Where is BURKINA FASO located on the map?
Burkina Faso, also officially known as the Republic of Burkina Faso, is a country in West Africa. Its capital is Ouagadougou and its inhabitants Burkinabe or Burkinese. Burkina Faso is surrounded by Mali to the north and west, Niger to the east, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast to the south.
French is the official language. The languages of the Sudanese family, such as the moré (mossi) and the dyula, the language of the dyula traders, are spoken by the majority of the population.
The climate is Sahelian in the North and Sudanese in the rest of the country. From November to March, there is a dry and cool season, during which the Harmattan, a wind originating from the Sahara, is blowing and which is characterized by a great thermal amplitude between day and night. From March to May reign heat and humidity. Rainfall rises from over 1,300 mm in the Southwest, the most productive region of the country, to less than 254 mm in the north; it is in summer, during the “wintering”, that it is the highest. The thermal amplitude is high in the North (15 to 45 ° C); elsewhere temperatures range from 21.1 to 26.7 ° C.
Where is the country of BURKINA FASO situated?
Remains (cut stones, pottery, engravings) dating from the first millennium BC evoke a civilization still to be studied. The first farmers leave their mark on the landscape by clearing the forest. They precede the ancestors of the current Mossi, who inhabit most of the country. The origin of these riders is poorly known. Traditions say they came from the east, south, and even from the west. Constituted as a military aristocracy, they made agreements with the local populations, who remained the owners of the land, as evidenced by the traditional relations existing between the “land chiefs” and the canton chiefs, who hold the political power. The arrival of the Mossi is situated between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.
The four Mossi kingdoms, which are the result of a brewing between the conquerors and the indigenous peoples, but which form a single cultural unit, are gradually being built up and never achieve political unity. Most importantly, the kingdom of Yatenga, in the north, is in direct contact with the Sudanese empires against which it leads expeditions (taken Timbuktu in 1329). In particular, he must defend himself from the Islamist enterprises of the Songhai Empire. The administration is highly centralized and allows the rapid mobilization of defense forces. The king’s person, the mohro naba, is sacred; it represents the vital force whose power is supposed to burn the ground.
The other populations of Burkina Faso have their own history, making brewing with other peoples (Gourmantchés, Bwas, Sénoufo, Gans). In the north, the Tuareg, Fulani, Songhai and Djerma have settled more recently. The fifteenth century marks the arrival, from the west, of Mande-speaking populations, especially the Dyula merchants who will be at the origin of Bobo-Dioulasso.
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