58 Fun Facts About Burkina Faso

What is the capital and largest city of Burkina Faso?

Ouagadougou, which locals shorten to Ouaga, was the seat of the largest Mossi kingdom for centuries before the French arrived, and the Mossi king still holds court in the city.

Under what name was Burkina Faso known until 1984?

Upper Volta (Haute-Volta) was the colonial and early independence-era name, taken from the upper course of the Volta river system; the change came on 4 August 1984.

What does the name Burkina Faso, coined from Mooré and Dyula words, mean?

Land of upright (honest) people: Burkina is Mooré for upright or honest and Faso is Dyula for fatherland, while the ending of Burkinabè, the people's name, was borrowed from a third language, Fula.

Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso's revolutionary president of the 1980s, is often nicknamed Africa's what?

Che Guevara: like Che, Sankara was a young Marxist revolutionary who died by the gun. He took power at 33 and was shot dead at 37 in a coup that put his close friend in charge.

Sankara's government planted more than how many trees to fight the advance of the Sahara?

10 million trees were planted in little more than a year to slow the desert, and in 1985 the government launched 'three struggles' against bush fires, stray livestock and the reckless felling of firewood.

Sankara built a populist image partly by doing what with the government's luxury vehicles?

Selling them off: Sankara sold the government's fleet of Mercedes cars and made the modest Renault 5 the official car for his ministers.

Who seized power in the October 1987 coup and then ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years?

Blaise Compaoré, once a close friend and bandmate of the predecessor he overthrew, ruled until the 2014 uprising and was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 2022 for that predecessor's murder.

What triggered the October 2014 uprising that toppled Burkina Faso's president of 27 years?

A bid to extend his term set it off: as parliament prepared to vote on lifting the limit, protesters burned the National Assembly on 30 October 2014, and he resigned and fled the next day.

Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in September 2022, held what distinction at age 34?

World's youngest head of state at the time: Traoré was 34 when he led the country's second coup of 2022, in September, and the following year he ordered French troops out.

In 2023 Burkina Faso formed a mutual defence pact with which two neighbours?

Mali and Niger signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter with Burkina Faso in September 2023, creating the Alliance of Sahel States; the three junta-led countries declared a confederation in 2024 and left ECOWAS in 2025.

Rural women in Burkina Faso gather wild savanna tree nuts to make which export?

Shea butter is sold abroad for skin creams and, less famously, for chocolate, where it stands in for cocoa butter.

Which warrior princess of Mossi legend rode away from her father's kingdom and married a hunter?

Yennenga was, in legend, the daughter of a Dagomba king; her son with the hunter Rialé, Ouédraogo, went on to found the first of the Mossi kingdoms.

The Tour du Faso, raced across Burkina Faso most years since 1987, is an event in which sport?

Road cycling: the ten-day stage race was run until 2008 by the organisers of the Tour de France, and its 2014 edition was called off because of the Ebola outbreak.

The traditional Mossi ruler based in the capital, whose title means "king of the world", is called what?

Mogho Naba: every Friday morning he comes out of his palace in the capital dressed in red as if riding to war, and his ministers ritually talk him out of leaving.

Burkina Faso's flag shows a yellow star on horizontal bands of which two colours?

Red and green: adopted on 4 August 1984 in Pan-African colours, the red is said to stand for the revolutionary struggle, the green for hope and abundance, and the yellow star for the revolution's guiding light.

Which three colours, one for each of its main rivers, striped Burkina Faso's flag until 1984?

Black, white and red stripes flew until 4 August 1984, a year to the day after Sankara's 1983 coup, when they gave way to the Pan-African colours flown by its neighbours as a show of unity with other former colonies.

The capital hosts FESPACO, which is what?

Africa's largest film festival: FESPACO began as a week of screenings in 1969, was made a state institution by decree in 1972, and now takes over the capital's cinemas every odd-numbered year.

Idrissa Ouédraogo's Tilaï, a drama set in a Burkina Faso village, won the Grand Prix at which 1990 festival?

Cannes gave Tilaï its Grand Prix in 1990 for the story of a man who comes home to find the woman he loves married to his own father.

Which commodity has been Burkina Faso's leading export since the late 2000s?

Gold overtook farm crops as the leading export in the late 2000s as a wave of industrial mines opened from 2007, and within a few years it was earning well over half of all export income.

Which French-promoted crop was long Burkina Faso's main cash export?

