Burkina Faso

We fly back to Dakar, over the jungles of still-troubled Guinea and the winding rivers of Guinea-Bissau. In the plane we order two orange juices. After the Nigerian steward hands us one of them, Ebru and I, in unison, ask him for the other. ‘I know,’ he replies, surprised and slightly offended, ‘you ordered two so I will give you two.’ In Sierra Leone, alas, where such efficiency cannot be taken for granted, receipt of a second glass would be far from guaranteed; we have grown used to having to spell everything out in detail.

In the Senegalese capital, where we make a brief stopover, the young bargirl in David’s hotel tells us her boss has returned to England for treatment on his legs. He has been gone for over a month, and she does not expect him back. Although we realise that it is better for him to be at home and within reach of functioning hospitals, we are sad to have missed him and his expatriate tales, which had given us a taste of what it would be like to carve out a new world for ourselves here. David’s drinking, of course, he had brought with him from elsewhere, but his stories of touring Dakar’s food markets picking out fresh produce and haggling in French over prices, of watching and learning from local cooks, and of the travails of setting up a business, with all the concomitant hassles, bribes and jocular arguments with officials, had provided an attractive glimpse of the life we could expect.

From Dakar we fly to Bamako, the noisy, traffic-choked capital of Mali, and from there catch a bus to Burkina Faso. Ten minutes outside Bamako the bus breaks down, and we settle down for a long wait in the dry heat of the Sahel. Accustomed by now to these things, we are less perturbed by the interruption to our journey than we might have been a few months earlier. We have water, there is shade in the lee of the bus, we will eventually reach our destination; there is no hurry. What else is there to do but wait? After only an hour or so another bus pulls up. It is headed not for our planned destination but a different Burkinabe city, Bobo-Dioulasso. The driver offers us a ride. Adaptability, we have learned, is a key survival mechanism in West Africa, and we gratefully jump in and bed down for a twelve-hour journey.

A good paved road takes us through the wilds of southern Mali. Big, hump-backed cows roam across flat fields between mangoes, bushy shea trees, eucalyptus and the occasional muscular baobab. The trees are spaced like oaks in an English deer park, but here there is no grass, just the hard red earth of Africa. The flat landscape is vast and open under a hazy, grey-brown sky, the pale ball of the sun obscured by a gauzy blanket of Saharan dust. After the dense hills and dark, snarled forests of Sierra Leone, the feeling of space and airiness is like freedom.

The Malian border guard, with whom we sit under a tree while he checks our passports, invites us to his wedding in Bamako the following month. He tells us it is high time we had children, and then allows us to resume our journey. Our bus continues southwards, down through the villages of northwestern Burkina Faso, towards the country’s second city.

There is no compelling reason for Burkina Faso to exist as a country. It has no overwhelmingly dominant ethnic group, no unifying religion, there are no obvious geographical barriers dividing it from surrounding nations and, unlike the Portuguese and British enclaves of Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, five of the six countries it borders share the same colonial heritage. Landlocked and lacking significant natural resources, the French only occupied the territory because it provided a convenient bridge between their coastal colonies to the south and their desert holdings in present-day Mali and Niger (then known as the Soudan). For a time, indeed, in the 1930s, the land the French named Upper Volta ceased to be, carved up between more important neighbours and only re-emerging as a country when her colonial masters grew worried about the increasing influence in the region of radical nationalists from the Ivory Coast.

But despite these flaky beginnings, and despite six coups d’état in the first thirty years after independence, Burkina Faso’s sixty ethnic groups have held together peacefully. Although they live in one of the poorest countries in the world, and although a massive increase in population and the steady encroachment of the Sahara have intensified the struggle for food, water and jobs, Burkinabes, unlike the citizens of many other West African countries, have neither risen up in armed rebellion nor plummeted into civil war. And whereas their peers in Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau are rushing to the cities in search of modernity and the bounties of the West, the vast majority of Burkinabes, few of whom have ever switched on a light or turned on a tap, still reside in their ancestral villages, growing or rearing their own food, battling the hard soil, the merciless sun and the Saharan dust storms, getting by. Burkinabes, like the working-classes described by George Orwell in 1930s England, have ‘neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect, but merely have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard.’

In the villages we pass through, set back from the road and reached by narrow trails between the trees, women stand outside their compounds and pound millet with long pestles. The square or rectangular compounds vary in size. Some contain just one house, others two or three; the tan, single-storey mud houses grow out of the earth like giant termite mounds. Each compound is enclosed by a chest-high mud wall, with a thatched, round granary where food is stored between harvests sitting like a turret in one corner. Chatting to the Malian man sitting next to me, I praise the beauty of these dwellings, huddled like little fortresses against the desert winds. ‘They are not beautiful,’ he replies brusquely, surprised at my naiveté. ‘They are hard work. They have to be retouched every year, before and after the rainy season. It takes a lot of time. If you have a brick house it lasts for years and you don’t have to do anything to it.’

It is a land of dry riverbeds, nibbling goats, pecking guinea fowl and wandering cows. In the late afternoon light the infinite plain is cloaked in a warm, comforting glow. Twists of smoke rise from the compounds as the evening meal is prepared. Small groups of people sit under trees, talking. The villages have mosques in the Soudanic style, built of mud and with little wooden poles jutting like the thorns of a cactus out of the crumbling, spear-shaped minarets. Only the larger villages have roadside stalls - the inhabitants of smaller settlements eat what they grow or what they can barter for.

Nearing Bobo-Dioulasso the sepia landscape is suddenly interrupted by the brilliant green of a strip of rice fields, swaying in the breeze under a thin white mist. Flanking the fields is a line of darker green: spring onions. Effusive banana trees are dotted around. Trucks carry marrows and mountains of yellow tomatoes towards the city. As we move into the south-west of the country, closer to the jungles of the Ivory Coast, the land is growing more fertile. Some of the riverbeds contain water. The rice fields are inundated. The aridity of the north gives way to greener, lusher pastures.

We arrive in the city as night falls. After elbowing our way through the usual bus station scrum, we stand in the unlit road working out our bearings. In the darkness this is difficult, and we are relieved when a young Frenchman whom we will never see again offers us a lift to our hotel in his jeep.

Bobo-Dioulasso is Burkina Faso’s second city. Although more sizeable than Bafatá, its counterpart in Guinea-Bissau, it too is little more than a large town, inhabited only during the part of the year when there is no planting or harvesting to be done in the countryside. At these times, villagers abandon their compounds and flood into Bobo’s shady streets, eking out a living by trading and bartering or doing odd jobs in hotels and restaurants. ‘People see the villages as home, not the city,’ says Abdoulaye, a young man who runs a café near our hotel. ‘As soon as it is time to plant the millet and the yams they will go back there.’

Although Bobo is an attractive, leafy town, replete with good, French-style cafés and eating houses and with a steady trickle of European tourists bolstering the local economy, there is tragedy everywhere you look. Gangs of barefoot boys roam the streets carrying tin can begging bowls. Impossibly young prostitutes wait for business outside bars. A young child sick with malaria stares listlessly from a doorway. A madman jumps up and down in the night-time traffic.

The town is full of madmen. One, whom we see often, is permanently naked, his gaunt body covered in a layer of yellow dust. One day we see him throw a nut or small stone onto the ground in front of him. He bends over, his naked buttocks exposed to the traffic, and peers intently at the object for several minutes, smiling mysteriously, before eventually walking away without it (his condition is not uncommon in this part of Africa; it is known by the Yoruba in Nigeria as were). Another man lies in the street in a red woollen hat, masturbating into his dungarees. One or two sing songs and dance, to the amusement of onlookers, but most sit on the pavement or walk around in silence, an absorbed look clouding their eyes.

Abdoulaye tells us that although the men appear placid, a few occasionally become aggressive. ‘It is safer not to approach,’ he warns. He says their families cannot afford to keep them or have them treated, and that while passersby give food and sometimes money, the government offers no help at all because mental health problems are not taken seriously here. I ask him if he thinks it is the stress of poverty that has made the men like this. He narrows his dark eyes and nods. ‘Poverty, the heat, hunger. You have to be strong to live here,‘ he says.

Within a couple of days of arriving in Bobo I find my own resilience weakening. After the trials of Sierra Leone and our enervating experiences with the missionaries and phantom drug dealers, I had hoped that Burkina Faso, the last stop on our trip, would be reinvigorating. But the surrounding misery, the constant, guilt-inducing demands for our business or money, and the relentless high temperatures, which on most days climb above forty degrees in the shade, have wearied me. Instead of exploring a new land I want to have absorbed everything already; the prospect of going through that long process again holds little appeal, and I am too tired now to start up fresh conversations to find out how the country works. I sit with Ebru at a pavement bar, and things and people pass before my eyes without registering. Sights that a few weeks before would have enthralled me – the flowing robes of a Tuareg, Muslims at prayer in the dust, the grand old mosque near the river, and the buzz of the markets and the dimly lit night-time streets – these things that I had longed for years to see are now just a blur. Instead I think of home and family, of cool air and comfort, of anonymity and freedom from hustlers. The latter are the source of particular disquiet. After so many months of incessant attention it is difficult to maintain poise, to treat the latest hawker or beggar with the courtesy you showed the first. Pity the hustler who finds himself the last straw, the receptacle into which you pour your accumulated ire. He is not to know that it is not him you are raging at but the travails, the collected slights, of his continent. As he backs away, stunned, you curse yourself again: West Africa has won another little victory against you.

For respite we hire a motorbike one lunchtime and ride out on dirt tracks through dry forests to a river. We swim in the shade of bamboo stands, the cool, clean water speeding past us over its sandy bed. Red and blue damsel flies crouch on rocks in the shade. Tiny bats swoop to drink. In the still of the early afternoon there is complete silence, interrupted only by the croak of a frog or the buzz of a fly.

While we are sitting drying on the riverbank, a young man approaches and takes a seat on a tree trunk a couple of yards away. We greet him, and he sits watching us. He looks sheepish, bearing none of the confidence of youth, but after a few minutes he plucks up courage and asks if we have anything to give him. We tell him we have brought nothing with us, and he accepts our refusal as if that is what he was expecting. As he gets up quietly and walks away, another slow-worm of guilt burrows through us, for he has asked politely and with reluctance. Despondent and slightly ashamed, we get on the bike and ride back to the city.

The next morning I wake up feeling tense, and over coffee my mind takes a sudden dive. It is as if – and there are no doubt less hackneyed ways of putting it but this is the image that comes into my head - a small dark cloud has come over the sun. Despite the forty-degree heat a shiver courses through me as a feeling of cold dread ensconces itself in my mind. I have been through this once before, and the youthful suicide of a close friend has left me with an inordinate fear of its consequences. I start to shake, terrified of that spiralling descent into depths from which you cannot be sure you will resurface. Madmen drift by in the street, their hair matted and clothes hardened by dried dirt. They are the ones whose resilience has given out, who have been unable to withstand the strain. Am I to end up like them? Will the pressure in my head, too, reach bursting point, and my mind come loose from its moorings? My stomach tightens with fear, and I run to the bathroom at the back of the café. The large, bare room stinks of excrement. The latrine is in the far corner, impossibly far away across a glacier of filthy white tiles (I think afterwards of a scene from Trainspotting). I lunge across to the sanctuary of the toilet bowl and vomit around it.

