Burkina Faso had not exactly been near the top of the list of countries I wanted to spend time in when I moved to West Africa in 2006. However I had been working my way through the more obvious draws of the region and now I had the opportunity to spend a week or so in this “land of upright men” (as the name means!).
So it was quite a surprise to start reading through my Bradt Guide and finding a whole range of attractions, easily enough to keep any visitor busy for a month. But as my work was taking me to Bobo Dioulasso, in the south-west corner of the country, I decided to focus there. Bobo itself is a lovely town, with an old quarter full of artisans making woodcarvings, bronzes, batiks, etc (I spent a couple of hours there watching the production of three batiks), a pretty old mosque and lots of decent eating places.
From there I headed off to the countryside. The Domes of Fabedougou were deserted apart from some stunning red-throated bee-eaters, and nearby were the impressive waterfalls of Karfiguela where I had a swim and watched the wood hoopoes and violet turacos in the trees over the water. I also bumped into an English lady I had eaten dinner with a year or so before in Guinea; what a small world!
The Peaks of Sindou, also deserted, gave me another chance for a bit of exercise,
and then further along the increasingly rough dirt track was the village of Niansogoni where I hiked up a hill to visit the remains of mud dwellings and granaries built into the side of a rock face. People had lived there back in the nineteenth century because it was safe from the raids of a neighbouring tribe, and the last inhabitants to leave only moved down to the plains in the 1980s.
It is an area where you can organise treks of many days, sleeping and eating in the villages, but I did not have the time. Mind you, trekking in the 40°C temperatures there would have been quite a challenge.
I also visited the Loropeni ruins. These comprise a mysterious set of big rock-walled enclosures in an area of woodland. Nobody knows when they were built or why, but they are impressive and were recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Just about worth the 160km each way along a dirt road on the back of a motorbike, although I’m not sure about the walking in the dark, waiting and final two hours squeezed with four others into the front of a lorry after the motorbike broke down 40km away from the end of the trip…
My final destination was Tiebele, a small village near the Ghanaian border famous for its architecture. Houses were traditionally built in a figure of eight shape, with the entrance only about waist height. This meant anyone entering the house would have to show their head first – which was thus easily chopped off by those inside if they were unwelcome intruders!
Thankfully tourists are not considered unwelcome in the royal palace of Tiebele, nor in a large compound in nearby Tangassoko. We help them to pay to continue painting the houses in the traditional way, with a number of symbols and geometric patterns, representing various important aspects of their lives and history. The “paints”, and the “varnish” which preserves it for three years, are made of natural muds, minerals and plants, but the cost of extracting and transporting these has meant that the tradition is dying out. Some are trying to replace it with a cheaper modern alternative, painting the walls with tar, but it really doesn’t compare.
Finally back to the capital, Ouagadougou, for my early morning flight home. The evening before the flight, however, I admit that I quite enjoyed being chatted up by a charming and good-looking young French man staying at my hotel. Something to raise the spirits – that despite my apparent loss of youth and beauty (see my last post) I still have something left that appeals to someone!
St. Louis is a beautiful, decaying old city in the far north of Senegal, located on an island near the mouth of the River Senegal. It used to be the capital, under the French, but has long since been crumbling away into the sand. It’s partly that the revenue from tourism and fishing is nowhere near enough to fund the maintenance/restoration of the old houses, but a greater problem is the way their ownership has passed down through the generations – not to a favourite son or daughter but to all the offspring equally. Now some are owned by several hundred people, and getting them all to agree to spend money on the house, or to sell it, is a major undertaking. Only when a balcony threatens to collapse onto the people walking below does the government step in, and several buildings look beyond repair. I would imagine the serious threat to this low-lying island of sea level rise doesn’t help.
However the sense of decay does add to the atmosphere of the place. One crumbling warehouse (roofless and windowless) makes an impressive backdrop to a display of old wooden masks and statues, so what would elsewhere be just another tourist shop here becomes a kind of gallery. There are real galleries, too, in the city – of textiles, and of modern African art. & above all there is music. A jazz festival has taken place here every year for the last couple of decades, with a number of big names playing the specially built ‘Quai des Arts’, but a thriving “off festival” (off-Quai?) scene has developed too so that many restaurants and bars host live music during the festival and throughout the year.
I’ve never had the time available to go for the full four days of the festival, and this year was no different, but I decided to go up for the weekend, to catch the last couple of days of Jazz 2010.
So on Saturday evening I was in St. Louis, ready to enjoy a selection of trios, quartets and quintets from around the world. On the way, I stopped for some prawns in garlic with a glass of red wine in a local restaurant – and before I had finished my meal three musicians were warming up next to me to play in the restaurant. N’Dar Afro-Jazz. They were so good that I spent three hours enjoying their performance and never made it to the official stage. & when they finished at midnight their leader took me to another venue nearby to watch a selection of local acts playing different types of traditional West African music. I got back to my hotel at 3am.
On Sunday evening however I was determined to get to the main stage to see the final night of the official festival. Three different groups performed, the final one made up of Pharoah Sanders on saxophone and William Henderson on piano, accompanied by some local drummers. My knowledge of jazz is not great (I never forget raving to a colleague about some jazz drummer I’d seen at the Village Vanguard in New York many years ago – “Roy Haines!” he said, “What, THE Roy Haines?!”) but apparently this saxophonist is well-known and has played with greats such as John Coltrane. He was good. Afterwards there was an official jamming session backstage, which I only left – reluctantly – at 3.30 to get my pre-arranged taxi share back to Dakar.
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