Cotton was pushed hard by French colonial administrators, and after the early drive failed Paris broke the colony up in 1932; the crop still went on to be the country's leading cash earner for decades.

The ancient furnaces at five Burkina Faso sites, listed as World Heritage in 2019, were built to smelt which metal?

Iron: about fifteen furnaces still stand across the five sites, built to draw in air on their own draught instead of being pumped with bellows.

Which country did Burkina Faso fight in the five-day 'Christmas War' of December 1985?

Mali sent tanks over the border on Christmas Day 1985 in a quarrel over the Agacher Strip; after a ceasefire, the International Court of Justice split the strip between the two in 1986.

Which city, known locally as Sya, is Burkina Faso's second largest?

Bobo-Dioulasso was simply Sya until 1904, when a French colonel renamed it 'home of the Bobo-Dioula' after its people; it is still called the country's economic capital.

The Grand Mosque in Burkina Faso's second city, a landmark of Sudano-Sahelian style, is built mainly of what?

Mud brick: tradition says the mosque came out of a bargain, a Muslim cleric helping the local king against an invading army in return for a promise to build it.

Burkina Faso's national dish tô is what?

A stiff porridge of millet, sorghum or maize, tô is left to set, then pinched off by hand and dipped in a sauce of baobab leaves or okra; it is the everyday staple rather than a feast dish.

Poulet bicyclette, a Burkinabé speciality, is what?

Grilled free-range chicken: the lean village birds are said to owe the name either to the sellers who carry them to market by bicycle or to a strut like a racing cyclist's.

Burkina Faso's national football team is nicknamed what?

The Stallions (Les Étalons) are named for the horse that carried the warrior princess of legend to the hunter she married; Ouédraogo, a very common surname in the country, itself means stallion.

Hugues Fabrice Zango won Burkina Faso's first-ever Olympic medal in 2021 in which event?

Triple jump: Zango took bronze in Tokyo as a part-time athlete working on a doctorate in electrical engineering, then became world champion and Dr Zango within months of each other in 2023.

Which Burkinabé forward, once at Chelsea and Lyon, debuted for the national team at 15?

Bertrand Traoré played for his country at 15, but after Chelsea signed him he waited 18 months for a work permit, spending them on loan at Vitesse in the Netherlands.

Burkina Faso was one of 17 colonies that won independence in 1960, a year now known as what?

The Year of Africa saw 17 colonies become independent; Burkina Faso's turn came on 5 August 1960, though it kept its colonial name for another 24 years.

Which household object became the emblem of the citizens' movement that helped topple Burkina Faso's president in 2014?

A broom: Le Balai Citoyen, 'the Citizen's Broom', was founded in 2013 by a rapper and a reggae singer who vowed to sweep out corruption, and its members carried brooms on the marches.

Roch Kaboré, elected in 2015, was Burkina Faso's first elected president in 49 years to have what?

No past ties to the military: Kaboré, a banker and former prime minister, was the first elected head of state since 1966 without a military background; soldiers deposed him in January 2022.

Which of Burkina Faso's six neighbours has English as its official language?

Ghana, a former British colony, lies along Burkina Faso's southern border; its other five neighbours were all under French rule before independence.

After ordering French troops out in 2023, Burkina Faso's junta brought in soldiers from which country's 'Africa Corps'?

Russia's Africa Corps, the successor to the Wagner mercenary group, set up base at Loumbila just outside the capital, months after some 400 French special forces had been sent home.

France split the colony that is now Burkina Faso among which neighbours from 1932 to 1947?

Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger: Paris broke the colony up in 1932 to save money, sharing it between Ivory Coast, French Sudan (now Mali) and Niger, and restored it in 1947 under pressure from Mossi leaders.

SIAO, a fair held every two years in Burkina Faso's capital since 1988, is a showcase for what?

African handicrafts: SIAO is a trade show as much as an exhibition, set up so that craft makers from across the continent can meet professional buyers face to face.

Which UNESCO Biosphere Reserve north of Burkina Faso's second city is named after the animals in its lake?

Mare aux Hippopotames, a forest reserve since 1937 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1986, is managed by an association of local villagers, who keep bees around it and take visitors out to watch the hippos.

Which national park spans Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger?

W National Park takes its name from the W-shaped double bend of the Niger River at its heart; the Niger section was listed by UNESCO in 1996 and the whole three-country park in 2017.

Which dry, dusty wind blows off the Sahara across Burkina Faso from about November to March?

The harmattan is so laden with Saharan dust that its haze can hide the sun for days, disrupt flights and drift hundreds of kilometres out over the Atlantic.