For a few minutes this relaxes me, but on the way back to the hotel it happens again - the tension, the heat, the knotted stomach, the fear racing far ahead of its cause. This time I make it to the shade of a mango tree before vomiting in the dust (I look around to see if anybody has witnessed my capitulation, but fortunately the streets are quiet). The journey from slight tension to panicked desolation has taken just minutes, but the road back to stability seems dauntingly long. I can think of nothing else: escape from the mesh of bleak thoughts is the only thing that matters. I try to focus on making it through the next hour without deteriorating, then the hour after that. I try to come up with reasons – sunstroke, heatstroke, fatigue – to persuade myself that it is just a wobble, a physical rather than a mental problem, and that control, momentarily lost, can be regained. After many hours and several more vomiting fits, and buttressed by Ebru’s constant reassurance, this ploy eventually slows my fall (I am in no state to argue with myself). We make plans to move on from Bobo and to head for the capital, Ouagadougou, where there is an international airport within a few hours‘ flight of home.

I am not the first traveller in West Africa to be brought low by the trials it puts in your path. The French colonists had a word for the condition, “soudanité”, a feverish state brought on by the isolation, the ennui, the debilitating heat of the Soudan, and the accumulated effects of alcohol and disease. Large numbers of colonial administrators and military men succumbed - usually, of course, after much longer and more taxing stays in the region than my own. Writing during the colonial era, Auden described the tropics as a ‘test for men from Europe.’ Of those who undertake this trial, he added, ‘no one guesses who will be most ashamed, who richer, and who dead.’ Sometimes the fever spilled over into insanity, and Conrad’s fictional Kurtz became terrifyingly real.

The explorer Mungo Park may have been an early victim. On his first expedition to the region in 1795, the Scot, travelling alone, had displayed almost superhuman patience and tolerance. Despite being robbed by bandits and village chiefs, beaten by fanatical Muslims, and held hostage for four months by Moors, he maintained an extraordinary equability and understanding of his assailants’ motives. ‘It must not be forgotten,’ he wrote, ‘that the laws of the country afforded me no protection; that everyone was at liberty to rob me with impunity; and finally that some of my effects were of as great value, in the estimation of the Negroes, as pearls and diamonds would have been in the eyes of a European.’

Park had a limitless store of courage. After escaping from the tyrannical Moors he had to hide out for weeks in the bush, avoiding all human contact for fear of being turned in to his former captors. He wandered with his horse through the parched Sahelian scrub, with nothing to eat or drink for days. With the scorching sun showing them no mercy, man and beast soon came to the brink of death, but even at his lowest point the explorer was able to muster compassion for his equine companion. ‘As I was now too faint to attempt walking and my horse too fatigued to carry me,’ he wrote, ‘I thought it but an act of humanity, and perhaps the last I should ever have it in my power to perform, to take off his bridle and let him shift for himself.’ The effort of removing the bridle made Park dizzy and nauseous. He fell to the ground, feeling as if ‘the hour of death was fast approaching.’ As he lay there on the burning sand, his mouth as dry as acacia bark, he contemplated his fate: ‘Here, then, thought I, after a short but ineffectual struggle, terminate all my hopes of being useful in my day and generation; here must the short span of my life come to an end. I cast, as I believed, a last look on the surrounding scene; and whilst I reflected on the awful change that was about to take place, this world and its enjoyments seemed to vanish from my recollection.’

He was saved, miraculously, by a freak thunder storm – he quenched his thirst by sucking on the clothes he had laid out to soak up the rain – and was rewarded for his forbearance when a few weeks later he located the Niger and established that, contrary to European belief, it ran from west to east. ‘Looking forwards I saw, with infinite pleasure, the great object of my mission: the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward. I hastened to the brink, and having drunk of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success.’

Park‘s second trip to the region, nearly eight years later, was not so blessed. On this mission he had two objectives: to chart the entire course of the Niger and to find the fabled city of Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara. From his first visit he had learned the importance of coming prepared, and this time he arrived at the Gambia not alone but accompanied by forty-five European soldiers, servants and carpenters (the latter would build the boats in which they would descend the great river), and with plentiful supplies of food and gifts. Crucially, however, the voyage was delayed until the rainy season, when dangerous diseases flourish, and by the time Park reached the Niger for the second time three-quarters of his men had died of malaria or dysentery. The handful of bedraggled survivors boarded canoes at Bamako. One had been driven mad by the soudanité, the remainder were weakening by the day.

On his first trip, Park‘s apparent love of Africans was undimmed by their repeated attacks on his person and possessions (‘whatever difference there is between the Negro and European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin,’ he had written after observing a tearful reunion between an aged mother and her son, ‘there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature’). But by now his attitude had changed, and he made a decision which betrayed his deteriorating mental state. Instead of continuing to haggle his way out of trouble with gifts and money, he switched to a murderous scorched earth strategy whereby he and his men would avoid all contact with ‘natives’ and shoot on sight any who hinted at malicious intent. Dozens of those with whom he would once have patiently reasoned and negotiated were felled by his muskets; the great explorer had finally lost his equilibrium, his spirits at last worn down.

When he reached Timbuktu, the city of which he had dreamed for so long, Park did not disembark from his canoe, but instead rowed past without so much as a glance. In his last letter to the British Colonial Office there are none of the fascinated descriptions of local customs and geographical features that had lent such colour to his earlier missives. Reaching the end of the river had now become the sole object of his thoughts; his bravery had degenerated into a suicidal recklessness. ‘I shall set sail for the east,’ he wrote, ‘with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. Though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I myself were half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger.’

Die he did, either drowned when failing to negotiate a treacherous stretch of rapids or, more likely, murdered by a hostile tribe. He had covered over a thousand miles by canoe, but was still hundreds of miles from the mouth of the river (within a few decades of his death the discovery of quinine as a treatment for malaria would enable later travellers safely to chart the river’s course, down to its swampy delta on the steaming coast of modern-day Nigeria). Park’s exact fate remains unknown. When, several years after his last letter, reports of his demise reached Scotland, his son, Thomas, did not believe them, and in 1827 he made for West Africa himself, intending to rescue the missing explorer from captivity. Days after arriving on the Guinea coast, however, Thomas was dead, having fallen victim to malaria. No further attempts were made to locate his father.

Perhaps the most notorious of the soudanité‘s victims was Paul Voulet, who in 1898 led an expedition to acquire the western Sahel - the vast strip of semi-desert that linked the coast of Senegal to distant Lake Chad - for France. A young, ambitious officer who saw in the enterprise an opportunity to cement his growing reputation and accelerate his rise through the ranks, Voulet had fought in what is now Burkina Faso two years previously, defeating the king of the Mossi and razing his capital, Ouagadougou, to the ground. These exploits had drawn widespread acclaim in Europe, and Voulet was a logical choice to lead the new campaign.

France’s motives for colonisation were complex. As well as the usual economic considerations – her West African colonies exported palm oil, rubber, timber, cotton and cocoa – there was also a “mission civilisatrice”, a civilising mission, the effort to remake Africa in France’s own image. Under slavery, the Europeans had wanted Africans’ bodies, which were set to hard physical labour until they dropped dead of exhaustion. Now they wanted their minds. The Victorian-era urge to tame nature found its natural expression in the attempt to curb the native’s wildness, to put an end to his barbaric traditions. ‘For colonialism,’ wrote Frantz Fanon, ‘this vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God, a country of cannibals.’

Such a vision was buttressed by science. As late as the 1950s, in a report published by the World Health Organisation, the psychiatrist J.C. Carothers described the African as a ‘lobotomised European,’ who ‘makes very little use of his frontal lobes.’ Half a century earlier, A.R. Wallace, who had collaborated with Darwin to unveil the secrets of evolution, predicted that the ‘lower races’ would soon be wiped from the earth, for they would be unable to modernise in time to withstand the onslaught of civilised peoples (in a similar vein the British Prime Minister of the time, Lord Salisbury, proclaimed that ‘one can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying’). Colonialism would hasten this evolutionary inevitability: either the inferior races would be assimilated or they would disappear, their extinction leaving the way clear for the enlightened human society that had annihilated them to roam the earth in peace.

Those Africans who refused to be civilised were brought into line by force. In 1849 the French massacred the entire population of the Algerian town of Zaatcha. Three years later they repeated the feat in Laghouat. Paul Voulet learned from these tactics; after capturing Ouagadougou during his first visit to the region, he used summary executions to instil fear and respect into his new subjects. These techniques were lauded back home, and on his second expedition he ratcheted up the violence. This time, however, his methods would prove unpalatable even to his superiors.

Voulet began in Senegal with just a small band of men. His government was reluctant to provide a large army, and it was left to the young officer to gather whatever troops he could on arrival in Africa. Using a combination of force and promises of pillage and power, Voulet, a short, moustachioed, slightly rotund man who carried in his luggage books about the military triumphs of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, gradually amassed a significant fighting cohort. The army expanded as it advanced, adding to its numbers at every village it passed. On reaching a settlement Voulet would send out a patrol to surround it. Anyone who tried to escape was shot dead, his head impaled on a stake to strike terror into the survivors. The Europeans carried machine guns and rifles, the villagers either slow-loading muskets or mere arrows and spears; surrender was inevitable, and the patrol would return to camp with a fresh supply of fighters, porters, concubines (the thousand-strong force had a harem of six hundred women), and slaves.

As the army grew, it became more violent. At one village, after six of his soldiers had been killed while attacking its inhabitants, Voulet took revenge by having twenty women and babies speared to death. At another, in retaliation for the wounding of two of his men, he took thirty women and children captive and ordered the extermination of the entire male population (as proof that they had carried out his orders, Voulet demanded that his men bring back their victims’ hands, a custom that would be mimicked a century later by Sierra Leone’s rebels).

Early in 1899 the campaign reached its nadir (at around the same time, Joseph Conrad was finishing Heart of Darkness in faroff southern England). At the village of Birni-N’Konni in modern-day Niger, Voulet’s men went on a murderous rampage. They made their way along its little lanes, raping, burning and looting. By the time they had finished, not a single inhabitant was left alive: hundreds of men, women and children had been killed. It was one of the worst massacres in French colonial history.

Voulet himself was becoming increasingly unhinged. When he heard that his superiors, worried that their mission civilisatrice had gone astray, were sending a more senior officer to replace him, he announced that he was breaking his ties with France. ‘I am an outlaw now,’ this real-life Kurtz told his men. ‘I disavow my family, my country. I am no longer French. I am a black chief. Africa is large; I have a gun, plenty of ammunition, six hundred men who are devoted to me heart and soul. We will create an empire in Africa, a strong impregnable empire…They will never dare to attack me.’

Voulet’s replacement, a Lieutenant-Colonel Klobb, made his way down through the Sahel with a force of fifty men. He pursued his quarry for fifteen hundred miles, accompanied at every turn by the acrid stench of death. He came across burned out villages, charred corpses, cooking fires strewn with children’s limbs, and hanged women dangling from trees ‘like black husks.‘ The remains of guides and porters who had displeased Voulet were dotted along the route like milestones; they had been strung up alive at a height where their feet could be reached by hyenas’ hungry jaws. At Birni-N’Konni, the site of the massacre, Klobb and his men were horrified to find more than a thousand corpses rotting in the afternoon sun.

