Burkina Faso Travel Guide

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Burkina Faso has a turbulent past and a promising but scary future. The country has a strong socialist history; a one party state was established immediately after independence in 1960 and maintained for close to thirty years. The country remains one of the poorest in the region today-- in large part because the state was destabilized and drained of its resources as leaders of competing ideologies fought each other through military coups, sometimes violently.

The hero of those years is Thomas Sankara, a Marxist who fought to promote agriculture, education and women's rights. He was murdered by his political opponents and became a martyr to the people. His picture is featured everywhere: on stickers in the back window of transport buses, on posters at your corner store, on flags. Workers' retreats (plots of land, farms and clubs that are run as collectives) still exist in the country side as a testimony to the continuity of his ideology.

Today's Burkina Faso is very different from the one Sankara visualized: it is multi-party, liberalized and capitalist-- a veritable haven for venture capitalists. It is a shame that the poverty of the state and its inability to provide even the most basic services to its citizens makes the duality between the haves and have nots so striking. The difference between urban and rural is especially dramatic.

Burkina Faso has a lot to offer visitors in its diversity of landscapes. If you ride from north to south, the contrast between the yellows and blues of the desert, then the greens and reds of the greenbelt, is compelling. You can ride camels into the desert in the Northern Sahel region; ride bicycles through the rice fields and mango groves of the Southern agricultural region; then gawk at the quantity and pace of motorcycles during rush hour in Ouagadougou.

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Burkina Faso Travel Guide

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