, near the border with Ghana, the Nazinga reserve is one of the few places in Burkina Faso where you can still see large mammals in the wild. Set up as a conservation area in the 1970s–1980s, it became famous for its elephant herds, which often come down to the waterholes and made Nazinga a rare safari spot in a country with little spectacular wildlife compared with East and Southern Africa.
Besides elephants, the reserve is home to antelopes, warthogs, monkeys, crocodiles and rich birdlife, in a landscape of wooded savannah and dams. For years it was a management model combining conservation and sustainable use, and a destination popular with travellers and with the Burkinabè themselves.
Like so many of the country's attractions, however, access today depends on how the security situation evolves, which should always be checked before any visit. Either way, Nazinga stands for the other side of Burkina's south: alongside the cultural wealth of the Kassena and Lobi, a natural heritage that society is trying to preserve despite the difficulties.
Hardly anything that happened to Burkina Faso happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