When he finally caught up with Voulet, Klobb addressed the renegade’s men, reminding them of their duty to uphold the honour of France. Voulet responded by ordering them to shoot the intruder, and Klobb fell dead on the sand. This was not the end of the matter, however, for within two days rumours of mutiny reached the young officer’s ears. Furious, he gathered his troops together and harangued them, berating them for their disloyalty. As he raved at his men he began shooting at them with his pistol. Eventually they shot back, and Voulet’s reign of terror was over. When news of the atrocities committed in the name of France reached Paris, there was a public outcry. The embarrassed government ordered the Minister of Colonies to conduct an inquiry. Its conclusions were published three years after Voulet’s death. They blamed his actions squarely on the soudanité.

We take the bus to Ouagadougou. Unlike Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso has coach companies plying the main routes between towns - there is no need here to cram into the back of a sept places or stew for hours waiting for a minibus to fill up. Miraculously, our bus leaves Bobo on time, and we settle into our comfortable, pre-assigned seats for the six-hour journey.

It was Bruce Chatwin, I think, who wrote that the psychological benefits of movement are a legacy of our nomadic past, and an hour or so into the journey I am less fraught, my mind less cluttered as the slight rocking of the bus lulls me into calm. After several days of grey apathy (Ebru would later tell me that my state of mind had so worried her that she had hidden our penknife for my protection), I even feel a little of my enthusiasm for the trip returning, and begin again to take in something of the country.

A few miles outside Bobo-Dioulasso there is a military checkpoint. This is burdensome for travellers: our bus is stopped for a few minutes while the driver’s papers are checked, and passengers of smaller vehicles must get out and show their identity cards. The checkpoint lengthens journey times, increases costs for business traffic, and hurts the pockets of those whose documents are not in order. As it takes away, however, it also gives, for sitting on the ground around it are a dozen market women, selling peanuts, onions, fizzy drinks, mangoes, bananas and other provisions. There is also a small café. If the checkpoint closed, all these women and the owner of the café would go out of business, but while it is in existence it helps share out some of Burkina Faso’s meagre wealth. Bus and car passengers could, of course, buy mangoes and bananas in the markets of Bobo instead, and if they did, the economic effect of closing the checkpoint would be neutral. But they surely buy more than they otherwise would merely because the women are there and the buyers have time to kill while waiting for their papers and vehicles to be examined (I, for one, buy a bottle of fresh yoghurt that I do not need). Since those who can afford to drive or travel by bus are in general better off than those who hawk in the dust, therefore, it seems likely that the checkpoints play a part, however small, in smoothing the country’s economic imbalances. Thinking thus, moreover, makes the delays easier to tolerate.

The long journey to Ouagadougou gives one more than enough time to examine the village architecture of western Burkina. The houses and compounds are smaller and scruffier than those in Mali. Many of the mud walls are crumbling or have collapsed, and each village has a scattering of dwellings that have been abandoned, perhaps when they became too dilapidated to repair, perhaps because the inhabitants moved away or died. But in contrast to Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, where we saw entire villages lying empty, here there are new houses being built, and new urn-shaped granaries topped with fresh yellow thatch. For Burkina Faso is one of Africa’s least urbanised societies. Whereas almost half of Sierra Leoneans and Guineans live in towns or cities, four in five Burkinabes live in the countryside. The rural areas are crowded - the country’s fertility rate, at an average of six children per woman, is among the highest in the world, and in the past half-century the population has increased five-fold. Everywhere you look, even in the remotest regions, you see people, tilling the parched fields, pumping at wells, driving herds of cows through the scrub, or simply walking or sitting.

As we leave western Burkina behind, the land begins to dry out. The trees shrink and become more scrub-like, the fulsome mango, its still-green fruits hanging like yo-yos, replaced by squat acacia whose bright yellow flowers provide a rare injection of colour. Under the trees the ground is bone dry. Lakes are reduced to large puddles, rivers to chutes of sand. When we stop for a refreshment break and step out of the bus, we are knocked back by what we think is a gust of hot air but soon realise is the normal weather of central Burkina Faso. It is as if you are stepping into the blast of a giant hairdryer. The air is so thick with heat that if you reach out you feel you will be able to grab big handfuls of it, like mounds of burning ashes. People we had met elsewhere in West Africa had warned us about Burkina’s cripplingly high temperatures. Are you sure you want to go there at that time, they had asked. You know it’s going to be hot? It’s even hotter than Mali! You like the heat then? Having planned the trip for years, we had had no choice but to come, and we hoped that if we respected the heat it would treat us kindly in return. We had been worried about its physical effects, from which we thought wearing hats and keeping covered up would protect us, but had not bargained for its effects on our minds.

Only the most sadistic psychiatrist would recommend Ouagadougou as a retreat for a patient recovering from the soudanité. The city is one of the oldest on the planet. It feels like the end of the world.

Look at Ouagadougou on a map and you will see an orderly design, a grid of long, straight avenues punctuated by parks and the occasional monumental square or large government building. The map, however, is deceptive. In reality, the wide, flat avenues trail off into nowhere, attractive only to the winds of the surrounding plains. The parks are nothing more than empty brown wasteland, neither a blade of grass nor a tree to be seen. But the biggest deception of all is that for long periods each year the visitor to the city can see none of this, for the cartographers have neglected to make reference to the harmattan, the great Saharan sandstorm which for several months each dry season, as it carries its grainy load from the dunes of the desert out into the Atlantic, smothers the whole of West Africa in a choking, ochre haze.

Ouagadougou is on the harmattan’s frontline. Day and night the city is caked with grime. As you haul yourself through its asphyxiating heat, thick clouds of dust rush down the avenues to embrace you. Women pull up scarves to cover their mouths, men don plastic facemasks. The sounds of cars and motorbikes are muffled, as if they are gliding along with their engines switched off. You can see no more than a hundred yards. We watch a street sweeper shuffling along in a black headscarf, black mask, black overalls and with a black broom cradled in her arms like a rifle. Only her eyes are visible. It resembles the set of Blade Runner. The entire city is shrouded in a permanent grey-brown fog. Even the sun, normally so fierce, is blotted out, a pale disc behind a dirty muslin veil. The defiant can eyeball it with comfort, although the sun will not quickly forget this slight and will re-emerge with still greater fury once the storm has passed.

Ouagadougou’s hawkers are unbowed by the dust. At every turn you are greeted with a loud ‘Mon ami!’ or ‘Mes amis,’ a ‘Bonjour!’ or, less judiciously, a ‘Les blancs!’ There are hundreds - no, thousands! - of them, on every street corner, at every junction, outside every eating house or hotel, or just ambling along the pavements. In my fragile state I find it harder than ever to treat them all equally, politely, without rage. We try crossing the road when we see them approaching, but they cross too! We decline their offering but they keep walking with us, cajoling and pleading, pulling other objects from their satchels - other rabbits out of the hat - to tempt us into a purchase. ‘Looking is free!’ they say. ‘Just have a look!‘ I wonder how they do it, how they can keep going through so many rejections, how they feel at the end of a bad day, and how they muster the energy to go out and do it all again the following morning.

None of these questions makes me feel any better. Retreating from the streets to our hotel room one afternoon, the guilt, the fear, and the shame at my weakness in the midst of so many far more difficult lives suddenly return. It is as if a switch in my brain has flicked the wrong way, plunging me back into gloom. As I sit on the bed, sweating onto sodden sheets, here again is that feeling of bleakness, of being drained, enthused by nothing, of being weighed down under a granite cloak. Here too the all-consuming selfishness, the harmattan of self-absorption, as recovery once again becomes the only thing that matters. I grow irrationally impatient with Ebru when she tries to help by talking and diverting my thoughts, and respond curtly to the hotel receptionist when he asks how my morning has gone. As the minutes pass and my loss of control reaches its extreme, disturbing violent impulses enter my head and clamour for my attention; I have to shut myself in the bathroom to calm down.

I begin to half-wonder if I might have been cursed, if one of the many hawkers or beggars I have spurned over the past few months has cast a juju spell on me. Perhaps they felt that they had given me something – a greeting, a smile, the wish for a good day, company – and that by rejecting their requests for help I had broken the ancient code of reciprocity. Kapuscinski wrote that ‘the unreciprocated gift lies heavily on the head of the one who has received it, torments his conscience, and can even bring down misfortune, illness, death.’ But it is too late now for me to heed the wise Pole’s warning.

I seek distraction in a dry political science book, discarding a more risky novel in which any allusion to breakdown or depression might pitch me deeper into turmoil. I cling to small improvements. The book occupies my mind for a while and this brings temporary relief. When it stops working, however, and my thoughts again wander, it is as if another rung on the ladder back to safety has snapped, and I fall a little further. I realise, of course, that as a writer all this angst puts me in distinguished company, that it will make me appear a more sensitive and tortured soul, but this provides no consolation; all I can think of is getting back on an even keel, back to the shallow contentment of old.

In the late afternoon we decide to make for the airline office, to enquire about bringing forward our flight home. It feels like defeat, and I am at first reluctant, but when Ebru reminds me that it might be prudent for us to be in a country with a functioning health service I grudgingly agree. As we emerge from the hotel into the furnace of the Ouagadougou streets, we pause for a fatal second to adjust to the change in temperature. I look to the right, and a seated hustler shouts, ‘OUI!’ at me, confidently and firmly, as if it is him that I have been looking for, as if he has the solution to all my problems. For the first time in days I laugh, and resign myself to my fate as he rises to sell me a model motorbike he has made from a recycled mosquito spray can.

The man in the Air France office tells us that changing our flight will be straightforward, and that once we have decided on a date we need only give him a few days’ notice. This reassures us, and we resolve to take a few days to think it over.

The next morning dawns under the same grey fog. Mopeds and taxis ply the streets quietly, tentatively, as if after a snowfall or an air raid. Pedestrians inch along, covering their faces against the swirling dustclouds. It is easy to imagine a sudden powerful gust burying the entire city, perhaps the entire country, beneath a mountain of sand, to be discovered centuries later by excited archaeologists.

We take a bus to the outskirts of town. We are in search of a cemetery, of a man’s grave. On the bus we meet Maurice, a civil servant who works in the finance ministry. Short and sturdily built, with a broad, weary-looking face, he is dressed in a smart shirt, pressed trousers and flip-flops, as if he grew tired of putting on clothes by the time he reached his feet. We fall into conversation. He seems surprised and pleased that we have chosen to spend our morning at the grave, and tells us that he himself visits it every year on the fifteenth of October, the anniversary of its occupant’s death. When the bus breaks down a mile short of our destination, he says he will accompany us the rest of the way on foot.

The graveyard is one of the most desolate places on earth. We turn off the main road down a dusty alley between shabby brick buildings. The alley opens out onto a wasteland. Ahead of us lies a colossal heap of smouldering refuse. It is the size of a football pitch. Next to it a black tent under a tree houses a family, whose members peck among the rubbish, scavenging for scraps to sell. To the left of this festering pile the cemetery stretches off into the far distance. There is no gate, no grass, no flowers, a few dust-covered weeds the only colour amid the unremitting brown dirt. Smoke from the burning tip billows over the mean, poor graves, most of them marked only by a brick or perhaps a little iron crescent moon. Some are unmarked, just small crumbling mounds of dry earth. The sky is veiled in the grey-brown dust of the harmattan. It is the same colour as the parched ground and the distant surrounding houses. As we walk through, the gritty wind batters our faces, mingling with the smoke from the tip. Black plastic bags flap around our legs like the giant crows of hell.

