The history of Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso, a landlocked country on the bend of the Volta rivers, was for centuries the heartland of the Mossi kingdoms, durable states that held off the great Sahelian empires and kept their own religion and royal traditions into the colonial age. Around them lived many smaller, decentralised peoples, among them the Bobo, Lobi, Gurunsi, Senufo and Gurmantché, with Fulani herders in the north and Muslim trading towns in the west. France conquered the region in the 1890s and ruled it as Upper Volta, a colony valued above all as a reservoir of labour and soldiers. Since independence in 1960 the country has seen more military coups than almost any other in Africa, as well as the four-year revolution of Thomas Sankara, who gave it the name Burkina Faso, "land of upright people". Since the mid-2010s a jihadist insurgency has spread across much of its territory.

People have lived in the region since the Old Stone Age. Hunter-gatherers occupied the north-west from roughly 14,000 to 5,000 BCE, and farming settlements appear between about 3600 and 2600 BCE, as the drying of the Sahara pushed herders and cultivators south into the savanna. Burkina Faso holds some of the oldest evidence of ironworking in West Africa: furnaces near Douroula, in the north-west, were producing iron by the 8th century BCE, and by the 5th century BCE the craft was widespread. Iron hoes and weapons made it easier to clear the savanna woodland and support larger villages.

In the south-west and across the border in modern Niger, the Bura culture flourished from about the 3rd to the 13th century CE, known for its cemeteries of terracotta funerary jars and figurines. In the far south-west, near the borders of Ivory Coast and Ghana, stand the stone ruins of Loropéni, massive walled enclosures occupied between roughly the 11th and 17th centuries and linked to the trans-Saharan gold trade. Gold from the Lobi country was one of the sources that fed the markets of the Niger bend, and the ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For much of the medieval period the great trading empires of the western Sahel lay just to the north and north-west. The Ghana Empire, then the Mali Empire and later the Songhai Empire controlled the trade routes that carried gold, kola nuts and slaves north across the Sahara in exchange for salt, cloth and horses. Mande-speaking Muslim merchants, the Dyula, carried this trade into the savanna and founded communities in the west of what is now Burkina Faso, bringing Islam with them. Bobo-Dioulasso, the country's second city, grew as one of their market towns. The peoples of the Volta basin itself, however, were never fully absorbed by these empires. Many lived in small, independent villages governed by lineage elders and earth priests rather than kings, a form of organisation that made them hard to conquer.

The most powerful states of the region were those of the Mossi. Their oral traditions trace the royal line to Princess Yennenga, a warrior daughter of Naa Gbewaa, king of the Dagomba-Mamprusi state in what is now northern Ghana. Leaving her father's court, she bore a son, Ouédraogo, whose descendants are said to have founded Tenkodogo and then the other Mossi kingdoms. The incoming horsemen married into the farming peoples they found, and the Mossi people grew out of that mixture. The chronology is uncertain: traditions and earlier scholars placed the founding of Ouagadougou by Naaba Oubri as early as the 11th century, while many historians now favour a later date in the 14th or 15th century.

By the 16th century the Mossi world consisted of a handful of major kingdoms, chief among them Ouagadougou, Yatenga, Tenkodogo, Fada N'Gourma (a Gurmantché kingdom) and Boussouma, with as many as nineteen smaller ones. The ruler of Ouagadougou, the Mogho Naaba, was honoured as the senior Mossi king, though Yatenga in the north was a frequent rival. In the 18th century Naaba Kango of Yatenga made Ouahigouya his capital and reorganised the kingdom's government.

Mossi society rested on a division of authority. The nakombse, descendants of the conquerors, held naam, the power to rule, while the tengbiise, descendants of the earlier inhabitants, held tenga, ritual authority over the land and its fertility. Kings governed through a court of titled ministers and provincial chiefs, and the Mogho Naaba's court at Ouagadougou developed an elaborate ceremonial, including a weekly Friday rite still performed today.

