Burkina Faso Is a Leader in African Art and Culture and Hosts the Largest Craft Market in Africa
Please visit Art of Burkina Faso for more than information provided past Professor Christopher D. Roy in 2016.
The Physical Environment: The peoples that are discussed in this study live in the Westward African country named Burkina Faso. Since independence from French republic in 1960 to 1983, the country was known as Upper Volta. Post-obit the military revolution of August, 1983, an increasingly anti-French assistants attempted to do abroad with all traces of neo-colonialism, including all French names. The proper noun Burkina Faso, from Mooré and Jula root words meaning "the country of upright and honest men", has replaced the original, geographically-based name. The citizens of Burkina Faso are called Burkinabé.
Burkina Faso is a landlocked state of about 274,200 square kilometers (about the size of the land of Colorado) simply south of the great bend of the Niger River and 500 kilometers from the Bight of Republic of benin. To the southward along the coast are Cote d'ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin (Dahomey). To the north and northwest lies Mali, and the eastern border is with Niger.
Burkina Faso is an enormous flat obviously of red clay soils from 250 to 350 meters in a higher place body of water-level, broken merely by the valleys of the Volta Rivers, the Komoé, and small-scale tributaries of the Bani and Niger Rivers. There are occasional spectacular outcroppings of stone, peculiarly in the northward, near Kongoussi and Tikaré, in the center near Boromo and Houndé, and in the west effectually Orodara. In the center of the country the Mossi Plateau, drained by the White Volta, reaches an altitude of 300 to 450 one thousand. The Mossi Plateau rises, in steep bluffs, above the lower surrounding country. The river dissects the rest of the obviously with deep valleys. The major rivers are the Komoé, which rises in the rocky escarpment between Banfora and Bobo-Dioulasso, and the Red, White, and Blackness Volta Rivers, all tributaries of a large organization that drains most of the country. Of these, the Black Volta is the largest, and runs almost year-round. The White Volta is dry out much of the year, especially north and due west of Ouagadougou. The Cherry-red Volta is the shortest and the most intermittent of the three, joining the White Volta only south of the Republic of ghana/Burkina. The Sankara government renamed the rivers Mouhoun (Black Volta), Nakanbé (White Volta), and Nazinon (Red Volta).
Burkina Faso spans three major climatic zones of the Western Sudan: north of a line from Ouahigouya to Dori the Sahel is characterized by very dry desert steppe, with depression shrubs, many acacias and baobabs, much sand, and no permanent rivers. This area receives less than 700 millimeters of rain annually. The desertification of the region has been speeded up by the major droughts that began in 1970. South of the line from Ouahigouya to Dori is the "Northern Sudan" climate zone that receives from 1000 mm to 700 mm of almanac rainfall. The area consists of open up grasslands with scattered stands of shea nut or karité (Butyrospermum parkii), locust bean or néré (Parkia biglobosa), and West African mahogany (Kaya senegalensis), too as occasional baobabs (Adansonia digitata) and kapok (Eriodendron anfranctuosum) trees. The southwestern quarter of the state is part of the Sudan/Guinean forested savanna surface area, with occasional thick forest cover and much denser undergrowth than is typical of central Burkina. Although the region receives as much as 1400 mm of rainfall each yr, it but supports a population density of about 10 inhabitants per foursquare kilometer.
Rainfall amounts vary considerably from year to year, and since the late 1950'south there has been a steady subtract in averages.
As is true throughout the Western Sudan, the almanac wheel is marked by a curt rainy season that (ordinarily) begins in May and early June and ends in September. In northern areas the rainy flavour begins later each year. All agricultural activity except harvest is carried out during this period. As in all agronomical areas, including Iowa, farmers are too busy during the growing season to deport out any activities except cultivating. During the long dry season from November to late April, about no rain falls, however there are occasional showers in April causing some trees to foliage out and mark the time to begin clearing the fields for planting. Once the harvests have been gathered, people are left with a lot of gratis time to repair equipment and homes, to weave or make pottery, and to stage the elaborate religious festivals and initiations in which masks play an important part. The catamenia of mask activity begins in February among the Mossi, and later, in April amongst the Bwa and Bobo, and continues until planting time. This is as well the hottest fourth dimension of the year, when the daytime temperature often is over 40o C. (105o F.), and information technology is not much cooler at nighttime. The landscape is desolate, with grey or red dust and dust-covered vegetation to the horizon. Families retreat to the shade of the family unit dwellings, and livestock huddle in the thin shade of the few scorched copse. Dust devils trip the light fantastic across the fields, and every bit the water level of wells drops, women must walk miles for a muddy bucketful. With the first heavy and frequent rains in June, the landscape is transformed, every bit roads go lined with dumbo greenish walls of millet and sorghum stalks seeming to submerge villages in a sea of vegetation.
The major economic activities in Burkina are farming and herding. The major traditional crops are pearl millet and red or white sorghum. Maize or corn has been grown since its arrival from the New World, as have peanuts and tobacco. Rice is grown in large modern plantations north of Bobo-Dioulasso. Although the Volta Rivers have been of import for the rich valley soils they produced, farming has been nearly impossible until recently because of the high incidence of fly-borne onchocerciasis or river blindness. The major cash crop is cotton, of import since earlier the colonial period when it was woven into cloth for trade with forest cultures to the south. The French have encouraged the growing of cotton fiber to feed the textile mills most Bobo and Koudougou, often at the expense of nutrient crops, disrupting traditional economic and social patterns. The major exports are fresh green-beans, peas, and mangoes to French republic.
The Sahel is the center of the livestock manufacture in Burkina. For a long time Burkina has been the major supplier of beefiness cattle and other livestock to the Republic of cote d'ivoire and Ghana, where the tse-tse fly prevented livestock raising. This manufacture is now threatened past the establishment of livestock projects in northern Ivory Declension.
Although the area lacks significant mineral resources, the valley of the Blackness Volta River has been a source of golden for centuries. Deposits of manganese were discovered in the far northern Udalan expanse before long afterward independence, merely foreign investors feel that the amounts are likewise depression to justify the construction of a railway to export the mineral.
Human labor has been an important export that has fueled the economy of Ivory Declension. The railway from Abidjan to Bobo-Dioulasso and Ouagadougou was built to comport farmers idled by the dry flavour to the cocoa plantations and ports of the Ivory Coast.
Traditional subsistence economies, including hunting, gathering and angling are still important for rural peoples, especially during the dry flavor. Women get together fruit and leaves of trees that grow in the bush, including wild raisin (Lannea oleosa), karité, and néré. In April and May all of the inhabitants of a community spend several days at nearby ponds harvesting fish with nets and large basketry traps. Each year during the dry out season, great numbers of men hunt in the deep bush, forming big circles to drive game toward the center to exist slaughtered.
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Source: https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/topic-essays/show/37