Maurice leads us over a small rise, and in the distance, through the fog, we make out a low cluster of whitewashed graves. Rectangular stone boxes under simple white headstones, they look spectrally pale in the brown haze. The twelve tombs, a few of them already crumbling, stand in a line, huddled together against the wild wind and swirling sands. In front of them, but very close, is another grave, this one painted in bright colours. A scattering of red pebbles on a background of military-fatigue green and brown decorates its surface. On one side of the grave is daubed the flag of Burkina Faso, a yellow star dividing horizontal strips of red and green; on the other the words, ‘Père Fondateur de la Révolution,’ Founding Father of the Revolution, are emblazoned in capital letters. And on the headstone is the name of a president.

The history of Africa in the second half of the twentieth century is strewn with dead revolutionaries. Lumumba in the Congo, Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Biko in South Africa, Mondlane in Mozambique: all were feted as the saviours of their people; all were felled by colder, worldlier foes. These idealists, these visionaries with plans for the improvement of their countries were snuffed out before they could see their projects through. Their fervour, their energy, and the love they inspired in their people would prove insufficient defence against the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of the old guard, those grim-faced, calculating rivals who were still in cahoots with the hated colonial masters.

In Burkina Faso the revolutionary torch was taken up by Thomas Sankara. A charismatic, handsome army officer with an intense gaze and a burning zeal for change, it is he who lies here before us, beneath the headstone whose inscription reminds us of his humble rank of “Capitaine“. Dynamic, impulsive and passionate for his country to be free, this ill-fated young firebrand is seen by many as Africa’s Che Guevara, and still inspires adulation a quarter of a century after his death.

Sankara becomes president of Burkina Faso in 1983, after ousting the repressive military government in a bloodless coup d’état. He takes over a people whose hopes have been muzzled. Independence, that great eruption of optimism and joy, has been and gone, and Burkinabes are no better off, no freer. Two decades of corrupt and incompetent leadership have left their country penniless and indebted; to stay afloat it has been forced to beg for loans, first from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and then, most humiliatingly, from France, the former colonial power.

Sankara, who sees these moneylenders as neo-colonialists engaged in a “reconquest” of Africa, dreams of throwing off the chains. Although he is just thirty-three years old and has no experience of high office, he tackles the task with relish. As soon as he comes to power he launches his revolution. He promises to bring development to all Burkinabes, and not just to the elites who are in league with the French. His people will no longer need foreign handouts or be fleeced by their own leaders. ‘We do not want this aid that turns us into beggars and dependents,’ he thunders, pumping his fist in the air. Peasants, women, the working classes and the young will break free and lead their continent to a self-sufficient, dignified future. ‘Down with imperialism!’ he cries as he rallies his spellbound followers. ‘Down with the embezzlers of public funds! Down with toadies and thieving rats! Down with the ravenous jackals!’

The young leader has revolution in his bones. As a child he had celebrated independence by lowering his village’s French tricolour and raising the new flag of Upper Volta; as president he replaces his ministers’ Mercedes with the humble Renault 5, the cheapest car on the market. While other African leaders stash millions in foreign bank accounts, Sankara, whose cheques often bounce, draws a monthly salary of less than five hundred dollars and needs a mortgage to buy a home. While other African leaders buy private jets and lounge on luxury yachts, Sankara’s most valuable possessions are a refrigerator, three guitars and the battered old bicycle he rides around Ouagadougou. And while other African leaders wear the finest suits flown in from Paris and Milan, Sankara, echoing Gandhi, dresses his ministerial team in homespun Burkinabe cotton. The youth of Africa lap it up.

It is Sankara who gives the country its name. The French had called their colony Upper Volta, a dry, geographical description taken from the three rivers that rise to the west of the capital. Sankara renames it Burkina Faso, the Land of the Honourable People. He wipes the colonial stain from the map and puts his countrymen proudly in its place. Burkinabes revel in their new-found importance, thrilled that one of their own sons is daring to stand up to Africa’s historic oppressors, amazed that they, humble peasants, are in the vanguard of a movement that will transform the entire continent.

But the Revolution is not only about symbols. The corrupt institutions of power must be brought to heel, and Sankara is fearless in his choice of targets. He takes on tribal leaders by abolishing the tribute payments and forced labour they exact from their subjects. He takes on the political classes by cutting civil servants’ salaries and launching an anti-corruption drive. He tells haughty army officials that they must ‘live among the people,’ and drags ambassadors out into the countryside to explain their raison d’être to mystified villagers. And he rattles foreign donors, and in particular the French, by telling them his country does not want their help and cannot afford to pay back its debts. ‘Those who lent to us were playing a game of chance,’ he explains unapologetically. ‘As long as they were winning there was no problem, but now they’ve lost they squeal “unfair”. They played, they lost. Those are the rules of the game. Life goes on.’

Having torn down, he sets about building up. Burkinabes lack the skills and physical strength to carry the Revolution forward, so Sankara builds schools and invests in healthcare, vaccinating millions of children against killer diseases. To boost agricultural productivity he breaks up feudal landlords’ estates and parcels them out among the peasants. He plants trees to hold back the encroaching Sahara. Lithe and fit and rarely seen out of military fatigues, he darts around, full of energy, driving his people on and exhorting them to work harder, to produce more, to haul their country out of poverty. ‘Consommons Burkinabe!’ he cries, and backs his words by slapping a ban on fruit imports.

There is room on the revolutionary juggernaut for women, too. Africa will never develop, Sankara says, if half its people are treated like chattels. He promotes women to key government positions, reforms inheritance laws to give equal rights to male and female children, bans polygamy, and rails against female circumcision, a painful rite of passage for girls that can lead to fatal complications during childbirth. He instigates a national day for husbands to do the family shopping, and takes an all-female presidential motorcade with him when he tours upcountry. Already bewitched by his youthful good looks, the women of Burkina swoon.

We sit with Maurice on a rock by the grave, buffeted by dust, the only sounds the wind and the rustling of the flying plastic bags. A brown goat walks across one of the whitewashed tombs. People cycle past from time to time, wearing masks to keep out the dust and toxic fumes from the tip. There is a strong smell of burning plastic. A young mother walks by with a baby on her back, seemingly unaware of her proximity to history. ‘She knows about him,’ says Maurice when I wonder aloud whether today’s younger generation are still interested. ‘Everyone loves him except those who killed him.’ I have heard many similar sentiments. ‘He was unique,’ Maurice continues, staring wistfully at the gaudily-painted grave. ‘He was the only African leader who worked for his people and not for himself. He was a martyr.’ Back in Bobo-Dioulasso, Abdoulaye had given a similar endorsement. ‘All African leaders are the same, except one,‘ he told me. ‘Thomas Sankara wanted people to work, to prosper, to make Burkina Faso and Africa better. He was loved not just here but all over Africa, and even in Europe. But he was the last one.‘

Sankara’s dauntless optimism and attacks on the establishment galvanise his people and give them renewed hope, but progress on the development front is slow. The Marxist economic policies adopted by many African governments had failed their people – as the rest of the world had grown richer, Africa had grown poorer. Sadly for Sankara, who embraces Marxism with gusto, the policies prove no more effective in Burkina Faso.

Marx called for industrial armies to improve the soil. Sankara, who idolises the peasantry, draws up a five-year plan for agriculture. Cotton and grain production duly increase, but where are the storehouses to preserve the extra stock? Where are the roads to take it to market? Where, indeed, are the markets? The president has not had time to build up the nation’s infrastructure, and a third of the annual harvest is destroyed.

Marx called for the elimination of the wealth gap between town and countryside. Sankara obediently raises consumption taxes, paid mainly by urban dwellers, to fund the rural investment his country desperately needs. But urban Burkinabes are poor, too. How can they afford the higher prices of goods, and how can industry cope with the inevitable decline in demand? The president, putting ideals before pragmatism, has overlooked these concerns, and manufacturing and commerce plunge into recession.

Sankara is impatient to drive his country forward, but the eternal African barriers stand in his way. Decrepit infrastructure, an unskilled populace, a hostile climate and the quirks of colonial cartography which left Burkina Faso detached from international trade routes thwart his ambitions. To his bewilderment, and despite his tireless efforts, living standards barely improve under his watch.

As the economy stalls, rumblings of discontent are heard in the towns and in the countryside. With the decline of manufacturing, jobs in the cities dry up, and the urban middle classes emigrate to Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Muslim merchants, already irked by the Catholic Sankara’s ban on polygamy, are given further cause for resentment when the state takes control of commerce. And in the villages, as the fruits of revolution fail to ripen and poverty continues to bedevil the population, the complaints of tribal chiefs grow louder and more defiant.

West Africa can warp even the purest intentions, and Sankara, frustrated by the country’s slow progress, responds harshly. He sets up People’s Revolutionary Tribunals, which inflict brutal punishments on critics of his reforms. He shuts down national newspapers, fires striking teachers, and executes trade unionists suspected of plotting a coup. His Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, which are sent into the rural areas to keep his people to the right path, administer justice randomly and violently, and use force to bully the peasants into working harder. Unrest in the villages grows.

Sankara, who although as nervous of criticism as any dictator has no desire to rule by force, admits that mistakes have been made. He attempts to rein in the Committees‘ excesses, but their degeneracy has added fuel to the fire of his growing list of enemies. At home, tribal chiefs and the urban elites; abroad, France and his fellow African leaders, whom he berates for their corruption (‘there is a crisis in Africa,’ he says, ‘because some individuals deposit sums of money in foreign banks that would be large enough to develop the whole continent’); powerful forces are ranging against him, none of whom would regret his demise.

In the end, as in all great tragedies, he was betrayed by those closest to him. Blaise Compaoré had risen through the ranks with Sankara, and the two men were close friends. When Sankara had been arrested by the previous government, his friend was among those who freed him. When he had seized power shortly afterwards, his friend led the military wing that ensured the coup’s success. And while Sankara governed as president, his friend served as his second-in-command and Minister of Justice.

But Compaoré was a pragmatist, Sankara an idealist, and in Africa it is the pragmatists who survive. An old black and white photograph shows the two men saluting a military parade. Sankara seems out of his depth, looking uncomfortable, even slightly schoolboyish, in a high-collared army jacket. His youthful, fresh face is rapt with concentration as he puffs out his chest and gamely tries to act out a part for which he is unprepared. Next to him, tall and wiry, stands a stern Compaoré, his feminine lips pursed as he haughtily surveys the troops. Although he is two years younger than his comrade, it is Compaoré who appears the worldlier, the more suited to his role.

While his boss was busy with revolution, Compaoré plotted to replace him. He curried favour with the dictators his colleague had spurned, strengthened his ties to the army’s disaffected officer class, and secured the crucial support of the French. These power blocs were neither popular with nor concerned for the Burkinabe people, but their backing was all Compaoré needed. With the imperial powers and their African stooges ranged against them, Sankara and his impoverished masses stood little chance of holding their ground.