The Mossi were formidable raiders. The chronicles of Timbuktu record that a Mossi army sacked the city in the 14th century while it belonged to Mali, and in the 1480s Mossi forces sacked Walata before being defeated by the Songhai ruler Sonni Ali at Kobi in 1483. In 1497 Askia Muhammad I declared a jihad against them. The Mossi lost battles but kept their independence and, with it, their ancestral religion. Islam spread slowly among traders and at court, where Muslim advisers served the kings, but the royal rituals remained rooted in the old faith. Mossi rulers also took part in the regional slave trade, selling captives taken from neighbouring stateless peoples to traders who supplied markets to the south and north.

The 18th and 19th centuries brought new states to the edges of the Mossi lands. In the west, warriors from the Ouattara dynasty of Kong, in modern Ivory Coast, established the kingdom of Gwiriko, with its centre at Bobo-Dioulasso, early in the 18th century. In the north, the Fulani jihad movements that created the Sokoto Caliphate inspired the founding of the emirate of Liptako around Dori in the early 19th century, which subjected the Gurmantché and others of the area. The Mossi resisted pressure from these Muslim states and from Massina.

The later 19th century was a time of turmoil. Zarma slave raiders led by Babatu devastated the Gurunsi country in the 1880s and 1890s, and the armies of Samori Touré pushed into the south-west in the 1890s. Rivalry and succession struggles weakened the Mossi kingdoms just as European expeditions began to arrive.

In the Scramble for Africa, Britain, France and Germany all sent missions into the Volta basin. A British agent from the Gold Coast, George Ekem Ferguson, obtained a treaty of protection from Ouagadougou in 1894, but France moved faster on the ground. In September 1896 a French column under Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine took Ouagadougou after hard fighting, and the Mogho Naaba Wobgo fled south; he died in exile in 1904. Yatenga, which was divided by a succession war, accepted French protection the same year. An Anglo-French convention of June 1898 fixed the borders with the Gold Coast, and French troops spent the following years subduing the decentralised peoples of the south and west, who resisted village by village.

The heaviest challenge to French rule came in 1915 and 1916, during World War I, when the Marka, Bwa and neighbouring peoples of the Volta and Bani river region rose against conscription and taxes. The Volta-Bani War was one of the largest anti-colonial revolts in French West Africa. It was put down with great violence, with villages destroyed and thousands killed.

The territory was first attached to the colony of Upper Senegal and Niger. On 1 March 1919 France created a separate colony of Upper Volta within French West Africa, with its capital at Ouagadougou. The French kept the Mossi chiefs in place as instruments of indirect rule, and the Mogho Naaba remained a figure of great authority.

The colony's main value to France was its people. Forced labour built roads and the railway towards the coast, and hundreds of thousands of young men went, under compulsion or in search of cash for taxes, to work on the cocoa and coffee plantations of Ivory Coast and the farms of the Gold Coast. Many others served as tirailleurs in the French army. In 1932, during the Depression, France abolished the colony to save money and divided its territory between Ivory Coast, French Sudan and Niger. Upper Volta soldiers fought for France again in World War II.

After the war the Mogho Naaba and Mossi leaders campaigned for the colony's restoration, and on 4 September 1947 Upper Volta was reconstituted with its old borders. Political parties formed as France extended the vote, with the Voltaic branch of the African Democratic Rally (RDA), led by Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly and, after his death in 1958, Maurice Yaméogo, becoming dominant. Upper Volta became a self-governing republic within the French Community in December 1958.

Upper Volta became independent on 5 August 1960, during the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Yaméogo as president. He soon banned all parties but his own, and his government became known for corruption and austerity. In January 1966 strikes and demonstrations led by trade unions forced him from office, and the army chief, Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana, took power.

