Three books that put you in Burkina Faso. One, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, is by a writer from Burkina Faso and set there. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Very little literature from Burkina Faso has been translated into English, so readers often find memoir and outside scholarship first. Much of the country's published writing is in French, the official language, while Mooré and Dioula are widely spoken and stories and histories have long been passed on aloud. The country's modern history, from colonial Upper Volta to Thomas Sankara's revolution of 1983–87, runs through much of what is available in English.
Malidoma Patrice Somé's Of Water and the Spirit recounts a Dagara boy taken by missionaries, then returning to his southwestern village for initiation. Elliott P. Skinner's The Mossi of Burkina Faso: Chiefs, Politicians and Soldiers draws on long fieldwork to show chieftaincy in the centre of the country. Ernest Harsch's Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary covers the revolution, including rural life and women's roles.
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Memoir of a Dagara boy taken by missionaries, then returning to his village for initiation, showing southwestern Burkina Faso's spiritual life under colonial pressure.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Burkina Faso.
Jeanphi, a young man desperate to leave his West African hometown, fails to cross the Sahara, then gets his chance through a lonely French philanthropist, in this short, darkly funny novel about migration and the white-saviour charity world.
A satire of postcolonial Sahelian politics, corruption and power-seeking, written by Burkina Faso's best-known investigative journalist, who was murdered in 1998.
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