Bobo

Population: Around a million in western Burkina Faso and adjacent Mali

Location: The region around Bobo-Dioulasso, Houndé and the Mouhoun river

Language: Bobo (Bwamu is spoken by the neighbouring and often confused Bwa)

Language family: Niger-Congo → Mande (Bobo); the neighbouring Bwa speak a Gur language

Traditional governance: Village-level authority without chiefs in the usual sense: the earth priest, the Dwo cult officers and the elders of the founding lineages govern collectively.

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Clothing: Handwoven cotton strips sewn into tunics and wrappers; indigo dyeing; mask costume of fibre and leaves entirely covering the wearer.

Food: Millet, sorghum and maize with baobab and okra sauces; dolo millet beer, brewed by women and central to every ceremony and work party.

Ceremonies: Mask performances at the start of the rains and at funerals; the leaf mask of the Bwa, made fresh each year and danced to purify the village; initiation cycles into the Dwo cult; harvest and sowing rites.

Marriage customs: Bridewealth in labour and grain; clan exogamy; the smith lineages marry among themselves.

Initiation rites: Long initiation into the Dwo cult in age classes, involving seclusion in the bush, instruction in the masks' meaning, and a symbolic death and rebirth.

Every dish the Atlas publishes for Burkina Faso and Mali, at national rather than community level — 16 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.

“The mask does not dance for itself.”

Ritual serves the village, not the performer.

“The smith's fire belongs to everyone and to no one.”

The smith's ambiguous, indispensable status.

“Beer brewed for the field is not drunk in the house.”

Collective work has collective rewards.

Creation: Wuro, the creator, made the world and withdrew; his son Dwo mediates between people and the divine and is present in the masks; other cults (Soxo of the bush, Kwere of thunder) handle particular domains.

Beliefs: Dwo cult with initiation grades; earth priests controlling land and sacrifice; Islam and Christianity present, particularly in the towns, alongside the village religion.

Ancestors: Founding lineages hold ritual authority; ancestors are honoured at village shrines and in funeral masking.

Traditional settlements: Compact villages of flat-roofed banco houses joined into blocks, with granaries and interior courtyards; Bobo-Dioulasso's great mud mosque nearby.

Building techniques: Banco mud construction with wooden beams and flat earth roofs; painted geometric wall decoration; granaries as separate sculpted forms.

Village layout: Compound of joined rooms around courtyards, granaries within; shrine sites and the mask house restricted; fields beyond the village.

1. Pre-1500

   Bobo and Bwa communities established in the western Volta basin.

2. 1800s

   Pressure from Fulani jihad states and from Samori Touré's campaigns.

3. 1897–1916

   French conquest; the Volta-Bani war of 1915–16 is among the largest anticolonial risings in West Africa.

4. 1900s–present

   Bobo-Dioulasso becomes Burkina Faso's second city and a centre of music and cinema.

5. Present

   Mask traditions continue alongside Islam and Christianity; some masks enter the international art market.