So passionate was Thomas Sankara’s desire to make his country a model for Africa that when he became president of Upper Volta in 1984 he renamed his country Burkina Faso, meaning “land of honest men”. In the 3 short years he led his country, he initiated groundbreaking initiatives and reforms that would help raise literacy, improve women’s rights and reduce corruption in a landlocked and impoverished backwater. Sankara’s efforts were controversial and met a certain amount of success. Had it not been for a coup in 1987, he may have succeeded in many other areas. Turns out his best friend, Blaise Compoaré, led a coup against him – a gang shot him, dismembered his body and buried him in an unmarked grave on the edge of the capital city, Ouagadougou (with friends like that…). Luckily for the people of this country, Compoaré has continued more or less on the path of his predecessor in carrying out social reforms for his country. But he is following the line of many other dictators in the region on the democratic front – i.e. not knowing when to leave, rigging elections and ruling with an iron, though sometimes benevolent, fist.
When I bought my visa for Burkina, I thought of the place only as a drive-through country on my way to Mali. I knew nothing of the place, other than it was 161st out of the 169 countries on the UN Human Development Index (Canada is 8th, by the way, and has fallen from 1st or 2nd since the Conservatives came to power – of course that’s only coincidence). It turns out, my time in Burkina has been a very pleasant surprise. People are friendly, transportation is reliable and efficient and the cities and towns I’ve visited have plenty of people milling about and live music to experience. Getting here was no small feat, but I’ll leave that to another post. One thing is for sure, this country is definitely poorer than Ghana. After crossing the border, the villages consist of nothing but groups of thatched roof huts surrounded by mud walls. Unlike northern Ghana, in Burkina, there is no rich, southern part of the country on which to draw wealth.
March 6
The colourfully named Ouagadougou – Burkina’s capital – is a dusty outpost of a million or so people in the middle of the hot and dry Sahel, a region that forms the buffer between the Sahara to the north and the rainforests and savannas to the south. That it stretches from eastern Senegal to Sudan makes the Sahel one of the most significant geographical regions on the continent, characterized by stunted trees, scrub vegetation and poverty.
I arrived at 4:00 pm and got off the sporadically air conditioned bus to a 40C temperature and desert-like dryness. Not more than 10 paces from collecting my backpack, I was surrounded by taxi drivers looking for a fare. Fortunately, they were not aggressive though. I picked a guy with an honest looking face and was quickly ushered to a green Peugeot that looked like it had been extricated from a 75-car pile-up with no survivors. My backpack would have to go in the back seat as the trunk presumably would not open. I jumped in the front seat and slammed the creaking door shut. A moment later the driver had us hurtling out of the bus station into the Ouaga traffic and down a long and wide boulevard to the heart of the city.
I checked into the Hotel Delwende, a simple but clean spot in the city centre just steps away from the le Grand Marché the city’s main mosque. This would be my base of recovery for a couple of nights after a very long trip from Accra (a distance of 1,000 km or so). Sadly for me, I arrived in Ouaga precisely on the last day of FESPACO, a biennial film festival attended by film lovers from all over West Africa and Europe. Turns out, the festival has made this city quite a cultural centre over the past few years. In talking to locals, quite a few Québécois make the trip here to enter their films or see what other filmmakers of the Francophone world are putting out.
A couple of days in Ouaga was plenty. The well-regarded Musée de la Musique was closed for renovations and many of the other sites were inconveniently located far outside of the city in the suburbs. I walked around a lot, chatted with dozens of artisans and other merchants looking to hawk their wares and got caught up on my email. Walking around the city was pretty exhausting – I was still getting used to the 40C temperatures and got my first taste of the dry and dusty Harmattan winds that usually begin blowing off the Sahara at this time of year. The one afternoon it hit, for about 15 minutes the sky’s blue changed to haze and it felt like everywhere I walked I had a million-watt hair dryer blowing in my face. Apparently this is what it’s like in April for days at a time.
March 8
I caught a bus from Ouaga to Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina’s second largest city. I probably would not have travelled here except that a friend of a friend from Montreal is living here for a year as a volunteer. Turns out this was a great place to visit, not just because of my gracious host, but also because this small city has a great nightlife and great live music scene. As my host explained, “Ouagadougou is like Toronto, Bobo-Dioulasso is like Montreal.” I thought at first the comparison between my home city and the barren Burkina capital was a bit of a stretch (and kind of insulting, coming from a Montrealer), but I soon realized what she meant. The city is compact, easy to get around and has plenty to do in the evenings when the sun goes down and the air temperature shrinks back into the low 30s.
sedativegunk 