The young president was aware of the danger his friend posed. In his later photographs he is sombre, his large eyes narrowed in thought. In an interview in the autumn of 1987, while talking of Che Guevara, he said: ‘While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.’ A few weeks later his mood was darker still. ‘The day you hear Blaise Compaoré is preparing a coup against me,’ he advised a group of journalists, ‘do not try to warn me – it will be too late.’

Within seven days he was dead, gunned down on a sunny October afternoon by a military hit squad. Twelve of his colleagues perished with him. They lie here in the cemetery with him now, as close in death as they were in life. The plotters took over the airport and the state radio station, and that evening, as the dead men were being dumped in an unmarked grave, Blaise Compaoré declared himself president.

The assassination is shrouded in silence. According to his death certificate Sankara died of natural causes, and despite years of campaigning by his family and supporters there has never been an official inquiry. Compaoré always denied being involved in the murder that brought him to power. Seemingly oblivious to the coroner’s verdict, he expressed his shock at the ‘brutal attacks’ on his comrade. He claimed that although Sankara had betrayed the Revolution, rendering his removal from office unavoidable, the transition was intended to be peaceful, and his soldiers had disobeyed orders. To this day many observers, including the French and supportive leaders elsewhere in West Africa, accept this version of events, describing the assassination as a coup attempt that ‘went wrong,’ an accident. Few openly hold Compaoré responsible for his colleague’s death.

Maurice has no doubt who was to blame. ‘How could thirteen deaths be an accident?’ he scoffs. ‘Everyone knows he was killed deliberately. He was too popular just to be left in prison. They had to kill him.’ The exact truth may never be known. Several of the soldiers thought to have carried out the shootings have since died in mysterious circumstances, their testimony accompanying them to the grave. The only survivor of the attack, who escaped because the plotters thought him dead, still lives in Ouagadougou but does not talk. What is not in doubt, however, is that Compaoré was both the driving force behind the coup and its main beneficiary. He would have known better than anyone that his comrade remained popular, and that if he had been allowed to live the clamour for his reinstatement would have been impossible to quell. Compaoré needed Sankara off the scene, and his soldiers obliged. As so often in Africa, his supporters looked the other way.

As we are about to leave the cemetery, an old man in a mask and a red woollen hat pulls up on a moped. He dismounts, nods at us in greeting, and walks over to one of the whitewashed graves. It bears the name of Somda Der, Sankara’s young driver. The man stands over the grave with his eyes closed and his head bowed in prayer, the dust swirling around his fragile frame. Twenty-three years after his relative – perhaps his son, perhaps his brother - was shot dead, he has not forgotten him. After he leaves, Maurice tells us that if a dead person comes into your thoughts or dreams, you should go to visit his grave. ‘He must have had a dream last night,’ he says, as the old man and his moped fade away into the haze.

Once the fallout from the assassination had subsided, the new regime began to co-opt the dead men’s memory in an attempt to give itself legitimacy. Sankara is now a “Hero of the Revolution“, and he and those murdered with him were reburied in the individual graves we see before us. But the graves are untended; they do not look like those of a president and his men. The anniversary of the deaths, moreover, is marked by no official ceremony (on the twentieth anniversary in 2007, when Sankara’s wife returned to the country for the first time since his death, the internet was closed down for several days, dissenting voices gagged). It is as if Sankara, all his energy and fervour extinguished, has been left behind by his erstwhile friend, consigned to the silence of history.

Burkinabes have not forgotten, however. Sankara’s legend has grown in the years since his demise. His economic failings and the brutality of his revolutionary committees are largely overlooked; what has remained is the memory of the hope he instilled in his people. In Ouagadougou’s main market the day after our visit to the cemetery, I ask a young stallholder if he knows where I can find a Thomas Sankara T-shirt, as a souvenir of my trip. The boy is delighted, and excitedly relays my request to his neighbours. A crowd quickly gathers to tell me about the great man, as one of them is sent off to hunt for the prized trophy. Most members of the crowd were not yet born when Sankara died, but each has something to say about him, about his honesty, his stand against the French imperialists, his rejection of foreign aid, his criticism of his corrupt peers, and his untimely death. Eventually, after half an hour of enthusiastic discussion, the T-shirt hunter returns, breathless but happy. He has found me a perfect fit, with a grainy photograph of a fist-waving Sankara on the front and his immortal words, ‘When the people stand up, imperialism trembles!’ emblazoned on the back. He presents it to me proudly. I ask him what he thinks of Sankara. ‘He was a great man,’ he replies, ‘but he didn’t last. To last in African politics you have to lie, but he told the truth.’ The boy, made cynical beyond his years, is no more than sixteen.

Our hotel room in Ouagadougou, unlike all the other rooms we have stayed in on our trip, has a television. This allows us to watch the celebrations marking fifty years of Burkina Faso’s independence, which are being held on a football field in Bobo-Dioulasso. Blaise Compaoré is the guest of honour.

Compaoré has ruled his country for much longer than the man he replaced, but he remains a sullen, unloved figure. Sankara has streets named after him in African capitals, with pilgrims trekking to his grave from all corners of the continent. Compaoré, on the other hand, inspires only suspicion and fear; like a stepfather replacing an adored father, he has never gained his people’s affection.

In the first months of his presidency he attempted to mend fences. He disarmed Sankara’s revolutionary committees, legalised political parties, and declared an amnesty for political prisoners. Still he was not trusted, however: he had too much blood on his hands. Realising that he would not win any popularity contests and that holding fair democratic elections would therefore leave him vulnerable, he tightened his grip on power by other means. The media was silenced, rivals locked up or executed, ballots rigged, and opposition parties ground into insignificance. When he stood unopposed for election in 1991, three-quarters of his countrymen abstained from voting.

On the television, a soldier presents his president with the Burkinabe flag - the flag Sankara designed – while the master of ceremonies tells the audience of seated dignitaries that the red half of the flag symbolises the blood spilt for the freedom of the country. Compaoré, balding but still physically robust, looks humble, almost shy as he joins in the singing of the national anthem (which Sankara composed on his guitar). Dressed in a dark suit, crimson tie and polished black shoes, he steps up to a podium to deliver his speech.

It is not easy being an African dictator. Attaining and then holding onto power require resourcefulness, cunning, patience and endurance. You can never drop your guard, must never lose sight of your single overriding imperative of clinging to office. All your energies - your entire existence - must be permanently focused on this. It is an exhausting choice of career.

To acquire power, you first need to gather around you a loyal band of supporters. You can start with family members, but as you rise through the ranks in the army or the political party you will need to branch out. Colleagues who admire your charisma and respect your obvious leadership qualities will be your first port of call. You will need to grease their palms from time to time, either with financial rewards or promises of high office when you reach your goal (be especially generous with military officials, whom you will rely on to stage your coup d’état). To obtain the financial rewards and to bolster the long-term solvency of your project, take the time to garner the favour of a handful of wealthy businessmen; you can repay these benefactors with public works contracts once you have your hands on the national purse.

You will need support in the wider population, too. It is possible to lead a country without universal popular backing, but with no support at all from your citizenry you will be defenceless when rivals move to unseat you. You turn, therefore, to the people from your village, your town, your tribe. You promise them that you will give them jobs when you assume power, and in the meantime you must give them sweeteners -food, cash, land or assistance in resolving disputes.

To really make certain that your push for glory will prevail, you must obtain the sponsorship of a Western power, for only they can provide the financial muscle that will guarantee your success. During the Cold War this was easy. However incompetent, corrupt and bloodthirsty you were, however many of your innocent fellow citizens you tortured and murdered, as long as you claimed to be fighting off the communist tide or resisting the capitalist oppressor you could count on financial and military aid from the United States or the Soviet Union. This option is now closed off, although perhaps with the growing presence of the Chinese in Africa it might one day open up again.

Today your best hope is the former colonial power. France in particular is happy to support dictators in return for influence, business contracts, and access to your country’s natural resources. The Ministère des Affaires Etrangères has been a steadfast ally to a panoply of West African dictators, from the mad cannibal Jean-Bédel Bokassa to the kleptocratic Omar Bongo and Félix Houphouet-Boigny. France has even supported dictators whose countries it never colonised, propping up ruthless tyrants like Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and the doyen of all despots, Mobutu Sese Seko, who while appropriating two-thirds of Zaire’s national budget for his “discretionary spending” openly advised members of his party not to steal too much at once but to ‘steal cleverly, little by little.’ Most of these men (including Blaise Compaoré, who quickly turned his back on the austerity of the Sankara years) have villas in the south of France, palaces in the Parisian suburbs, and penthouse apartments in the City of Light itself. They have fleets of Mercedes and Bugattis to ferry them around when they visit the metropolis. As a budding dictator you have all this to look forward to, and you can count on the French to assist your rise with money and arms, confer legitimacy by recognising your government, and help you quash opposition once you have attained the presidency.

Now that you have the French, your tribe, a few wealthy businessmen and a cadre of military and party colleagues onside, you are ready to make your push for power. In West Africa coups d’état are often bloody. Your opponent will not go down without a fight, so you must be ready to use extreme violence. If you do not eliminate him outright, you must at least force him into exile, preferably after seizing his assets (while Charles Taylor’s rebel soldiers were relieving Samuel Doe of his ears, they yelled at him to give them his bank account numbers). When he is gone, to nullify the risk of a counter-coup you must immediately purge his followers. Siaka Stevens executed dozens of potential rivals during his first few years in power, and Nino Vieira and Compaoré himself were quick to do likewise whenever they smelt a conspiracy brewing.

Once you are ensconced in office, your travails intensify, for you must always be alert to the threat of sedition. This danger is real, your paranoia fully justified. From the 1960s to the turn of the millennium, three in five African leaders ended their rule in a coffin or in exile. ‘I expected a coup any day,’ said the former Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida. ‘From day one I was there, I knew that somehow, some day there would be a coup. Because we took it by force, somebody is going to try and take by force.’ You will need eyes everywhere – in the villages, in the cities, among your friends and close colleagues, even within your own family - to protect you against usurpers.

While you are watching your back, you must not take your eye off your supporters. Now that you are president, their expectations skyrocket, and you must continue to slake their thirst. The French demand mining contracts and free rein for their businesses. Your military colleagues expect promotion and power (you will have to create new positions, new battalions, to give each of them the status and access to national funds he requires). Nor must you forget your tribe and your village. They are your rock, the critical mass which will give you the numbers you need to fend off rebellions or popular revolt. You need them to love you, everybody else to fear you.

To satisfy these grassroots followers you must first provide them with a source of income. This is likely to mean expanding the government bureaucracy to create jobs. This makes your administration less efficient, but by increasing the number of hoops citizens and businesses must go through to accomplish anything, it also multiplies the opportunities for your supporters to extract bribes. Further demonstrations of your largesse will come in the shape of grand projects in your home community. The Ivory Coast dictator Houphouet-Boigny built the world’s largest cathedral in his provincial hometown of Yamoussoukro. Compaoré has opened a wildlife park in the grounds of his palace in the dusty backwater of Ziniaré, and has drawn up plans to relocate the country’s main airport there from Ouagadougou. The town, unlike those around it, has schools, a hospital, and numerous development projects, all in the service of cementing its inhabitants’ loyalty to their leader.