Which currency does Burkina Faso use?

The West African CFA franc is shared by eight countries and pegged to the euro; its initials first stood for 'French colonies of Africa' and were later reread as 'African Financial Community'.

Burkina Faso's only railway runs from Kaya through the capital to which city on the coast?

Abidjan: the colonial-era line reached Burkina Faso's capital only in 1954 and still gives the landlocked country its one rail route to the sea.

A 33-megawatt facility opened at Zagtouli in 2017 was billed as West Africa's biggest what?

Solar power plant: France's President Macron attended the opening of the Zagtouli plant, part-funded by his country and built to cut Burkina Faso's dependence on electricity imported from its neighbours.

The royal court of Tiébélé, a World Heritage Site since 2024, is famous for which feature of its houses?

Hand-painted walls: the patterns are the work of the community's women alone, who cover the houses the men have built with symbols of its beliefs and history.

Which gourd-resonated xylophone is a signature instrument of Burkina Faso's Bobo and Senufo peoples?

Balafon: its wooden keys sit over calabash gourds, and holes in the gourds were traditionally covered with spider silk so that every note comes with a buzz.

Since 2015 Burkina Faso's army has been fighting an insurgency by which kind of armed groups?

Jihadist militants linked to al-Qaeda and the IS group spread in from the north after 2015; their January 2016 attack on a hotel and café in the capital killed about 30, and failure to stop them was the reason given for both 2022 coups.

Sankara's neighbourhood CDR organisations were modelled on those of which country?

Cuba: Sankara, who had met Fidel Castro while prime minister, borrowed both the name and the model of Cuba's neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution.

Which religion did nearly two-thirds of Burkina Faso's people profess in the 2019 census?

Islam: the 2019 census counted 63.8% Muslims, up from 56% in 1996, with about a quarter of the people Christian and 9% following traditional religions.

Which of these did Thomas Sankara write himself for the newly renamed Burkina Faso in 1984?

Its national anthem, Ditanyè, has words by Sankara, a jazz guitarist in his army days, and took effect at midnight on 4 August 1984 together with the country's new name.

Who was Burkina Faso's first president after independence?

Maurice Yaméogo made his party the only legal one, then cut civil servants' pay by a fifth; a general strike on 3 January 1966 brought him down and the army under Lamizana took over.

Sonni Ali, who beat back a Mossi invasion at Kobi in 1483, built which West African empire?

Songhai was a small kingdom around Gao until Sonni Ali captured Timbuktu and then took the trading city of Djenné by siege, turning his kingdom into an empire.

Burkina Faso's national day, 11 December, marks the anniversary of which 1958 event?

The proclamation of the Republic: on 11 December 1958 the colony became a self-governing republic within the French Community, and full independence came only on 5 August 1960.

R21, a vaccine trialled on children at Nanoro in Burkina Faso, protects against which disease?

Malaria: in the Nanoro trial of 450 young children the vaccine proved 77% effective, and in 2023 the World Health Organization recommended it for children in at-risk areas.

Yacouba Sawadogo, the Burkinabè farmer called 'the man who stopped the desert', revived zaï, which is the practice of doing what?

Planting in dug pits: Sawadogo filled each small pit with manure, which drew termites whose tunnels broke up the hard soil, and over decades he turned barren ground into a forest of some 60 species.

Which nation beat Burkina Faso 1–0 in the final of the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations?

Nigeria's Sunday Mba scored the only goal in Johannesburg; that 2013 runner-up finish was Burkina Faso's best at the tournament to that point.

Which officer led the January 2022 coup that deposed President Roch Kaboré?

Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, a lieutenant-colonel, seized power on 24 January 2022 and lasted eight months before Captain Ibrahim Traoré ousted him that September.

Which sacred animals share their pond with the villagers of Bazoulé?

Crocodiles: around a hundred live in Bazoulé's pond, fed chickens and calm enough to sit on, because legend says the animals once led the villagers to water during a drought.

Burkina Faso's award-winning Gando Primary School has a metal roof raised clear of its classrooms to do what?

Let hot air escape. Warm air rises through gaps in the ceiling and out under the roof, drawing cooler air in through the windows behind it, so the classrooms stay comfortable with no air conditioning.

Which architect from the village of Gando won the 2022 Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour?

Francis Kéré. He left Gando at seven because it had no school, reached Berlin on a carpentry scholarship, qualified as an architect there and came home to build with his own villagers.