Burkina Faso in the early 2000s was a stunningly boring country, it had a GDP per capita of $255 and an HDI of 0.293, it had only 11 million people. It was quite a poor country so don’t read this as a romanticization but they were relatively simpler times. It was 13 years into Blaise Compaore’s ultimately meaningless and long grinding autocracy, but it was still ultimately a safe country. Crime in Ouagadougou was mostly of the petty variety, economic growth mostly was trending upwards after the cataclysmic West African economic crisis of 1994, and Burkinabes co-existed across all ethnicities and religious faiths in general peace.
Most of the population trod in subsistence agriculture as urbanization slowly but surely continued to concentrate in Ouagadogou, known affectionately among some as ‘Ouga’. Burkina Faso was the perfect template of the poor yet peaceful African country.
Even after the War on Terrorism was declared and the vast US military industrial complex spluttered money worldwide into the coffers of hungry African militaries, barely anything of substance happened in Burkina Faso. In the period before 2015 there was no recorded incidents of terrorism at all in Burkina Faso, even four years post NATO Libyan intervention.
Burkina Faso in 2022 is sadly not a boring country. The country is now a conflicted, violent place of about 22 million. Since 2016, jihadist violence has surged in the country, in 2020 alone there were over 500 recorded terrorist incidents. A good half of the country, largely in the North is now permanently occupied by jihadists, with positions established even within three hours of the capital.
Source: The Economist - Heat map of all violent incidents involving jihadist groups in the G5 Sahel countries up to the end of 2020, note how concentrated the spread is in the North in Burkina Faso, especially alongside the Mali/Burkina Faso/Niger tri-border area, and how its spread even into Southern Burkina Faso.
There now exist in the country over 1.9 million internally displaced persons(IDP), about 10 % of the country’s population, with mass camps established throughout towns in the country. Once stable towns now swell with people forced to flee from the random violence of both jihadis and the government, which brings further infrastructural and social issues.
Source: ReliefWeb - As one can see, a lot of human misery up north in Burkina Faso around its tri-border region specifically, with tons of misery in the far east as well. This is as of June 2022.
Burkina Faso of course in the midst of this has also evolved from having a relatively failed but stable autocrat in Compaore into a befuddled mess of a country. Alternating from a military government post Compaore into the relatively hapless Roch Kabore years from 2015 to early 2022 into yet another military government led by Paul-Henri Damiba, who was just displaced by his friend Ibrahim Traore this past weekend. The question must be asked, just how did Burkina Faso get here?
Ibrahim Traore, broadcasting via State TV the change of government on Friday, September 30th 2022, with himself as new head of state.
An Autocracy from the start
Burkina Faso and its current territory was largely conquered in the late 19th century, by 1896 France had absorbed all the current territory that compromises it. What is curious about Burkina Faso is that even by the standards of other map created African countries, it is a case of being exceptionally map driven.
Burkina Faso began life as a part of the “Upper Senegal and Niger” Colony, which was Mali + Burkina Faso + Niger in one massive territory, a Pan Sahelian colony, with its administrative capital centered in Bamako. Following some minor rebellions in the 1910s, the colony of Upper Volta was born in 1919. Haute Volta was named after the presence of the Volta River which runs through Burkina Faso. Investments were finally pumped into the territory to dissuade future rebellions, primarily roads and attempts to produce cotton on a large scale, this involved attempts at slave labor. Not producing the revenue needed, Haute Volta was formally disbanded in 1932 and segmented off into French Sudan(Mali), Niger, and Ivory Coast.
Ouagadougou and the Burkinabe south were mostly parceled off into Ivory Coast, thus formally establishing a tight link which continues to this day. Millions of Burkinabe migrants live in Ivory Coast and are a huge part of Ivory Coast’s workforce, which isn’t an immense surprise if you consider they were a part of the same territory until the late 1940s.
In 1947 France once again did an about face and formally re-established Upper Volta as a colony, giving hopes and energy to returned veterans and established local political elites as well that they would have their own local political base divorced from Abidjan. Upper Volta was arguably modern Africa’s first autocracy, given that even before the transitional period into independence was concluded it had already been furnished with the adornments of a one party autocratic state.
As French decolonization intensified in the late 1950s as a result of France’s failures in Algeria and its fears of contagion to West and Central Africa, Maurice Yameogo of the Voltaic Democratic Union(UDV - RDA), seized the moment and promptly banned all other parties and instituted one party rule even before the country was declared independent.
Maurice Yameogo surveying independence documents in 1960.
A staunch ally and friend of Houphouet-Boigny in Ivory Coast he was seen on the continent as a moderate politician and was ultimately very tight guarded over his notions of Upper Volta’s sovereignty. Upper Volta was envisioned by Leopold Senghor, another political star of the 1950s and 1960s, Senegal’s primary founder, as a part of what Senghor saw as an ultimate Mali Federation that would encompass Senegal/Mali/Upper Volta/Benin. Yameogo was partial to the plans at first but then did a retreat at the critical hour, securing Upper Volta’s independence.
Independence for Upper Volta ultimately was not that kind. Even by African standards at the time the place was pretty poor, with a GDP per capita of about $68, Ghana and Ivory Coast, in contrast stood out as among the richest newly independent states, Ghana stood at $183 and Ivory Coast at $155. Upper Volta’s issue was that it was just a fundamentally poor place, its exports mostly revolved around cotton, power was a luxury with very few power stations in the country, and unlike some African countries Upper Volta largely lacked minerals.
With Yameogo’s personal paranoid autocratic style attracting criticisms, and the general dire economic state in the mid to late 1960s, like so many independence era leaders Yameogo fell victim to a coup in the late 1960s.
Upper Volta would basically go through a series of coups in the next few decades, in 1980, in 1982, 1983, and 1987. We’ll focus on the two most fundamental ones though, the coup of 1983 and then the fateful coup of 1987.
A STAR
There were two superstars of 1980s African politics, both were dashing young military men from West Africa with iconic looks. One wore a red beret and has now evolved into a symbol of black liberation, the other wore aviator sunglasses and had a scruffy look. I’m talking of course of Jerry Rawlings and Thomas Sankara, who both rose to prominence in the early 1980s with their coups in their home countries of Ghana and the newly renamed Burkina Faso.
The two leaders pictured together.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ok Then Africa to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.