Burkina Faso's history: a colony abolished, rebuilt and ruled by coups

What the land held before the Mossi kingdoms

The oldest dated industry in Burkina Faso is iron. UNESCO's listing of the Ancient Ferrous Metallurgy Sites, inscribed in 2019, places the earliest of its five components at Douroula in the 8th century BCE, which it calls the oldest evidence of iron production found in the country. The other four, Tiwêga, Yamané, Kindibo and Békuy, record the intensification of smelting during the second millennium CE. Together they hold about fifteen standing natural-draught furnaces, other furnace structures, mines and traces of dwellings. Ore is no longer reduced at any of them, but UNESCO notes that village blacksmiths still make tools and take part in rituals.

The record before the furnaces is thinner. Wikipedia's country article places hunter-gatherers in the northwest between 14,000 and 5,000 BC, from scrapers, chisels and arrowheads excavated in 1973, and farming settlements between 3600 and 2600 BC. From the 3rd to the 13th century AD an Iron Age society, the Bura culture, occupied what is now the southeast of Burkina Faso and the southwest of Niger.

In the far southwest stand the Ruins of Loropéni, the first property in the country to be inscribed on the World Heritage List, in 2009. UNESCO describes laterite walls up to six metres high around an abandoned settlement of 11,130 square metres, the best preserved of ten fortresses in the Lobi area and one of about a hundred stone enclosures there. Radiocarbon dates take the enclosure back to at least the 11th century AD. It flourished between the 14th and 17th centuries, when the Lohron or Koulango peoples controlled the extraction and working of gold in the region, and it was finally abandoned in the early 19th century. Much of it has not been excavated, and what the walls were for is still partly a matter of inference.

How the Mossi kingdoms ruled the Volta headwaters

For several centuries before the French arrived, the centre of the plateau belonged to the Mossi. Britannica describes the Mossi states as a complex of independent kingdoms that flourished from about 1500 to 1895 around the headwaters of the Volta: Tenkodogo, Wagadugu, Yatenga and Fada N'Gourma in what is now Burkina Faso, with Mamprusi, Dagomba and Nanumba to the south in present-day Ghana.

Their beginnings are told in oral tradition, and the versions disagree. The best known traces the royal line to Yennenga, a princess of Naa Gbewaa's kingdom in northern Ghana, who left her father's court dressed as a man and had a son, Ouédraogo, with a Mande elephant hunter named Rialé. The versions date the story anywhere between the 11th and the 15th century. Britannica says only that the origins are obscure and that Mossi tradition placed the ancestors in the east, perhaps in the 13th century.

The kingdoms fought on horseback. Britannica records long-ranging light cavalry that harassed the empire of Mali to the north and contested the Middle Niger with Songhai. Mossi warriors raided Timbuktu sometime between 1328 and 1338, and the Songhai ruler Sonni Ali defeated them at Kobi in 1483. When Askia Mohammad I of Songhai waged a holy war against them in 1497 they lost the field and kept their religion. From about 1400 they traded between the forest states and the cities of the Niger, and the Moroccan conquest of Songhai in 1591 left them fully independent again.

At the head of the largest kingdom sat the king of Ouagadougou, the Mogho Naba. Below him were divisional chiefs and below them village chiefs, and Wikipedia's account of the kingdoms describes a balance between the nakombse, who claimed descent from the founders and the right to rule, and the tengbiise, earlier inhabitants who kept authority over the land. Islam became the religion of the kings under Naba Dulugu, whom Britannica dates to roughly 1796 to 1825, and the first mosque in Ouagadougou was built early in the 19th century.

How France took the Volta basin

A German explorer, Gottlob Krause, reached the plateau in 1888, and a British expedition under George Ekem Ferguson persuaded Mossi leaders to sign a treaty of protection in 1894. France ignored the treaty. French forces entered Ouagadougou on 5 September 1896 and burned it. The Mogho Naba Wobgo fled; his brother Kouka took the throne and sided with the French. Once France and Britain had agreed their boundary, Wobgo lost his main support, and he retired on a British pension to Zongoiri in the Gold Coast, where he died in 1904.

