Burkina Faso

The central plateau was long dominated by the Mossi kingdoms, notably Ouagadougou and Yatenga, which emerged from around the eleventh century and resisted absorption into the great Sahelian empires to the north. The west and southwest were home to other peoples and to trading towns linked to the trans-Saharan gold trade.

France conquered the region in the 1890s and administered it as Upper Volta. Independence came in 1960, followed by a series of coups. In 1983 a young army officer, Thomas Sankara, took power, renamed the country Burkina Faso — "land of upright people" — the following year, and launched an ambitious programme of self-reliance, mass vaccination, tree planting, and women's rights before he was killed in a 1987 coup led by his associate Blaise Compaoré.

Compaoré ruled for 27 years until a popular uprising forced him out in 2014. A fragile democracy followed, but the spreading Sahel insurgency and the army's frustration with it produced two coups in 2022. The military government now led by Ibrahim Traoré has broken with France, expelled its troops, and turned to Russia and Turkey for security support. With Mali and Niger, which are also under military rule, it formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, and the three withdrew from the West African bloc ECOWAS in 2025.

Burkina Faso is ethnically diverse, with the Mossi making up about half the population and dozens of other groups — Fulani, Bobo, Lobi, Gurunsi, Senufo, Mandé — each with its own languages, masks, and traditions. Religion is mixed: a Muslim majority, a substantial Christian minority, and widely practised traditional beliefs, often layered together.

Despite its poverty, the country built a strong reputation in the arts. FESPACO, held in Ouagadougou every two years, is the largest African film festival, and the SIAO is a major craft and design fair. Mask-making and masked dance, celebrated at the FESTIMA festival in Dédougou, and the balafon (a wooden xylophone with gourd resonators) are living traditions.

Social life runs on the extended family, respect for elders and chiefs, and long greetings. The Mossi emperor, the Mogho Naba, still holds a ceremonial court in Ouagadougou each Friday.

Burkina Faso is one of the least developed countries in the world and still overwhelmingly rural. Most people farm — millet, sorghum, maize, and cotton, the main cash crop — or herd livestock, and are highly exposed to drought and to the failure of the rains. Gold mining, both industrial and artisanal, provides most of the country's export earnings and is the other pillar of the economy.

The insurgency has upended rural life across much of the north and east and along the Sahel borderlands with Mali and Niger, displacing more than two million people into camps and swollen towns and cutting many communities off from markets, schools, and clinics. Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso remain relatively functional but absorb the strain.

Where daily life continues normally, it centres on the market, the mosque or church, the courtyard compound, and the shared evening meal, with the year turning on the single rainy season.

Burkinabè cooking is Sahelian and grain-based. The staple is tô, a stiff porridge of millet, sorghum, or maize, eaten with a sauce of leaves, okra, groundnut, or soumbala, a pungent condiment made from fermented néré seeds. Rice dishes such as riz gras (rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce) are common in town.

Grilled meat is everywhere in Ouagadougou, above all poulet bicyclette, the lean free-range chicken, grilled over charcoal, that is eaten right across West Africa. Brochettes and grilled fish are standard street food.

Dolo, a beer brewed from millet or sorghum, is drunk across the countryside; bissap (a sweetened drink made from hibiscus calyces) and tamarind juice are the everyday drinks.

In more settled times, Burkina Faso's draws were cultural and low-key. The Grand Mosque of Bobo-Dioulasso, a bristling mud-brick structure in the Sudano-Sahelian style, is the best-known monument, and Bobo-Dioulasso's old quarters and lively music scene made it the country's cultural capital.

Southwest of Bobo, the Sindou Peaks are a ridge of sharp sandstone pinnacles, and the Karfiguéla falls on the Komoé River and Lake Tengrela lie near Banfora to the south. In the far southwest, the stone Ruins of Loropéni, a walled settlement that grew rich on the trans-Saharan gold trade and was at its height between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, became the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. Three more have been added since: the ancient iron-smelting sites of the north, some of them dating to around 800 BC, listed in 2019, the W-Arly-Pendjari parks, and the Royal Court of Tiébélé, the Kassena royal compound known for its painted walls, listed in 2024.

The southeast held Burkina Faso's wildlife — the W and Arly parks, part of the transboundary W-Arly-Pendjari complex shared with Niger and Benin, with elephant, antelope, and one of West Africa's last lion populations. Access to all of these is now severely restricted or impossible because of the security situation.