Although your task as a dictator is never straightforward, however, neither, as many of your predecessors have shown, is it impossible. There are a number of advantages to pursuing your choice of career in Africa as opposed to a less benighted part of the world. Chief among them is the weakness of your subjects. The masses are too poor, too hungry and too busy finding food to eat each day to plot rebellion; they are uneducated, and therefore easy to manipulate once you gain control of the media (Compaoré’s first act after dispatching Sankara was to take over state radio); and they are accustomed to repression - to them, one despotic leader resembles another (Western governments take a similar view, and exert only half-hearted pressure for you to step down).

The weakness of your country’s economic and political institutions is another blessing. The business sector, for example, is undeveloped, and laws to protect its assets nonexistent – this makes it easy for you to appropriate your nation’s natural resources to enrich yourself and your cronies. The authority of chiefs was hollowed out by colonialism, making it easier for you to centralise power in the capital. And political parties, if they exist at all, are often mere husks, vehicles for their leaders to amass wealth and furnish the demands of their supporters; they are in no position to stop you plundering state finances and siphoning off foreign aid. You can use the fruits of your pillage, indeed, to guarantee their silence. They will happily comply, for their people must eat too: Compaoré’s own coalition contains more than thirty other parties.

That you are not alone is a further advantage bestowed on you by your continent. Once you have established a reputation as an effective custodian of power, your fellow dictators will rally to your cause. Charles Taylor gave Compaoré conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone, and received weapons and men for the RUF invasion in return. Compaoré also befriended Libya’s Gaddafi and Gambia’s Jammeh, who claims to be able to cure AIDS (but only on Thursdays). The late Houphouet-Boigny gave the Burkinabe leader his daughter‘s hand in marriage. If a rebel group somehow manages to elude your all-seeing eye and make a grab for power, you can usually count on your neighbouring despots to help you extinguish the threat.

Solidarity with your peers is essential, for like them you are in this for the long haul. This job, once embarked upon, is for life. Even if you weary of spending all your time smoking out opponents and attending to supporters’ needs, even if all the extrajudicial executions and betrayals of close friends finally breach your psychological defences and envelop you in guilt, it will be impossible for you to step down. Your power is a prison. If you allow someone else to take the reins, your life will be at his mercy - in the unlikely event that he does not send you to the gallows or the firing squad, at the very least he will target the assets you have so patiently accumulated.

But let us imagine that you can be sure of your survival, perhaps after reaching an agreement with your successor to stand down in return for being left alone. Maybe then you can fade peacefully from the political scene and slip into a quiet retirement. But wait! You cannot! You have forgotten the most important thing! If you step aside, what will become of your villagers, your tribespeople, your long-standing political and military allies? They will all be cast out onto the street, penniless. You cannot do this to us, they will say, an appalled look on their faces, their palms upturned in a pleading gesture. After all we have done for you! This is Africa – you have obligations. You cannot just turn your back on your people! Did your venerable ancestors bring you into the world for this? To spit on us, to betray those who gave you everything? No, you must stay the course, they agree, nodding sagely, the wisdom of generations on their side. We are in this together. You have no choice. You wanted power, we put you in power, and in power you must remain.

The French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, drawing on his experience in the Ivory Coast, identified two distinct but parallel systems of government in Africa. The first is the world of the air-conditioner. This system, which is inspired by the Western style of government, gives off an impression of bureaucratic and technocratic efficiency. It is a world of presidents, constitutions, parliaments and laws, and speaks the language of democracy, development and modernisation. It pertains to certain places and certain hours of the day, to ‘office hours (as long as one defines these relatively flexibly),’ to government buildings made of cement and steel and glass, to presidential palaces and airports with VIP lounges, to ‘glorious official soirées in illuminated gardens.’ While the air-conditioner hums in the background, the leader, in his three-piece suit and tie and speaking in fluent metropolitan French or the smooth American burr favoured by Charles Taylor, announces grand development plans to his spellbound foreign backers: hydroelectric dams, a new motorway, airports, universities – the appurtenances of a modern state. He promises elections free and fair, and looks businesslike, not awestruck, when he takes his seat at the United Nations.

But much of this is display. As Terray observed, the principal function of the world of the air-conditioner is not to govern, but ‘to show, particularly to the outside, that the country works, that it holds rank in the concert of nations’ (recall the Sierra Leone government’s gift to Haiti‘s earthquake victims, and its explanation that the country needed to play its part as a member of the international community). The serious business takes place not here, but amid a second world, the world of the veranda. This is a world of palavers under baobab trees, of sharing what you have, of the impenetrable African night, of obligations – personal, not bureaucratic, obligations - to your ancestors and your community; a world, at its most extreme, of human sacrifices in sacred forests. For our leader’s real concern is not democracy, nor the provision of services to his nation, nor that nation’s prosperous future. His real concern is in meeting his obligations to his narrow band of supporters, in feeding them in the here and now so that they will sustain him in power. This second system acts as a brake on the pride and greed of the Big Men, who are allowed to enrich themselves only if part of the material and political booty they accrue is generously redistributed. Like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, Terray noted, the Big Man is ‘far from being entirely the master of his choices.’ As long as he produces the goods, the little people will sing his praises, vote for him, pass on rumours and render him other services. But if he fails to deliver, and to keep delivering throughout his time in power, they will jump ship. It is a tit for tat relationship, which requires the leader to be permanently on his toes.

As the anniversary celebrations in Bobo reach their climax, Blaise Compaoré concludes his speech. It is possible that my imagination is deceiving me after spending the past few days thinking about Sankara, but I detect in his successor a great, crushing sadness. His eyes, sloping down at the outer edges, look careworn, lacklustre. His shoulders are slumped, his brow furrowed. His speech, fluent but turgid, has merely gone through the motions, its repeated references to ‘solidarity’ and the Revolution containing none of the vigour and excitement that filled his predecessor’s proclamations. Compaoré is in the process of amending the constitution to allow himself to stand for yet another five-year term in office. If he finishes that term, he will have ruled Burkina Faso for thirty-three years. Thirty-three years of looking over his shoulder, fielding demands, nurturing loyalty - thirty-three years in a jail of his own making. As I sit there watching the speech in my new Thomas Sankara T-shirt, I cannot suppress a pang of sympathy for the late revolutionary’s nemesis.

And so to the north, to the Sahel, the shore, the last sliver of solid ground before the perilous sea of the Sahara. Our journey has become something of a race against time, a quest to see as much as possible while my frazzled mind still clings to its own terra firma. It is all about reaching the end, and we are propelled on by the illusion that movement will hasten that moment, accelerate time itself. We have a sense that our fate is no longer in our hands. When we discuss the remainder of the journey, we append an “inshallah” or a “God willing“ whenever we settle on a plan. Nothing is certain any more. Not Ebru and I, but Africa and her capricious gods will determine whether, and in what condition, we make it through the final weeks.

The Sahel, a vast, flat steppe dividing desert from equatorial forest, stretches almost the width of the continent. It is a land where the mighty kingdoms of western and central Africa rose and fell, the starting point from which Mansa Musa, the fourteenth-century ruler of the Mali Empire, set off for Egypt, carrying with him so much treasure that the gold price in Cairo’s markets took decades to recover. Traders and their camels have traversed the region for thousands of years, ferrying slaves, ivory and kola nuts northward, salt, iron and Islam south. They moved in camel-led caravans thirty miles long, and sold their wares in the magnificent desert cities of Timbuktu and Agadez. The Burkinabe stretch of the Sahel saw the rise of Askia Mohammed’s great Songhai Empire, and then its swift decline and surrender to Moroccan Berbers. After the latter departed at the end of the seventeenth century, it became something of a no man’s land, the traders and their thirty thousand-strong camel caravans sharing the territory with bandits, smugglers and, in recent years, desperate migrants headed for fortress Europe.

As kingdoms have waxed and waned, however, one group of people, the Fula, has been a constant presence on the Sahel’s broad expanses. Although in recent years they have scattered across West Africa, into the forests and down to the Gulf of Guinea where they make a living as traders in coastal cities like Bissau and Freetown, it is to this strip of dry, beige semi-desert that the Fula belong. For centuries, perhaps millennia, they have roamed its lonely plains with their herds, always on the move, never laying claim to any particular place. In the dry season they migrate to the southern reaches. When the rains come they begin the slow return northward, to the edge of the desert. It is a life, as the 1930s French traveller Odette du Puigaudeau described it, ‘divided into days of pasture and days of wandering, into days at watering holes and days without water, a humble, quiet life full of long dreams, moving slowly across infinite, empty plains, outside the walls of towns.’

The English explorer Richard Jobson encountered Fula herdsmen on the Gambia in 1620. ‘Their profession is keeping of Cattle,’ he reported. ‘Some Goats they have, but the Heards they tend are Beefes, whereof they are aboundantly stored.’ Every day their women - ‘streight, upright, and excellently well bodied’ -would bring to Jobson’s camp, ‘in great and small gourds like dishes, made up very handsomely, new milke, sowre milke and curdes, and two sorts of butter, one new and white, the other hard and of an excellent colour, which we call refined butter, and it is without question, but for a little freshness, as good as any we have at home.’

Then as now, the Fula were semi-nomadic, never staying anywhere for long. ‘In some places they have settled Townes,’ Jobson observed, ‘but for the most part they are still wandering...Where they find the ground and soyle most fitte for their Cattle, there, with the Kings allowance of the country, they sit downe, building themselves houses, as the season of the yeare serves.’

Today, the old Fula ways are under pressure. On the bus heading north, the Fula man sitting next to me says that many of his brethren are quitting the nomadic life and settling in the towns and cities (we had seen some of them in Ouagadougou, listlessly hawking leather bags and sandals). ‘There is not enough pasture and the boreholes are drying up,’ he explains. ‘I used to be a herder myself, but it’s difficult spending all day under the sun looking for water or grazing land only to find it has all gone.’ He now works for a development agency as a livestock expert, teaching herders how to treat sick animals and how to stock grass to tide them over during lean periods. ‘They don’t have education, so they don’t know about modern techniques,’ he says. ‘When their cattle fall sick, they just die. The herders can do nothing about it. We are trying to improve their knowledge so that they can continue their way of life.’

As our bus trundles northwards, the country grows ever drier. Stunted acacia are dotted sparsely around, intersected by long lines of denuded baobab spaced like electricity pylons. Scrubby, grey-green thornbush offers a faint trace of colour. The rest is dust. ‘There used to be many more trees,’ says my neighbour, ‘but people have cut them down. Wood is their only source of energy, and when the population exploded there was deforestation and the desert advanced.’ From time to time in the distance we see herds of scrawny cows, driven on foot by a lone Fula in a dark robe and conical straw hat, man and beast united in the eternal search for water and pasture.

You know you are approaching a Sahelian town when the country about you becomes pockmarked with black plastic bags, strewn around like toxic chocolate chips on a cookie. An ugly ring of these bags surrounds every settlement, thickening as the first buildings come into view. We reach the small town of Dori, which is no exception, late in the afternoon. The harmattan has eased off for now, and the high, gaping African sky, white tinged with blue, has reappeared. The people have come out of their dust-strafed shells and cheered up. ‘The harmattan makes you sick. It gives you colds,’ says the man in our hotel, relieved that the siege has lifted. ‘You don’t have dust in your country, do you?’

