Does anyone have an independent report of the incident which is claimed to have occurred within 50km of the Sanbrado?? ie what happened, who is believed responsible?
Jihadists aren’t such a big problem IMO as although about 60.5% of people in Burkina Faso identified themselves as adhering to Islam in the last census in 2006, the reality is that tribal cultural influences remain very strong and overide religious belief to a large extent. Religion in these deeply tribal countries manifests itself as syncretism (or the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths).
The largest tribal group in Burkina Faso are the Mossi that make up 40% of the population or about 6.2 million people.
The Mossi homeland is the central portion of Burkina Faso, which was known until 1984 as Upper Volta. The Mossi area, located in the center, runs from Tenkodogo in the southeast to Ouayagouya in the northwest.
The Sanbrado project sits squarely within the Mossi tribal lands northwest of Tenkodogo where the Mossi language, Moore, is spoken. Moore is one of two official languages of Burkina Faso.
The Mossi have deep respect and beliefs around the powers of ancestors and family is also very important, to the extent that when people meet the greeting is quite drawn out and complex. Here is an interesting description of the greeting protocols.
“Mossi greetings are more elaborate than those in other African societies. The persons greeting each other shake hands, and each asks how the other is. The questioning goes on to cover wives and children, and even the animals, such as cows and sheep. A full Mossi greeting for an honored elder can take half an hour. In any greeting, the person who is of lower status shows respect to the other by staying in a lower position. If a common person is formally greeting a chief, he lies down in front of him and symbolically throws dirt onto his own head to show how much lower he is in status.
If two people of equal status meet, however, each tries to respect the other by slowly dropping from a standing position to a crouching one. The two people start out standing and shaking hands; they finish, still shaking hands, with both crouching low and sitting on their heels.
When visiting a household, guests stand outside the walls of the family's area and clap their hands to announce their arrival. The head of the household then comes out of the walled area to greet the visitors. Only a close friend or relative would go in unannounced.”
What I’m trying to say is there is a very big incompatibility between life according to African tribal traditions, particularly Mossi traditions that go back to the 14th century and rituals around fertility and the idea of an Islamist caliphate, (ie a state under the leadership of an Islamic steward with the title of caliph, a person considered a religious successor to the Islamic prophet Muhammad). The Mossi have their own all-powerful creator, Wende.
What’s more the Arabs have been around this area for a very long time, long enough to have written some of the history of the Mossi and the other African tribes and the Mossi were never colonised by the Arabs. The Mossi were excellent horsemen and one of the last peoples in Africa to be colonized. They were conquered by the French in 1896–97. The links below say that “French taxes forced many Mossi to move to Côte d'Ivoire to earn money. Mossi men could go south between crop-growing seasons and bring money back to their families in the north. They also traveled around as traders and as soldiers in the French army. As the economy of Côte d'Ivoire improved, more and more of the Mossi settled there. They became farmers or lived in the cities and towns.”
There are about 1.2 million Mossi in Côte d'Ivoire now.
I don’t see that a few extremists are going to destroy a proud society that has been around for almost 700 years, their goals will never become aligned IMO as the Mossi will care more for their own traditions than an extreme and narrow interpretation of the Sunni religion (interpreted by a small extremist minority) that adheres to Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism. I doubt that the average Mossi understands the first thing about Sufism and would probably want to see the Islamic extremists eradicated if they are causing trouble and creating violence in their communities. Esh
(20min delay)
