Burkina Faso
Capital: Ouagadougou · West Africa
The 'land of upright people', where Mossi kingdoms have endured for six centuries alongside masked traditions of the Bwa, Bobo and Lobi.
Ethnic communities
- MossiFounders of the Ouagadougou and Yatenga kingdoms; the Mogho Naba still reigns
- Bwa & BoboFamed plank masks and agrarian ritual societies
- LobiAcephalous society known for shrine sculpture and fortified homes
- Fulbe (Peul)Sahelian cattle pastoralists
More communities of Burkina Faso
- Bwa · Plank-mask makers of leaf-and-sun ritual theatre
- Bobo · Ancient farmers with Dwo mask religion and balafon feasts
- Gurunsi (Kassena, Nuna, Lela) · Painted-house architects of Tiébélé fame
- Senufo · Poro-society farmers over the Ivorian border
- Gourmantché · Eastern kingdoms of geomancy and horse lore
- Bissa · Groundnut farmers of the south-central belt
- Samo · Sourou valley farmers with masked ancestral rites
- Marka (Dafing) · Mande traders and indigo weavers of the northwest
- Dagara · Xylophone funeral masters straddling the Ghana line
- Tuareg & Bella · Sahara-edge nomads and former dependents in the Oudalan
- Dogon frontier villages · Escarpment kin along the Mali border
- Karaboro & Turka · Southwestern farmers of the Comoé headwaters
Languages
Major languages: Mooré, Dioula, Fulfuldé, French
Language families: Niger-Congo (Gur, Mande); Atlantic (Fula)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Mossi Kingdoms (Ouagadougou, Yatenga, Tenkodogo)
- • Gwiriko (Dioula)
Heritage sites
- • Ruins of Loropéni
- • Ancient ferrous metallurgy sites (UNESCO)
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Burkina Faso
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the artsb. 1951
Gaston Kaboré
Cinema
Director of Wend Kuuni and Buud Yam and a builder of the FESPACO festival that made Ouagadougou the capital of African cinema.
- Sportb. 1993
Hugues Fabrice Zango
Triple jump
Won Burkina Faso's first Olympic medal in Tokyo in 2021 and its first world championship title in 2023, while completing a doctorate in engineering.
- Politics & liberation1949–1987
Thomas Sankara
Revolutionary leadership
Renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso, the land of upright people. In four years he vaccinated millions of children, banned forced marriage and sold off the government car fleet. Assassinated in 1987.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bambara (Bamana)
Mali's largest people — farmers of the upper Niger whose Segou kingdom, chi wara antelope crests and the six graded komo initiation societies made Bamanankan the nation's lingua franca and their art a canon of world sculpture.
Open deep profile →Bobo
The farmers and smiths of the Bobo-Dioulasso region — makers of leaf masks and towering butterfly masks that come out at the first rains, and holders of a village religion centred on Dwo, whose masks are the god's own body.
Open deep profile →Bwa (Bwaba)
Farmers of the Black Volta country whose towering plank masks, painted in black, white and red geometry, are among the most recognisable objects in West African art, and whose villages rose against the French in 1915 in the largest revolt of the colonial period.
Open deep profile →Dioula
The traders whose language became a lingua franca — Mande merchants who carried Islam and commerce along the kola routes for six centuries, built the mud mosques of the northern savanna, and whose name in Côte d'Ivoire came to mean northerner and, for a time, foreigner.
Open deep profile →Dogon
Cliff-dwelling farmers of Mali's Bandiagara Escarpment whose intricate cosmology, mask society and granary-studded villages have made them one of the most studied — and most storied — cultures in Africa.
Open deep profile →Frafra (Gurunsi of Bolgatanga)
Farmers of the Upper East around Bolgatanga whose women paint the walls of their compounds in bold geometric patterns, whose baskets are exported worldwide, and whose region supplied the labour that built colonial Ghana's south.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Gourmantché
The people of the eastern savanna — farmers and hunters of a kingdom that survived alongside the Mossi for six centuries, whose diviners are consulted across the region, and whose country has become the epicentre of the Sahel's insurgency.
Open deep profile →Gurunsi (Kasena-Nankani and Nuna)
The painted-house builders of the Volta basin — farmers whose women decorate every wall with geometric patterns in earth pigment, and whose Tiébélé compound is among the most photographed pieces of architecture in Africa.
Open deep profile →Kassena (Gurunsi)
The painted-house builders of the Burkina–Ghana border — whose women cover the fortress-walls of Tiébélé in bold black, white and ochre geometry, and whose stateless earth-shrine villages held off the horsemen of the savanna kingdoms.
Open deep profile →Lobi
The fiercely independent farmers of the Black Volta — builders of fortress-houses (soukala), carvers of the bateba shrine figures that stand for the thila spirits, and a people who never accepted a chief, a king or a colonial officer without a fight.
Open deep profile →Mamprusi
The senior of the Mole-Dagbani kingdoms of northern Ghana, whose Nayiri at Nalerigu claims descent from the founder from whom the Dagomba and Mossi kings also trace, and whose succession dispute has kept Bawku under curfew for two decades.
Open deep profile →Marka-Dafing
Muslim traders and farmers of the Black Volta bend, a Mande people among Gur neighbours, whose Islamic scholarship and long-distance commerce made Safané and Boromo nodes of the West African trade network.
Open deep profile →Minianka (Mamara Senufo)
Senufo-speaking farmers of southern Mali around Koutiala, whose balafon and drum ensembles are among the most complex in West Africa, and whose country became Mali's cotton belt and the setting for a much-discussed book about healing through rhythm.
Open deep profile →Mossi
The kingdom-builders of the Volta basin, whose Mogho Naba still holds court in Ouagadougou every Friday — a 500-year unbroken monarchy of horsemen, farmers and mask societies on the West African savanna.
Open deep profile →Samo
Farmers of north-western Burkina Faso who fought the Mossi and the French alike, whose village autonomy was near-absolute, and who joined the 1915 revolt that the Volta-Bani country mounted against conscription.
Open deep profile →Senufo
Master farmers and carvers of the middle Volta savanna whose Poro initiation cycle takes twenty-one years, whose champion-cultivator staffs and firespitter masks rank among Africa's great sculpture, and whose balafon orchestras earned UNESCO honors.
Open deep profile →Tuareg (Kel Tamasheq)
The veiled lords of the central Sahara — matrilineal confederations who ran the desert's caravans for a millennium, write in ancient Tifinagh, and whose women own the tents, the poetry and the one-string imzad that carries the nomad soul.
Open deep profile →