Dori was once a punishment posting for civil servants. The hottest town in one of the world’s hottest countries, it has the feel of a remote frontier outpost teetering on the brink of the desert, cut off from the rest of humanity. The few cars and trucks that ply its streets rarely look like they are going anywhere else. The telephone lines are down. The occasional bus penetrates the moat of plastic bags, but otherwise the town is contained in its own little dustcloud. Here, as we are reminded every time we venture out into its sandy lanes, we really are ‘Les‘ Blancs. There are no other white people. The only other outsiders are a couple of shopkeepers from the south. It is a world apart.

Dori’s remoteness breeds solidarity among its inhabitants. Everybody seems to know one another, and salutations and smiles are freely given. On our second afternoon we find a yoghurt shop, on whose veranda we can sit, drink thick, sweet yoghurt, and watch the life of the town. Passersby – stately Fula women in heavy silver earrings, teenagers in jeans, old Muslims in white kaftans, and Tuareg, the people of the desert, in flowing indigo robes and turbans – stop to exchange greetings and news. As they continue slowly on their way, many of them greet us too. Nothing else happens. Cows mooch around, goats snooze in the shade of mud walls, boys career past on donkey carts, women pound millet in pairs outside their compounds. Later, towards dusk, the call to prayer wafts gently down the lane from a nearby mosque.

The young man who runs the yoghurt shop pulls up a plastic chair beside us and introduces himself. His name is Abdoul-Karim. In his late twenties, tall and light-skinned, with deep brown eyes and a slightly aquiline nose, he wears jeans, flipflops, a Muslim skullcap and, despite the forty-degree heat, a thick red lumberjack shirt. Originally from Bobo-Dioulasso, he came here a few years ago after dropping out of school, rescued from unemployment when a friend of his brother’s offered him a job in the yoghurt shop. He works all day and sleeps on a mat outside the shop at night. He earns a pittance, barely enough to live on. Like so many others, his life has been blown off course. ‘I had big plans,’ he says, ‘but I ran out of money and had to give up school. That set me back, and for a while my head was all over the place.’

It must be easy, if you are a Burkinabe, a Sierra Leonean or a Guinean, to become downhearted. Of the planet’s seven billion people, you and your compatriots are the unluckiest. Through pure accident of birth, ninety-nine of every hundred people in the world have a head start on you; your entire time on earth will be spent trying to claw back ground. ‘For three years I have been trying to save enough money to resume my studies,’ Karim continues, ‘but it’s difficult. I have to make new plans now in case I can’t go back to school. I need to regroup and think about what to do next. But I am an optimist. I will get out of this.’

The security guard outside the bank next door has been listening to our conversation. Sprawled drowsily over a metal chair, he leans towards us and joins in. The bank is closed (it does not open at all during the fortnight we spend in the town), but he tells us he will nevertheless be there all night guarding it. ‘Nobody comes. It’s very quiet,‘ he says. I ask him if he sleeps during his watch. ‘Of course!’ he replies with a toothy grin.

The guard, a Mossi, changes the subject to tell us about the laziness of the Fula. ‘They don’t know how to work,’ he says. ‘The Mossi work hard. They go out to the fields at five in the morning and come home at ten at night. The Fula go out at seven with their cows, come back three hours later and call that a day’s work!‘ He then tells a joke about perceived Fula greed. The old Sahelian rivalry still simmers. As crop farmers, the Mossi and other settled tribes depend on the Fula‘s herds for vital protein. The Fula, meanwhile, cannot survive for long without the grain they acquire from farmers. But the relationship is strictly transactional, rarely straying into warmth or friendship. While the farmer mocks herding as the work of the indolent, for the herdsman, free as a bird, the shackled, cattle-less farmer is an object of contempt.

There are deeper reasons, too, for the antipathy. The Fula were enthusiastic slavers, sweeping down from the mountains of Guinea to harvest captives for the Atlantic and North African markets; the Mossi successfully defended themselves, but other settled tribes of the Sahel were less fortunate. The Fula were also keen jihadists, using the profits from slaving to fund holy wars. Themselves converted to Islam by Arab and Berber traders, they launched numerous raids to cow the sedentary peoples of the region into submitting to their God. The victim of slave raid and jihad was the settled farmer, the perpetrator the itinerant herder. This historical divide has yet to be fully bridged.

Another ancient fault line is also still in evidence. When they bring their livestock south in the dry season, herdsmen inevitably run up against land occupied by peasants. Most of the time this does not create problems - the cattle fertilise the farmers’ soil, and the nomads exchange milk products, meat and hides for grain. In periods of scarcity, however, competition for water and pasture intensifies, sometimes boiling over into conflict. Farming in such a barren region is difficult at the best of times (Robert Delavignette, a colonial administrator serving in Upper Volta, noted that while the French peasant had ‘made of France a garden in which rare islands of wilderness still persist,’ the African, on the contrary, had laboured and suffered ‘to occupy a few islands of cultivated land in an encircling ocean of bush‘). When drought forces the farmer to use every last square inch of soil and eke out every last drop of available water, he becomes less accommodating towards his old adversary. The collision can be explosive. ‘There is often violence when the herders trespass on farmers’ land,’ the livestock expert on the bus to Dori had said. ‘In recent years there have been many droughts, and the conflicts have grown more frequent and more violent. The rainy season starts late and finishes early. There is not enough water for everybody.’ We will hear this complaint frequently in the coming weeks.

We quickly settle into an agreeable routine in Dori. In the mornings we sit with a friendly Songhai outside his shop and drink green tea. After a lunch of fish with spiced rice or peas with tomatoes at one of the town’s two eating houses, we spend the hottest part of the day in our room, reading and sleeping (as usual, we are the hotel’s only guests). In the evenings we sit with the languid Karim outside the yoghurt shop, watching the activity in the street and chatting with him and various passersby about the country. After the assault that was Ouagadougou, the slow pace of life is a welcome relief.

This being West Africa, however, ugliness lurks amid Dori’s charms. The Sahel is Burkina Faso’s poorest region, and the poverty here is Dickensian. Starving, pot-bellied toddlers sit quietly in the dust. Beggars roam the streets - everywhere we go, children and sometimes adults ask us for a “cadeau“. The shops have no stock, the market scarcely any food. In the late dry season desiccation, even the cows and goats look emaciated.

One morning we have breakfast at the town’s lone coffee shack. Sitting outside on a long bench with our backs to the road, we dip dry bread in coffee whitened by condensed milk. While we eat, five boys not yet in their teens hover behind us, silently staring. From time to time one of them moves closer to our shoulders, seemingly checking to see if we are leaving anything. When we look round he retreats to the group. The boys, their faces ghostly pale, wear torn T-shirts and shorts. Their entire bodies are caked in dust, their bones jutting out through their chapped skin like a fight in a tent. They stand there for twenty minutes, like seagulls waiting for scraps (failing once again Auden’s test for men from Europe, I grow impatient with them for intruding on our meal). As soon as we get up to leave, they run to the table and hoover up a few crumbs of bread. When we look back, we see one of them gulping down the dregs of Ebru’s coffee.

The boys are talibé children. They are ubiquitous in West Africa. In the towns of Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali and now Burkina Faso, posses of these boys – uniformly skinny, dirty and with a look of fraught desperation in their eyes – have been our constant companions. They work the streets in packs, empty tomato tins or little plastic buckets dangling from their shoulders, and ask everyone they see for money or food.

The Muslim African tradition of parents sending their sons to be educated by Islamic scholars dates back centuries. The children were given instruction in Arabic and Koranic studies and a place to sleep, and were expected to feed themselves by farming or begging for alms. After a few years, armed with knowledge and wisdom, they would return to their villages and disseminate the Prophet’s message.

Today, many of the holy men are frauds. ‘They go to the market, buy a cap and gown and a Koran and say they are Koranic masters,’ says Karim as we sit with him one evening. The men focus their recruitment efforts on the rural areas, using promises of food and shelter to persuade destitute families to send them their male children. Parents, uneducated, gullible and relieved at having one less mouth to feed, are tricked into allowing their sons to be taken. Often it will be the last they see of them. Some of the boys are as young as five or six.

The children are a cash cow for their masters. ‘It is pure child exploitation,’ says Karim, a devout Muslim. Every morning they are sent out into the streets to beg. They are expected to come back with at least a hundred and fifty francs (fifty cents). If they do not hit their target, the holy man will beat or torture them, so towards the end of the day those who have not raised enough through begging are forced to steal. ‘They know what is waiting for them otherwise,’ says Karim darkly.

Few of the talibé children receive any form of education. Their masters, these modern-day Fagins, want them on the streets instead. Some have twenty or thirty boys in their care, a potential revenue stream of more than ten dollars a day. This is big money in these parts, and the masters, who anyway know little of the Koran, cannot afford to waste time teaching. At night the boys sleep on crowded floors in their captors’ homes. They do not get enough rest – we often see them in Dori in the afternoons, sleeping on the ground under trees (they look young and vulnerable, with an innocence that disappears from their faces as soon as they awake). Nor do they have enough to eat. The boys who surrounded our breakfast table were underfed, their bodies too small for their heads. In Ouagadougou the previous week another talibé child had asked us for money. ‘Give me something so I can eat,’ he demanded through swollen lips. We refused, and he began to stare intently at Ebru’s bag, his eyes desperate, feverish as he homed in on it. When he made to snatch it I pushed him away. I could feel his ribs like a radiator through his T-shirt.

When they are old enough to stand up to their overlords, or too old to garner almsgivers’ sympathy, the boys escape or are released, or set up as masters themselves. Their future is bleak. ‘They get used to this life of begging and stealing,’ says Karim, ‘so when they grow up and run away their only option is delinquency.’ It occurs to me that the boys would make easy prey for extremists and warlords. Across Africa, it is to young male outcasts that those plotting rebellion or brutality turn first. The talibé boys, hopeless, hungry and made amoral by years of abuse and alienation, fit the bill. West African governments are worried by this prospect, but their half-hearted efforts to put a stop to the practice have had little effect. ‘It is a river that cannot be dammed,’ opines Karim. ‘Families are too poor, they have no choice.’ When I suggest that free education might help, by providing children with a daily meal and thereby reducing the economic burden they place on their families, he laughs. Burkina Faso’s performance in this area is abysmal: fewer than half of rural children ever go to school.

The people of Dori are worried about famine. Over coffee one day we meet a man whose job is to teach adults to read and write. Three-quarters of Burkinabe adults are illiterate, and the teacher believes that by learning these skills of the modern world the herders of the Sahel will be better able to diversify away from what is an increasingly precarious occupation. He tells us that drought and famine have become cyclical in the north of the country: ‘The last rainy season was poor, so there is not enough water or pasture. People are already hungry, and in the next two or three months, until this year’s rainy season begins, the situation will get worse.‘ The Fula will be the worst sufferers, he predicts. ‘Herders will not be able to feed and water their cattle. Many animals will die. Maybe people will die too.’

