Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso by Armelle Faure Marcia Tiede Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso. Afterword by Lazare Ki-Zerbo. Bordeaux: Elytis, 2020. 224 pp. $31.45 (paper). ISBN: 978-2356393005. In this sometimes pungent memoir, Armelle Faure traces her experiences as a young ethnologist in the Bissa region of southern Burkina Faso during the turbulent years of the Sankara administration (1983–1987), from which emerged her doctoral dissertation (1990). Her publications have concerned rural land tenure and displacement, oral histories of place, and sustainable/participatory development. They include a contribution to this journal on Mossi-Bissa relations in the nineteenth century (2002). She published a monograph (1996) on the Bissa region before construction of the Bagré dam on the Nakambe (White Volta) river in the early 1990s—a development which hovers in the background of her fieldwork there. Révolution et sorcellerie is the author’s recollections of her seemingly fearless younger self in the presence of an idealistic revolution, which she was eager to witness and support. (She dedicates the book to “all the humanist and romantic utopians who have died with their ideas and their dreams.”1) As a young person of that era, Faure recalls, “I like the idea of revolution. The youth, all the young people of my age, aspire to a collective energy that could permit transcending, acting collectively to transform society” (2020, 42). Despite her ardent sympathies, she was obliged to reckon with the notion of “vous les Blancs” being viewed as “a foreign enemy” (2020, 50). An article written just days after Faure’s return to France and before completion of her dissertation (Faure 1988) provides an enlightening counterpoint to this book. It preserves more of the precariousness of those years, both in navigating the academic channels in Paris, and in finding her way in Burkina Faso on slim resources, when “the mere sight of a piece of bread would cheer me up,” and she was still limited in language and means of transport: “I had not yet found my research topic, persuaded that it would come to me in the field one fine day, perhaps after some calabashes-ful of dolo [millet beer]. Moreover, I had had enough of preserving the state of mind of a Parisian student who was half on holiday and always a stranger. The word went out: I wanted to be part of the village conflicts.” (1988, 10) [End Page 217] Faure had an earlier degree (DEA) in film. In preparation for the Festival panafricain de cinéma (FESPACO) in February 1985, she describes the transformation of Ouagadougou’s most notorious slum into new residential quarters, the Cité de l’an III, in this third year of the revolution. Representatives from Jerry Rawlings’ Ghana would join the festivities, and pop-culture reference was made to “Tom and Jerry, two great revolutionaries changing Africa in the face of history.” She and her fellow film enthusiasts reveled in the ambience of authors and filmmakers such as Wole Soyinka, Souleymane Cissé, and Ousmane Sembène. She noted the number of films portraying confrontations between “the young rural generations, who hope for change and greater freedom, and the village elders, jealous guardians of their privileges” (2020, 93). Faure saw FESPACO as an example of how the charisma of Thomas Sankara was making Burkina Faso a magnet for creative forces and for young people like herself, ready to help bring about change (2020, 92–93). She came to appreciate a central tenet of Sankarisme being to build Burkina Faso up from its own resources—rather than exporting its labor to help build Côte d’Ivoire, as had been the case for generations—and without depending on the Soviet Union or former colonial powers. This was to be a largely voluntary effort, sustained by “effervescence and hope”—strengthened by public festival and spectacle—in order to develop a national culture, with the aim of attracting foreign support and providing more economic possibilities for the Burkinabé people (2020, 104). While visiting with various NGOs at FESPACO, Faure connected with an OXFAM representative, a Bissa woman, and found “a new team with...