Lamizana governed for fourteen years, alternating between military rule and periods of limited constitutional politics, and was re-elected in 1978. The Sahel drought of the early 1970s caused severe hardship and increased emigration. In November 1980 Colonel Saye Zerbo overthrew Lamizana; in November 1982 a group of junior officers ousted Zerbo and installed Major Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo. One of the most popular of these officers, Captain Thomas Sankara, became prime minister in January 1983 but was arrested in May after clashing with conservative members of the government. On 4 August 1983 his comrade Captain Blaise Compaoré led commandos from the town of Pô to Ouagadougou and brought Sankara to power.

Sankara, then 33, launched a revolution influenced by Marxism and by the example of Cuba. On the first anniversary, 4 August 1984, he renamed the country Burkina Faso, combining words from Mooré and Dioula. His government vaccinated about two million people in a short campaign, ran literacy drives, planted some ten million trees against desertification, redistributed land, and banned female genital cutting, forced marriage and polygamy in principle, promoting women into government posts. Ministers were made to drive modest cars and officials' salaries were cut. Abroad he denounced debt and Western aid as forms of control, which strained relations with France.

The revolution was also authoritarian. Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, modelled on Cuban examples, policed neighbourhoods and workplaces; trade unions were repressed; and Popular Revolutionary Tribunals tried former officials without basic legal guarantees. A brief border war with Mali over the Agacher Strip in December 1985 killed around a hundred people. Tensions within the leadership grew, and on 15 October 1987 Sankara and twelve others were shot dead during a coup that brought Compaoré to power. Sankara became a hero to many young Africans, and the question of who ordered his death remained open for decades.

Compaoré called his programme a "rectification" of the revolution and gradually reversed it, reconciling with France, the IMF and the World Bank. In 1989 two of his fellow coup leaders, Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Lingani, were executed on charges of plotting. A new constitution in 1991 restored multiparty politics, and Compaoré won elections in 1991, 1998, 2005 and 2010, the last with about 80 per cent of the vote. The murder of the investigative journalist Norbert Zongo in 1998 provoked large protests. Compaoré played a prominent role as a regional mediator, while also being accused of involvement in the wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. Cotton and, later, gold became the main exports.

In 2011 a wave of protests and army mutinies shook the regime. When Compaoré's party tried to change the constitution so that he could stand again in 2015, crowds stormed and burned the National Assembly in Ouagadougou on 30 October 2014. He resigned the next day and fled to Ivory Coast.

A civilian transitional government under Michel Kafando survived a coup attempt by the presidential guard under General Gilbert Diendéré in September 2015, which collapsed within a week under popular resistance and regional pressure. In November 2015 Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was elected president, the first change of leader through the ballot box since independence.

From 2015 armed jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State spread from Mali into northern and eastern Burkina Faso. Attacks on hotels and cafés in Ouagadougou in 2016, 2017 and 2018 were followed by a rural insurgency that killed thousands of civilians and soldiers and drove a large share of the rural population from their homes. Massacres such as Solhan in 2021 shocked the country, and both jihadist groups and government forces and allied militias were accused of killing civilians.

Anger at the state's failure to stop the violence led to two coups in 2022. In January officers ousted Kaboré and installed Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba; in September a younger officer, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, removed Damiba. In April 2022 a military court found Compaoré guilty in absentia of complicity in Sankara's murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Traoré presented himself as an heir to Sankara and turned away from France, whose special forces were ordered out and left in February 2023, while building ties with Russia. In September 2023 Burkina Faso formed the Alliance of Sahel States with Mali and Niger; the three announced their departure from ECOWAS in January 2024, and the withdrawal took effect on 29 January 2025. In December 2023 French lost its status as an official language. National consultations in May 2024 extended the transition by five years, and in August 2024 a jihadist attack on Barsalogho killed at least 400 people, one of the deadliest in the country's history. In 2025 Sankara and the men killed with him were reburied in a mausoleum in Ouagadougou. The government announced several foiled coup plots, and in January 2026 it ordered the dissolution of all political parties. The insurgency continues, with large parts of the countryside outside state control.