Ouagadougou (pronounced Wagadugu) is the capital of Burkina Faso. Your correspondent is here this week to attend the biennial Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou), better known by its French acronym FESPACO, Africa’s equivalent of Cannes and the Oscars combined.
FESPACO, now in its 20th edition in 40 years, has come to define African expression through the film medium. It is the largest African film festival as well as the biggest regular cultural event on the African continent. It focuses on the African film and African filmmakers and offers African film industry professionals a chance to establish working relationships, exchange ideas and to promote their work. It is a hugely successful event.
FESPACO’s stated aim is to “contribute to the expansion and development of African cinema as means of expression, education and awareness-raising”. Since FESPACO’s founding in 1969, the festival has attracted visitors from across the continent and beyond. Usual winners of the Étalon de Yennenga (Stallion of Yennenga), the highest prize at stake, have mostly been filmmakers from French-speaking West Africa: Burkina Faso itself, Mali, Senegal. But at the last Festival in 2007, Nigerian-born Newton Aduaka (who incidentally lives in France) won with his powerful, lyrical French-produced feature film Ezra, about a child soldier in Sierra Leone.
Although FESPACO itself is exhilarating, getting to Ouaga (short form of Ouagadougou) is not funny. Despite late General Murtala’s declaration in 1975 at the OAU Summit in Addis Ababa that “Africa has come of age” politically, Africa has apparently, and sadly, not come of age economically. Ouaga is on the same latitude with Kano, this writer’s hometown so, were there a direct flight due west from Kano, Ouaga could be reached in a little over an hour. But alas there isn’t, so one had to fly to Lagos, then on to Abidjan, then on to Ouaga, spending upwards of 24 hours on the way.
No matter. We are in one of the world’s poorest countries, Burkina Faso. But what a proud country! They know how to manage their poverty. Most of their taxis are Mercedes Benzes and, although weather-beaten and ancient, they do run. Yes, you share the road with donkey-carts, but even the donkeys, and their riders, obey the traffic lights which work and are all over Ouaga’s generally straight roads. Here, almost everyone, especially women, has a motorcycle, but it is rarely, if at all, used for commercial purposes. Anyone riding as passenger may well be a relative.
This country, like many African products of colonialism, was named by the French Haute Volta (Upper Volta) after River Volta, the biggest in the country. It took a young revolutionary, Captain Thomas Sankara, to change the colonial name to Burkina Faso, meaning “the land of upright people” in Mossi and Djula, the two major languages of the country.
Sankara became President in 1983 and brought literally earth-shaking revolutionary changes in the country. These included banning of tribute payments to and obligatory labour for the traditional village chiefs; abolishment of the rural poll tax; nationalisation of all land and mineral wealth; and the most revolutionary step of all: The Day of Solidarity with Women where men were encouraged for once to go to the market, buy the grocery and prepare the day’s meal so that they experience for themselves the conditions faced by women!
Alas! Like other African revolutionaries before him, Sankara was assassinated on October 15, 1987 in a coup at the age of 37. He was killed, according to www.mathaba.net/www/black/sankara.shtml, on the orders – if not at the hands – of one of his oldest friends, now President Blaise Compaoré. Echoes of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as well as Disney’s The Lion King? The revolution Sankara led between 1983 and 1987 was one of the most creative and radical that Africa has produced in the decades since independence. Sadly, like other radical African leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Murtala Muhammad, he was shot down as a result.
When Sankara died, his most valuable possessions were found to be his bikes, three guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer. He was the world’s poorest president. While President, Sankara had refused to use the air conditioning in his office on the grounds that such luxury was not available to anyone but a handful of Burkinabes. When asked why he had let it be known that he did not want his portrait hung in public places, as is the norm for other African leaders, Sankara had said: ‘There are seven million Thomas Sankaras’.
In 1985, Sankara had said, in one of his most famous quotes: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”
So let us today end on a poetic note.
AU REVOIR OUAGA
UN says Burkina Faso c’est poor
But let me a contrary story tell
Resource poor Burkinabe may be
But how able to manage they have been
They have pure water too
But Ouaga is clean as Sahel can be
One week here not a dim in light
O PHCN! To shame Burkina puts thee
Burkinabe are orderly as Africans can be
As they board their buses as in Paris do
Voila! Bus stops, routes, even Acaba lane!
Only one pothole in Ouaga I saw
And Viva Air Burkina lives!
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