Burkina Faso
The land of upright people at the heart of the Sahel
Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in the heart of West Africa whose very name, adopted in 1984, means roughly the land of upright or honest people. Flat, hot, and largely covered in savanna grading into the dry Sahel, it has no coastline and few mineral riches beyond a gold-mining boom, yet it has long punched above its weight culturally, hosting FESPACO, the continent's premier film festival, in its capital Ouagadougou. Its roughly 24 million people, drawn mainly from the Mossi and dozens of other groups, contend with poverty and a grinding jihadist insurgency.
The terrain is overwhelmingly a low plateau of savanna and scrub, crossed by the three Volta river systems, the Mouhoun (Black Volta), Nakambé (White Volta), and Nazinon (Red Volta), that gave the colonial territory its old name of Upper Volta. The southwest is slightly greener and more fertile, rising to the country's highest point at Ténakourou, about 749 meters. The north shades into the Sahel and the edge of the Sahara, prone to drought. Cotton and livestock long anchored the economy, but gold has become the leading export, drawing both industrial and informal miners.
The Mossi kingdoms, centered on Ouagadougou, resisted outside domination for centuries before France absorbed the area in the late nineteenth century. Independence came in 1960, and the country gained international attention under the charismatic revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, who renamed it Burkina Faso and pursued radical self-reliance before his assassination in 1987. Since the mid-2010s the country has been engulfed by violence linked to Sahelian jihadist groups, prompting mass displacement and a series of military coups that have realigned it away from France and toward new partners.