After an introduction by the editors, the book offers twenty-eight chapters that are papers presented at a conference held in Ouagadougou in March 2019 under the auspices and with the support of the government of then-President Roch Kaboré to commemorate the centenary of the creation of the Upper Volta colony, circumstances that explain certain features of the collection. The papers are divided into four sections: (1) The Birth of Upper Volta; (2) Administrative, Economic, and Social Policy; (3) From the Development of the Upper Ivory Coast to the Reconstitution of Upper Volta; and (4) Ethnology, Art, and Literary Production in Colonial Upper Volta up to 1947, including only four papers.

This outline makes it clear that the title of the book is misleading. It is not a volume of synthesis that brings together the accumulated historical knowledge of Burkina Faso in narrative form, following a chronological or thematic order. Rather, it is the proceedings of a conference that had a vague temporal boundary but no thematic focus. A few of the contributions are long and valuable, but a large number are by junior academics or amateurs writing on a rather random topic about which they happen to have some knowledge.

Why the border dates on the cover were chosen is not clear. The year 1897 is not crucial in the history of Burkina Faso (if we may use the modern name of the country). Ouagadougou, the area of the present capital, had been occupied by French colonial troops in 1896 (by a column led by the notorious officers Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine—the first reference to this is on p. 62 of the book); the north of the country, the Yatenga, another kingdom of the Moose, had come under the French as a protectorate even earlier. In 1897, the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in the western part of the country fell to a column coming from the south as part of a larger colonial move to defeat the African commander Samori in competition with the British, as mentioned in Chapter One. However, the eastern part of the country fell to the French when another column arrived from Dahomey in the southeast. These phases of the French assault are described in passages scattered throughout the volume. We do not find a sustained account of the entire colonial conquest (as, for example, Georges Madiéga had provided a description and enumeration of the international treaties that had established the country’s borders; and Jeanne-Marie Kambou-Ferrand, whom we lost in January 2025, has already given a superb account in her Peuple Voltaïques et Conquête Coloniale 1885-1914). So, “Creation” remains vague and fragmented. Haut-Senegal-Niger also remains unexplained, hovering like an unfathomable ghost over the accounts of the beginnings.

The closing date of 1947 is also unexpected. In that year, the colonial authorities reconstituted “Upper Volta” as a colony, but why end a historical account with a second beginning? The name Upper Volta had an official existence for only thirteen of the fifty years bounded by the dates on the cover. After 1947, the name became current again for another thirty-six years. Left out are: the turbulent decade leading up to independence, when passions and rivalries ran high; the attainment of independence and its aftermath; the long years of Lamizana leadership; and finally the brief period of the Thomas Sankara revolution, for which the country is still celebrated worldwide. Could it be the circumstances of the conference? The public in Burkina Faso is proud of the country’s past when it comes to civic activism and resistance to tyranny. For example, the unprecedented labor union militancy that overthrew the corrupt Yameogo regime, the Sankara revolution, the unyielding rebellion in the face of repression during the twenty-seven-year presidency of Blaise Compaoré, and the final uprising that led to his ouster. But as Roch Kaboré’s rule began to look like a continuation of Compaoré’s autocracy, the euphoria dissipated, and focusing on opposition to despotism came to be seen as defiance. This was the climate, and the conference organizers excluded consideration of the Sankara revolution, and perhaps why the 1915–16 war against the colonial government, the most significant primary resistance movement against a colonial administration anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and also the key to understanding the partition of the vast colony of Upper Senegal and Niger and the “constitution” of Upper Volta, has such a low profile in the papers of this conference.

The contributors do not share a common basic bibliography, and there is none at the end of the volume. Lack of access to scholarly resources may explain some of the gaps. Some of this could have been remedied with authoritative online sources, such as the extensive Burkina Faso entry of the Oxford Bibliographies, but the conference organizers/editors were unable to provide historiographical guidance and leadership.

In the last iteration of the major historical demographic study they produced, D.D. Cordell, J.W. Gregory and V. Piché (Hoe And Wage: A Social History Of A Circular Migration System In West Africa, Westview Press, 1998) wrote that there was no basic volume on the history of Burkina Faso; a study that a junior scholar could peruse at the beginning of a research career, or an informed citizen of the country could read for edification. Such a book would not be produced as a compilation of papers of varying subject matter and quality. It requires dedication, a long-term effort by one scholar or a small team of scholars determined to compensate for the difficulty of accessing valuable scholarly sources. This conference and the resulting volume of proceedings, as earlier examples of the same thing that served as models, remind us that, unfortunately, thirty years later, this observation remains valid.