Burkina Faso

• 1. Introduction

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  Burkina Faso sits at the heart of West Africa, entirely landlocked, ringed by six countries and a history that refuses to be still. On the 4th of August 1984, a young army captain named Thomas Sankara renamed this nation from the Republic of Upper Volta to something stranger and more deliberate: two words drawn from three separate languages spoken within its own borders. "Burkina" from Mooré, meaning upright. "Faso" from Dyula, meaning fatherland. Together they form a declaration as much as a name. The US Central Intelligence Agency's World Fact Book translates the whole phrase as "Land of the Honest Men."

  That act of renaming raises the questions this documentary will spend its time answering. How did a place named after a river become a country that christened itself with a moral aspiration? Who were the people already there, long before any European flag flew over the savanna? What did Sankara actually do with the revolution he built, and why did it end the way it did? And what does it mean today, when roughly 23 million people live inside a country where, according to one senior researcher, the deadliest attack in the nation's jihadist insurgency killed more than 170 people in a single night across two villages in 2021?

• 2. Before the Volta Name

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  Hunter-gatherers populated the northwestern part of present-day Burkina Faso from 14,000 BC to 5,000 BC. Their tools, including scrapers, chisels, and arrowheads, were discovered in 1973 through archaeological excavations. Agricultural settlements came later, established between 3600 and 2600 BC.

  The Bura culture, an Iron Age civilization, took root across the border zone between what is now southeastern Burkina Faso and southwestern Niger. Evidence of iron smelting in Burkina Faso dates from 800 to 700 BC, and that site is now part of the Ancient Ferrous Metallurgy World Heritage Site. Iron industry had developed in Sub-Saharan Africa by 1200 BC, for tools and weapons both.

  The Mossi people, who would become the largest ethnic group in the country, arrived in successive waves between the 8th and 15th centuries. They claim descent from warriors who migrated from northern Ghana around 1100 AD. From the 11th century onward, the Mossi established separate kingdoms: Tenkodogo, Yatenga, Zandoma, and Ouagadougou. That empire lasted more than 800 years. Somewhere between 1328 and 1338, Mossi warriors raided Timbuktu; they were defeated by Sonni Ali of Songhai at the Battle of Kobi in Mali in 1483. During the early 16th century, the Songhai conducted slave raids into the region. The Gwiriko Empire was established at Bobo Dioulasso during the 18th century, and groups such as the Dyan, Lobi, and Birifor settled along the Black Volta. These layered arrivals produced a country that by the 21st century would hold more than 60 indigenous languages and 23 million people split across dozens of ethnic groups.

• 3. Colony and Resistance

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  France invaded the territory in 1896, making it a protectorate; the eastern and western regions came under French occupation in 1897 after a standoff against the forces of Samori Ture complicated the process. The Franco-British Convention of the 14th of June 1898 created the country's modern borders.

  Colonial rule was neither quiet nor uniform. African children were barred from riding bicycles or picking fruit from trees, privileges reserved for colonists' children; violating these rules could send parents to jail. Draftees from the territory fought in the battalions of the Senegalese Rifles on European fronts during World War I.

  Between 1915 and 1916, the districts in the western part of what is now Burkina Faso became the site of one of the most significant armed oppositions in French colonial Africa: the Volta-Bani War. France suppressed the movement, but only after suffering defeats and organizing the largest expeditionary force in its colonial history sent into the country. French Upper Volta was formally established on the 1st of March 1919, with François Charles Alexis Édouard Hesling as its first governor. Hesling launched a road-making program and promoted cotton for export; the cotton policy, based on coercion, failed, and revenue stagnated. On the 5th of September 1932, the colony was dismantled and split between Ivory Coast, French Sudan, and Niger. Ivory Coast received the largest share, including Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. France reversed the split on the 4th of September 1947 in response to the anti-colonial agitation that followed World War II, restoring Upper Volta's boundaries as part of the French Union. Full independence from France arrived on the 5th of August 1960, with Maurice Yaméogo as the first president.

• 4. Thomas Sankara's Revolution

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  Capt. Thomas Sankara was appointed prime minister in January 1983, then arrested. Efforts to free him, directed by Capt. Blaise Compaoré, produced a military coup on the 4th of August 1983. What followed was one of the most ambitious socioeconomic programs attempted on the African continent.

  Sankara's government vaccinated 2,500,000 children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles. Ten million trees were planted in fifteen months to fight the advancing Sahara. Sankara called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had more than 350 communities construct schools using their own labor. Land was redistributed to peasants. Female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy were outlawed.

  His foreign policies rejected all foreign aid and pushed for odious debt reduction. His government nationalized all land and mineral wealth and worked to reduce the influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Cereal production, close to 1.1 billion tons before 1983, was predicted to rise to 1.6 billion tons in 1987. Jean Ziegler, former UN special rapporteur for the right to food, said that the country had become food self-sufficient under Sankara's leadership.

  Sankara also framed ecological protection as a political priority at a time when, as the source notes, environmental awareness was still very low globally. He described bush fires as crimes to be punished as such, and proposed planting wooded strips roughly fifty kilometers wide crossing the country from east to west to face the advancing desert. On the 15th of October 1987, Sankara and twelve other government officials were assassinated in a coup organized by Compaoré, his former colleague. Some of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution mounted armed resistance to the army for several days afterward, even knowing Sankara was dead.

