Ouahigouya

Ouahigouya is the capital of Yatenga, one of the great Mossi kingdoms that took shape on the plateau from around the thirteenth century and that held out for centuries against the Sahelian empires to the north. Yatenga's rulers, the nabas, governed through a hierarchy of chiefs and cavalry and raided north towards the Niger bend; the kingdom's court traditions, titles and royal drums are still recited today.

The town itself came later than the kingdom. Naba Kango, one of Yatenga's most forceful rulers, established Ouahigouya as his capital in the eighteenth century, moving the seat of power to a new site and building it up as a court and market centre. It grew as a place where the kingdom's authority, long-distance trade in salt, kola and cloth, and the crafts of weaving and dyeing came together.

French troops reached Yatenga in the 1890s, and the kingdom was absorbed into Upper Volta while the naba's office was retained under colonial supervision. Ouahigouya became the administrative town of the north and the terminus of the road from Ouagadougou. The city's marketplace was bombed by Malian forces during the brief border war of December 1985. The droughts of the 1970s and 1980s hit the surrounding farmland hard and sent many of its people to the coast for work; the same years saw the region pioneer the soil-restoration techniques for which it later became known. Since around 2015 the spreading insurgency has made the city a refuge for families from the countryside, and the seat of the army and administration for a region much of which is beyond their reach.

The court of the naba of Yatenga is the city's defining institution. Its office-holders, praise-singers and drummers keep a ceremonial calendar of weekly audiences and annual rites that predates both the colony and the republic, and the naba's word still carries moral weight in disputes that never reach a courtroom. Mossi respect for elders, for hierarchy and for the elaborate greeting runs through ordinary life from that root.

Mooré is the language of the street and the market. Islam is the majority faith, with a Christian minority and a continuing traditional religious practice attached to the earth, the ancestors and the naba's authority; the three are often layered in the same family. Weaving of narrow cotton strips and indigo dyeing are old Yatenga crafts, alongside pottery, basketry and metalwork sold through the market.

The city is also known for what its farmers did to their land. In the villages around Ouahigouya, growers revived zaï, the digging of small pits filled with manure to catch water and seed, and built stone lines along the contours to hold the soil. Yacouba Sawadogo, of Gourga just outside the city, became known internationally for restoring woodland by these means. The practice has become a point of local pride and a subject taught well beyond Burkina Faso.

About 125,000 people were counted in Ouahigouya at the 2019 census, making it the fourth largest city in the country, the largest of the north, and the administrative centre of Yatenga province and the Yaadga region, formerly called Nord. It is a low-built city of walled family compounds, corrugated roofs and wide red-earth streets, with mopeds and bicycles doing most of the moving about.

The economy is trade and farming. Millet, sorghum, cowpeas and sesame come in from the surrounding country, livestock is bought and sold for buyers further south, and the market supports a dense layer of small workshops — weavers, dyers, tailors, smiths, mechanics. Public employment, schools and the regional hospital account for much of the rest, and money sent home by relatives in Ouagadougou, Côte d'Ivoire and Europe has long been important.

The conflict has changed the city more than anything else in a generation. Tens of thousands of people displaced from villages across the north have settled in and around it, straining housing, water, schools and clinics, while the farmland and markets that many of them depended on lie in areas that cannot be reached. Where life continues normally it follows the market, the mosque and the fields, with the day's work done early and late to avoid the heat.

Ouahigouya eats the food of the dry north. Tô, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum, is the everyday dish, eaten with the hand and dipped in sauces built on okra, baobab leaf, sorrel or dried fish, and seasoned with soumbala, the strong condiment made from fermented néré seeds. Shea butter and groundnut paste give body to the sauces, and the whole is cooked over wood or charcoal in the courtyard.

Millet appears in other forms too. Dégué mixes cooked millet grains with sour milk or yoghurt and sugar, sold cold in the market; zoom-koom, a millet-flour drink flavoured with tamarind or ginger, is the common refreshment in the heat. Rice with sauce and riz gras, rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce, are the standard cooked meals bought away from home, along with beans, fried dough beignets and fried fish.

Meat is grilled: mutton, goat and poulet bicyclette, the lean free-range chicken, over charcoal at stalls that open in the late afternoon. At the Muslim festival of Tabaski a sheep is slaughtered in every household that can afford one. Dolo, the millet beer brewed by women in Mossi country, is drunk from calabashes in courtyard bars, while green tea poured in several rounds, and strong sweet coffee at roadside stands, serve everyone else.