The east and the west, where the forces of Samori Ture stood in the way, were occupied in 1897. Bobo-Dioulasso, which a Kong prince had made the capital of the Gwiriko region in the 18th century, fell to French troops the same year. The Franco-British Convention of 14 June 1898 fixed the frontiers the country still has, although Wikipedia records about five more years of fighting against local communities inside the French zone.

In 1904 the Volta basin was folded into the colony of Upper Senegal and Niger, governed from Bamako. Its men were drafted into the Senegalese Rifles for the European fronts of the First World War, and from 1915 the western districts and the eastern fringe of present-day Mali rose in the Volta-Bani War. The BBC's timeline gives the rebels 15,000 to 20,000 fighters at their peak. Wikipedia records that France had to raise the largest expeditionary force of its colonial history to put the rising down, while in the Sahelian north the Tuareg and allied groups around Dori broke their truce.

Why the colony was abolished and then restored

French Upper Volta was created on 1 March 1919, cut out of Upper Senegal and Niger because the French feared another rising. It was named for the upper courses of the Black, Red and White Volta, and Ouagadougou became its capital and was largely rebuilt. The first governor, Édouard Hesling, built roads and pushed cotton for export by coercion. The cotton policy failed and revenue stagnated. On 5 September 1932 France dismantled the colony and divided it among Ivory Coast, French Sudan and Niger, and Ivory Coast took the largest share, with most of the people and the towns of Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso.

For fifteen years the territory had no administration of its own. After the Second World War the Mossi pressed for a territory of their own, and on 4 September 1947 France revived Upper Volta inside its old boundaries as part of the French Union. The railway from Abidjan reached Ouagadougou in the mid-1950s, Britannica dating the extension to 1955, and Bobo-Dioulasso lost its place as the end of the line.

The Loi Cadre of 23 July 1956 opened the way to self-government in French territories overseas. Upper Volta became an autonomous republic within the French Community on 11 December 1958 and fully independent on 5 August 1960. Its first flag was three horizontal bands of black, white and red, one for each branch of the river.

How Upper Volta became a state of coups

Maurice Yaméogo of the Voltaic Democratic Union became the first president and soon banned every other party. After strikes and mass demonstrations by students, trade unions and civil servants, the army removed him on 3 January 1966, suspended the constitution, dissolved the National Assembly and put Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana at the head of a government of senior officers. Lamizana ran military or mixed governments through the 1970s and through the Sahel drought and famine, and he won an open election in 1978. The trade unions, a standing force in the country's politics, were his undoing: Colonel Saye Zerbo overthrew him in a bloodless coup on 25 November 1980, and Zerbo fell in turn on 7 November 1982.

The country's main Wikipedia article lists seven coups that succeeded, and the table sets them out.

Attempts failed in 1989, 2015 and 2023, according to Wikipedia's country article. The 2015 attempt by the Regiment of Presidential Security held the transitional president for a week before the regular army forced it to give way.

What Sankara's revolution changed

Thomas Sankara was born in Yako in 1949 and trained as an officer in Madagascar from 1970, where Britannica notes he watched a popular uprising bring down the government. He made his name in the 1974 border war with Mali. In January 1983 the Council of Popular Salvation made him prime minister; in May he was removed and arrested. On 4 August 1983 his friend Captain Blaise Compaoré brought the commando unit from Po to the capital, with Ghanaian and Libyan help according to Britannica, freed him and overthrew the government.

The National Council of the Revolution set up popular Committees for the Defence of the Revolution and a youth movement, the Pioneers of the Revolution. On the first anniversary of the coup, by a decree of 2 August confirmed on 4 August 1984, Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, from the Mooré word for upright and the Dyula word for fatherland, and took the red and green flag with a yellow star that it flies today.

