Ouagadougou

Ouagadougou grew from a Mossi royal court. Mossi tradition traces the dynasty to Princess Yennenga, a warrior daughter of a Dagomba king, and her son Ouédraogo, and by roughly the fifteenth century the settlement on this part of the plateau had become the seat of the Mogho Naba, the ruler of the most powerful of the Mossi kingdoms. The court was an elaborate hierarchy of ministers and provincial chiefs, with mounted armies that held off the Sahelian empires to the north for centuries, and the town itself remained modest: a palace, its wards of court officials and craftsmen, and a market.

The French took Ouagadougou in 1896 and made it the administrative capital of the colony of Upper Volta, keeping the Mogho Naba in place with ceremonial authority. A colonial town of earth and brick grew beside the royal quarter, the cathedral was built in the 1930s, and the city became the centre of schooling and administration for the whole territory. Independence in 1960 confirmed it as the national capital, and its population multiplied many times over in the decades that followed.

Since then Ouagadougou has been the stage of the country's politics. Thomas Sankara led a revolution from here in 1983, renamed the country Burkina Faso and was killed in a coup in 1987; a popular uprising drove out his successor Blaise Compaoré in 2014; a further attempted coup was resisted in 2015. The city suffered major attacks in 2016 and 2018, and after two coups in 2022 a military government has ruled from here. Displaced families from the countryside have arrived in large numbers, swelling the outer sectors.

For a city of the Sahel with little money, Ouagadougou carries extraordinary cultural weight. FESPACO, founded in 1969, is the pan-African film festival and fills the cinemas, hotels and streets every two years; its Étalon d'or de Yennenga prize takes its name from the Mossi princess. The SIAO craft fair, held in the autumn of alternate years, draws artisans and buyers from across the continent, and the city's bronze casters, weavers and sculptors supply both. Theatre, dance and street murals have long had a strong following here.

This is Mossi country, and Mooré is the language of daily life alongside French, with Dioula and Fulfulde heard in the markets. The Mogho Naba still holds his court in the city, and his Friday ceremony, a brief re-enactment of a king turned back from war by his counsellors, is performed each week. Neighbourhood and village chiefs, the naba, retain real influence over land, marriage and disputes.

Islam is the largest religion, with a substantial Catholic and Protestant minority and traditional practice widely observed; mosques, churches and courtyard shrines sit close together. Politics is part of the atmosphere: Sankara's memory is strongly present in murals, songs and the memorial at the place where he died, and public rallies are a regular feature of life under the present government. Manners are formal and warm — long greetings, respect for age, and the obligation to feed a guest.

About 2.4 million people were counted in Ouagadougou at the 2019 census, and the city has grown since, above all through arrivals from the countryside. It is low-rise and very wide, laid out around the old centre with sectors spreading over the plateau, and its red laterite streets, moped traffic and dust are the first things visitors notice.

Work is mostly informal: market trading, transport, workshops, building and domestic service, alongside the government offices, banks, schools and aid organisations that give the city its salaried class. Market gardens along the dams supply vegetables, and millet, sorghum and maize are grown on the edges of the built-up area. Electricity cuts are common, water is rationed in the dry season, and rents in the central districts are far beyond most households.

The conflict shapes the city indirectly but constantly. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have settled in the outer sectors and with relatives, straining schools, clinics and water supply; soldiers and checkpoints are visible; and political life is tightly controlled, with frequent rallies in support of the government. Everyday rhythms continue all the same: an early start before the heat, a long afternoon pause, and evenings spent at the maquis, the grill stands and the courtyard bars.

The everyday meal is tô, a stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or maize eaten with a sauce of okra, baobab leaves or sorrel, sharpened with soumbala, the pungent condiment made from fermented néré seeds. Babenda, a Mossi dish of sorrel and other leaves cooked with soumbala, groundnuts and a little rice, is a family standard, and gonré, bean-flour cakes steamed in leaves, are sold at markets. Benga, rice and beans with oil and chilli, is the cheap plate of the working day.

Ouagadougou's reputation, though, rests on its grills. Poulet bicyclette — lean free-range chicken, flattened and roasted slowly over charcoal, then served with chilli, mustard and raw onion — is the city's dish, cooked at stands on almost every major street. Brochettes of beef, mutton and liver, fried fish from the dams, and riz gras, rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce, fill out the menu of any maquis.

For drinking there is dolo, the millet beer brewed by women and sold warm in calabashes in courtyard cabarets, a social institution of Mossi country; the industrial lagers made in the city; and non-alcoholic zoom-koom, a millet, tamarind and ginger drink, bissap from hibiscus flowers, tamarind juice and strong sweet green tea, brewed slowly in small pots and poured from a height.