• 5. The Compaoré Years

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  Blaise Compaoré held the presidency until October 2014. Within days of taking power, he reversed Sankara's nationalizations, overturned nearly all of his policies, returned the country to the IMF fold, and discarded most of Sankara's legacy. A majority of Burkinabè citizens believe that France's foreign ministry, the Quai d'Orsay, was behind Compaoré in organizing the coup; the source notes there is some evidence for France's support.

  Compaoré introduced limited democratic reforms in 1990 following an alleged coup attempt in 1989. Under the 1991 constitution, he was re-elected without opposition in December 1991, and won election in a landslide in 1998. In 2000, the constitution was amended to reduce the presidential term to five years and impose two-term limits. The Constitutional Council ruled in October 2005 that this amendment would not apply until the end of his then-current term, clearing the way for his candidacy in the 2005 election, which he won in a landslide. In the 2010 presidential election, Compaoré was re-elected again; only 1.6 million Burkinabè voted, out of a total population roughly ten times that size.

  In February 2011, the death of a schoolboy set off the 2011 Burkinabè protests, a wave of popular demonstrations combined with a military mutiny and a magistrates' strike demanding Compaoré's resignation, democratic reforms, higher wages for troops, and economic freedom. Starting on the 28th of October 2014, protesters marched against Compaoré again, this time over his plan to amend the constitution and extend his rule. On the 30th of October, protesters set fire to the parliament building and seized the national TV headquarters. Compaoré resigned on the 31st of October 2014.

• 6. Jihadist Insurgency

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  A jihadist insurgency began in August 2015, linked to the broader Islamist insurgency across the Sahel. Between August 2015 and October 2016, seven different posts were attacked across the country. On the 15th of January 2016, terrorists attacked Ouagadougou, killing 30 people; Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Mourabitoune, which had mostly operated in neighboring Mali, claimed responsibility.

  In 2016, a new group called Ansarul Islam was founded by imam Ibrahim Malam Dicko. Its attacks focused on Soum province; it killed dozens of people in the attack on Nassoumbou on the 16th of December. Between the 27th of March and the 10th of April 2017, a joint operation called "Operation Panga" involving 1,300 soldiers from Mali, France, and Burkina Faso targeted the Fhero Forest near the Mali border, a sanctuary for Ansarul Islam. Ibrahim Malam Dicko was killed in June 2017.

  On the 2nd of March 2018, Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin attacked the French embassy in Ouagadougou and the general staff of the Burkinabè army; eight soldiers and eight attackers were killed, and 61 soldiers and 24 civilians were injured. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, armed violence in Burkina Faso jumped by 174% in 2019, with nearly 1,300 civilians dead and 860,000 displaced. From 4 to the 5th of June 2021, unknown militants massacred more than 170 people in the villages of Solhan and Tadaryat. The senior ACLED researcher Heni Nsaibia described the Solhan attack as the deadliest recorded in Burkina Faso since the insurgency began. On the 14th of November 2021, Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin attacked a gendarmerie in Inata, killing 53 soldiers, the heaviest single loss of life by the Burkinabè military during the insurgency. By 2023, the bishop of Dori, Laurent Dabiré, claimed in an interview with Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need that around 50% of the country was in the hands of Islamists. On the 25th of August 2024, JNIM launched a major attack in the region of Barsalogho, killing at least 400 people.

• 7. Coups, Economy, and Survival

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  On the 24th of January 2022, mutinying soldiers arrested President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. The Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration declared itself in power, led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. Eight months later, on the 30th of September 2022, Damiba was ousted by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, whose rationale was Damiba's purported inability to suppress the Islamist insurgency. Traoré was officially appointed president on the 6th of October 2022. On the 18th of January 2024, Burkina Faso announced its exit from ECOWAS and was suspended from the African Union after helping form the Alliance of Sahel States.

  Burkina Faso remains one of the least developed countries in the world. More than 80% of its population relies on subsistence agriculture. Gold accounts for roughly 70% of export earnings; with production of 66.9 tons valued at $7.18 billion, gold represented an estimated 16% of GDP in 2023. But industrial gold production has dropped by 20% to 53.4 tons, partly because growing insecurity led to the closure of 7 out of the country's 17 industrial mines. Foreign direct investment fell from $670 million in 2022 to $83 million in 2024.

  The economy grew by 4.9% in 2024, compared to 3.0% in 2023, driven largely by services and agriculture. The extreme poverty rate fell by 3 points to 23.2%, yet the absolute number of people in poverty still exceeds 5.5 million. Access to drinking water improved substantially: according to UNICEF, access in rural areas rose from 39% to 76% between 1990 and 2015, and from 75% to 97% in urban areas over the same period. The 33-megawatt solar power plant at Zagtouli, near Ouagadougou, came online in late November 2017, the largest solar facility in West Africa at the time of its construction. In January 2024, French was formally demoted from official language to "working language," a status it now shares with English, following the ratification of a constitutional amendment.