The programme was large for a country of its means. The government rejected foreign aid, nationalised land and mineral wealth, ran a national literacy campaign and redistributed land to farmers. It vaccinated 2,500,000 children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles, and banned female genital mutilation, forced marriage and polygamy. Britannica credits the government with planting 10 million trees in its first year to hold back the desert. More than 350 communities built schools with their own labour.

The revolution also had a coercive side. Wikipedia's article on the country's politics records Committees for the Defence of the Revolution that extorted "taxes" and "contributions" and clashed with trade unions, and Britannica says the government lost popular support over economic problems and opposition from traditional quarters. On Christmas Day 1985 a dispute with Mali over the Agacher Strip became a five-day war that killed about 100 people. On 15 October 1987 Sankara and twelve others were killed in a coup led by Compaoré with Captain Henri Zongo and Commandant Jean-Baptiste Lingani.

How Compaoré held power until the streets ended it

Compaoré's Popular Front promised to "rectify" the revolution's "deviations". He reversed the nationalisations, took the country back into programmes with the International Monetary Fund and moved away from most of Sankara's policies. In September 1989 Zongo and Lingani were accused of plotting against him and executed. A constitution adopted on 2 June 1991 restored multiparty politics, and Compaoré, who had left the army to stand as a civilian, was elected unopposed in December 1991 because the opposition boycotted the vote.

He was re-elected in 1998, 2005 and 2010. The killing in 1998 of Norbert Zongo, a journalist investigating the death of a driver who worked for the president's brother, set off unrest that recurred into the 2000s. An amendment of April 2000 cut the presidential term to five years renewable once, and in October 2005 the Constitutional Council ruled that it did not apply to the terms Compaoré had already served. In 2011 a schoolboy's death set off months of protest, an army mutiny and a magistrates' strike. Abroad, Compaoré mediated in the Ivorian crisis of 2010 and 2011 and the Malian crisis of 2012.

The end came over Article 37, the term limit. In October 2014 the government brought an amendment to let Compaoré stand again in 2015. On 30 October, the day of the vote, protesters set fire to the National Assembly building, and on 31 October Compaoré resigned and left for Ivory Coast after twenty-seven years. A civilian transition followed, survived the attempted coup of September 2015 and handed over after elections on 29 November 2015.

The killing of Sankara was eventually tried. A military tribunal charged 14 people in April 2021 and opened the trial on 11 October 2021, with Compaoré absent. On 6 April 2022 it found him guilty and sentenced him, Hyacinthe Kafando and General Gilbert Diendéré to life imprisonment.

How the insurgency put the army back in power

The jihadist insurgency began in August 2015, and seven posts across the country were attacked between then and October 2016. On 15 January 2016 gunmen attacked a restaurant and a hotel in central Ouagadougou and killed 30 people, according to the BBC's timeline, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed it. Ansarul Islam began operating in Soum province in 2016. In 2019, according to figures from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project cited by Wikipedia, nearly 1,300 civilians were killed and 860,000 displaced. More than 170 people were killed in Solhan and Tadaryat in June 2021, and 53 soldiers at a gendarmerie post in Inata in November 2021.

Officers gave the failure to contain the insurgency as their reason for taking power on 24 January 2022, the BBC records, and the same reason again on 30 September 2022, when the first junta was itself overthrown. A transitional charter adopted on 1 March 2022 provided for three years of military-led transition before elections. Freedom House records that a new charter signed in May 2024 pushed the end of the transition back by five years, to 2029.

The violence did not ease. The BBC records that about 400 French special forces were expelled in 2023. Freedom House reports that government forces were accused of killing 223 people, at least 56 of them children, in Yatenga province in February 2024, and an attack on Barsalogho in August 2024 killed at least 400 people, according to the British government's travel advice.

The break with the region and with party politics followed. The country left the Economic Community of West African States formally on 29 January 2025, alongside Mali and Niger, its partners in the Alliance of Sahel States. A decree of 29 January 2026, confirmed by the transitional legislature on 9 February 2026, dissolved every political party and transferred their assets to the state. UN OCHA counted more than 2 million people forced from their homes over the years of crisis, and 4.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance in 2026.