Banfora

The land around Banfora belonged to Gouin, Turka, Karaboro and Sénoufo farming communities long before there was a town, with Dioula-speaking Muslim traders settled among them along the routes that carried kola nuts and gold. The escarpments and wooded valleys of the Comoé country were densely enough settled for villages to defend themselves through the nineteenth-century upheavals, when the campaigns of the Kénédougou kingdom of Sikasso and of Samori Touré reached the south-west.

French forces took the region in the 1890s and attached it to the colony of Upper Volta. Banfora's modern shape dates from the railway: the line pushed north from Abidjan reached the town in 1931 on its way to Bobo-Dioulasso and eventually Ouagadougou, and the station made it a collecting point for cotton, fruit and grain from a wide stretch of country.

The decisive change came after independence, when the well-watered plain north of the town was laid out as an irrigated sugar-cane estate with a refinery attached. Sugar made Banfora an industrial town in a farming region, drawing workers from across Burkina Faso and beyond, and mango orchards spread alongside it. By the late twentieth century the town had also become the base for visitors to the falls, the lake and the Sindou Peaks — a small tourist trade that has since ended with the spread of the insurgency into the west of the country.

Banfora is one of the most mixed towns in Burkina Faso. Gouin, Turka, Karaboro, Sénoufo, Dioula and Mossi live in the same streets, and Dioula serves as the common language of trade across the whole south-west. Islam is strong in the town, Christianity has a long presence through mission schools, and traditional religion remains part of village life, with sacred groves, shrines and initiation societies in the surrounding country.

The Sénoufo villages west of the town keep the best-known ceremonial traditions of the area, including masked dances tied to initiation, and regard the Sindou Peaks as a place of protection. Balafon music — the wooden xylophone with gourd resonators played across the south-west — is central to celebrations here as in Bobo-Dioulasso, along with drumming and dance at weddings, funerals and harvest festivals.

Everyday manners follow the wider Burkinabè pattern: elaborate greetings, respect for elders and for village chiefs, and hospitality offered as food or as water before anything else is discussed. Dolo, the millet beer brewed by women, is drunk in courtyard bars by those who are not Muslim, and the courtyards double as the meeting places where news and disputes are worked through.

The 2019 census counted 117,452 people in Banfora, the sixth most populous city in Burkina Faso and the administrative capital of the Tannounyan region, formerly called the Cascades, so its offices, schools and hospital serve a much larger rural population. It is a town of single-storey compounds, corrugated roofs, mopeds and market traders rather than of tall buildings.

The economy rests on the land. Irrigated sugar cane and its refinery provide the largest concentration of wage work in the region; mangoes, cashews, rice, maize and cotton come in from the surrounding plain; and small workshops dry fruit, press oil and repair machinery. Trade with Côte d'Ivoire, a short distance south, shapes prices and supply, and many families have relatives working there.

The day begins before dawn with prayer and the first mopeds, runs hard until the heat of the early afternoon, and picks up again in the cool of the evening around the market and the roadside grills. Electricity and water supply are uneven, and the rainy season can cut dirt roads to the villages. The national security crisis is felt here through checkpoints, the loss of tourism, the closure of some rural services and the arrival of families displaced from more dangerous regions.

Banfora eats the food of the wet south-west rather than of the Sahel. Tô, the stiff porridge of maize or sorghum, is the staple, served with sauces built on okra, baobab leaf, groundnut or dried fish and seasoned with soumbala, the pungent condiment made from fermented néré seeds. Rice is widely grown nearby and widely eaten, often as riz gras, rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce.

Closeness to Côte d'Ivoire shows on the plate. Yams, cassava and plantain appear more here than in the north, and alloco — ripe plantain fried and served with chilli and onion — is standard street food. Grilled meat is the other constant: poulet bicyclette, the lean free-range chicken, and brochettes of mutton or beef from charcoal grills set up at dusk. Fish from the lakes and dams is fried or grilled whole.

Fruit is the region's pride. Banfora sits at the centre of Burkina Faso's mango country, and the harvest between about March and June fills the market, feeds the drying workshops and supplies juice sellers. Cashew fruit, oranges and papaya follow the seasons. Dolo, millet or sorghum beer, is drunk from calabashes in courtyard bars, while bissap made from hibiscus, ginger drinks and strong sweet tea are the everyday alternatives.