The Burkinabe Sahel has suffered regular and crippling droughts throughout the past half-century. In the 1970s a decade-long famine claimed the lives of a hundred thousand people and tens of millions of cows and sheep. In 2005 the failure of the rains left the entire population of northern Burkina on the brink of starvation. ‘2005 was very bad,’ says Ousmane, our Songhai shopkeeper friend. ‘There was no millet and the prices of maize and sorghum doubled. We had to import food, which was much more expensive. Everywhere was affected, even the towns. You were lucky to have one meal a day. Whole herds of cattle were wiped out.‘

Three years later the spectre of hunger loomed again. A worldwide spike in food prices put even basic staples beyond the reach of most Burkinabes. In the cities, riots broke out in protest against “la vie chère”. Karim, who at the time was visiting family in Bobo-Dioulasso, saw crowds of looters fighting with police, ransacking shops and petrol stations, and destroying vehicles and public buildings. He was shocked at what he saw, and does not believe the rioters had good cause. ‘There were a few problems with food vendors taking advantage of the situation and hiking up prices,’ he says, ‘but the people didn’t understand that it wasn’t the government’s fault that prices were so high - it was a global problem.’

Droughts hit the Fula especially hard. In good times, they make a living selling milk and sometimes leather products in the markets of the Sahel, and buy grain from sedentary farmers with the proceeds. But in times of scarcity, when boreholes dry up or grain prices rise, they are vulnerable. Other tribes, like the Songhai, might combine herding with a little crop-farming, which spreads the risk for the hard days. But the Fula cannot do this. They have been on the move for centuries, since time immemorial. They cannot suddenly call a halt to their wanderings and settle down, chaining themselves to one place. ‘It is not in their culture,’ says the Songhai Ousmane. They know no other way of living.’

When drought bites and food prices soar, therefore, the Fula cannot fall back on home-grown crops. Nor, with their starving cows now unable to produce milk, do they have anything with which to barter. The only option left to them is to sell off their animals. But this too is unthinkable, for their animals are their future, their prize asset. And besides, they love their animals – selling them would be no less painful than selling a child. ‘A Fula will do anything for his cows,’ Karim had told us. ‘He would treat a sick cow before a sick wife.’ The adult literacy teacher concurs. ‘They won’t sell their animals even to buy corn to save their families,’ he says. ‘Even when their cows are sickening and dying they hold onto them. They prefer to keep the animal and die rather than part with it. Many Fula die in droughts.’

In centuries past, when food and water were easier to come by and conflict over resources was uncommon, the Fula’s single-mindedness was a rational response to a perilous environment. Experimentation with new techniques was considered too risky – it would divert time and energy from tried and trusted pursuits and the eventual rewards were uncertain. Mungo Park observed that although the “Foulah” drank plentiful milk and ate copious amounts of butter, they knew nothing of how to make cheese, and showed little interest in learning. ‘A firm attachment to the customs of their ancestors,’ Park surmised, ‘makes them view with an eye of prejudice everything that looks like innovation. The heat of the climate and the great scarcity of salt are held forth as unanswerable objections; and the whole process appears to them too long and troublesome to be attended with any solid advantage.’

The customs of the ancestors, however, are no longer fit for purpose. The Fula are being forced to quit their roaming, to leave behind the tall skies, the endless plains and the rumbling herds and relocate to the cacophonous, crowded cities. The modern world is dragging them into its vortex, severing their mystical ties to the open spaces of the Sahel. The people of Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau cannot escape their villages quickly enough, but the Fula are different. They are happy where they are. They have no yearning for change. The Fula, like a recalcitrant herd, are being driven into the twenty-first century by phenomena beyond their control.

There are two great forces lining up to push the herders off their land. The first is the changing climate. ‘You in Europe have made all this pollution and we in Africa are feeling its effects,’ says Ousmane accusingly one morning. ‘The weather is less predictable now. The harmattan goes on longer and the rainy season is shorter. Life has become very difficult for everybody here - farmers and herders.’ Burkina Faso is on the climate change frontline. The Sahel will be one of the world regions hardest hit by global warming. Average temperatures, already the highest on the planet, could rise by over three degrees in the next century. Rainfall has decreased by a quarter since 1950, and even if it does not decline further the rise in temperatures will mean that rainwater evaporates more quickly, before the Fula and the settled cultivators of crops can make use of it. The changing weather is likely to bring more droughts, more floods and more pests. It threatens to make food, water and pasture scarcer. Already the Sahara desert is advancing several miles into the Sahel each year, smothering valuable grazing land. As it continues its relentless march and the rains retreat before it, those trying to eke out an existence on the drying plains will have to travel ever farther to find sustenance.

As they forage, they will run up against a second great force. Climate change is a new problem, but one of its side-effects is the re-emergence as a challenge of a much older problem - the population explosion – which has reared its head as the supply of food and water has dwindled. Population growth need not be a disaster for Africa. Burkina Faso has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, with the average woman mothering six children. Its population has almost quadrupled in the past half-century. But with fifteen million inhabitants the country remains empty in comparison with the United Kingdom or Italy, for example, which are of similar size but have four times the number of people, and in neither of these European powerhouses have dense populations impeded spectacular economic expansion.

There are many advantages to being crowded. More people mean more customers for businesses and farmers and the potential for a more efficient division of labour. As Adam Smith noted of the ‘lone houses and very small villages scattered about in so desert a country’ as eighteenth-century Scotland, farmers’ very isolation required them to carry out a multitude of tasks in addition to herding or growing crops. They had to be baker, brewer, carpenter, mason and smith, ‘to perform themselves a great number of little pieces of work, for which, in more populous countries, they would call in the assistance of those workmen.’

The population of Burkina Faso today is similarly dispersed. An observer of Burkinabe village life will see farmers building their houses, repairing compound walls, thatching roofs, and undertaking numerous other domestic or community tasks that limit the time they can spend in the fields. The village women are yet more versatile. From dawn to dusk they flit from one chore to another – collecting firewood, gathering water, feeding babies, pounding millet, cooking, washing clothes, selling produce in the market, working in the fields or tending their herds. They must do all these jobs themselves because their communities are too small for it to be worthwhile anyone setting up as a provider of such services. Burkina Faso has many villages, but each one is tiny, and a builder, thatcher or baker would seldom have enough custom to justify abandoning his own domestic duties. Since they must carry out all tasks without specialising in any, the villagers’ outputs, to put it in industrial terms (and including the children they rear), are inevitably of a lower quality than they would be if they could focus on a single enterprise. Being of lower quality they are also of lower economic value, making it difficult for a family to accumulate wealth and climb out of poverty. More multitudinous societies, on the other hand (and more urbanised societies, if they can overcome the many problems that beset West African cities), are likely to contain specialists in different trades who will produce higher quality goods, and more likely as a consequence to advance.

Although population growth by itself does not deepen poverty, however, when it occurs suddenly, and in locations with limited and shrinking resources, it may heighten the risk. The population of the Burkinabe Sahel has tripled in the past forty years. Despite food shortages and the looming threat of climate change it is likely to triple again in the next forty. How will all these people eat? How will they share out their meagre rations? How will herders and farmers avoid resorting to violence as the scramble for food and water intensifies? Already the amount of food produced by the average African has declined by a tenth since 1960. Already drought and reduced rainfall are leading to increased conflict. How will communities cope when there is still less food, and when there are still more mouths to feed? Not well, according to the American economists Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, whose calculations predict a sharp rise in the number of violent clashes in the Sahel in the next half-century. Not well, either, according to the United Nations, which expects the number of hungry people in the region to double in three decades.

It is not just the size of the population that poses problems for West Africa, but the structure. The region is full of children. Everywhere you look there are hordes of them, straddling their mothers’ backs, playing in the streets, begging for alms, or herding cows and sheep. In any one year, one in three Burkinabe women will give birth (the proportion in a low-fertility country such as Spain is one in forty). Half the population is aged fourteen or younger.

Children produce nothing but consume everything. Most of what adults grow or earn disappears into their offspring’s stomachs, leaving parents with little to eat and less of the time and energy needed to tend cattle or dig fields. The younger generation suffers too. With food shared out among many siblings, each child has less on his plate. Hunger makes learning more difficult – adults who have been malnourished early in life have been found to have lower IQs than their better-fed peers – and means West African teenagers enter the labour force ill-prepared compared with their counterparts in countries with a more balanced age structure. Unproductive, they will earn less and find it more difficult to afford the rising cost of food, and more difficult, too, to feed and educate their own children. And so it goes on, in a vicious spiral that continues down the generations.

But while population growth may be bad news for Burkinabes in the short term, in the longer-term it could offer a glimmer of hope. Many countries have passed through the demographic difficulties with which Burkina Faso is now grappling and come out the other side, and it is not inconceivable that Burkina and her neighbours will follow in their footsteps. Sweden, for instance, now one of the world’s wealthiest nations, endured extreme poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century as its small adult population failed to cope with a sudden surge in the number of children. As in West Africa today, child labour was widespread, and the country, forced to borrow from abroad to keep afloat, became one of the most indebted in the world.

As these swarming masses of children grew up, fertility rates plummeted, and when they reached working age Sweden’s population became heavy with young adults. This too was a troubled era, marked by mass emigration, rapid urbanisation, and political unrest as poverty continued to bedevil large swathes of society. But the young adults now had fewer children to support than did their forefathers, and more freedom, as a consequence, to work, save and spend. Out of this turbulent period came the beginnings of Sweden’s industrialisation, the rise of an entrepreneurial spirit, and an increase in prosperity as the country took its first steps on the road to modernity.

Eventually Sweden’s baby boom generation reached maturity. Middle-aged adults are society’s great providers. They earn more, save more and invest more in businesses than any other age group. They can support themselves without relying on handouts from older or younger generations. And they fund the education of children and the care of the elderly. When the populations of East Asia reached maturity, their economies took off. Between 1965 and 1990 the number of working-age adults in the region grew nearly four times faster than the rest of the population. The Harvard economist David Bloom estimates that this “demographic dividend“ accounted for a third of East Asia’s giddying economic growth during the period. Sweden, too, prospered once the balance of its population became adult- heavy. The Swedish demographer Bo Malmberg has calculated that between 1920 and 1970, when the proportion of mature adults was at its highest, the income of the average Swede grew by four hundred percent – more than twice the rate in the decades before and after this boom.

Malmberg’s analysis may offer hope for Burkina Faso. ‘Countries that for a number of decades have benefited from increases in the middle-aged group,’ he writes, ‘seem without exception to have entered the club of industrialised nations. Such an increase is clearly associated with a more developed stage of economic growth.’ Fertility rates in West Africa have remained stubbornly high, meaning that adults still have many hungry children to support. The pressure this exerts on those of working age has hitherto tended to explode into conflict rather than spark economic advance. But if the countries of the region can first create a baby boom generation by bringing down fertility, and then harness the boomers’ potential when they reach maturity, their long-term prospects may be less bleak.

For six days of every week, Dori is a sleepy backwater, its wide streets of deep sand mostly empty. The harmattan, which has returned after a brief hiatus, blows lazily through. The only sounds are the regular tom-tom beats of giant pestles on mortars, as women performing their millet-pounding duets rock back and forth with the smooth synchronicity of pairs of nodding donkeys.

Every Friday, however, the tan-coloured town, like a desert blooming after sudden rain, explodes in a riot of colour as hundreds of herders and their families descend on its weekly market. They come from far afield, from the northern deserts, from the barren wastes of Niger to the east, and from all over the Burkinabe Sahel. They come to buy and sell, and also to socialise, to meet up with their fellows who have spent the weeks or months since they last came here roaming in different directions with their herds. The ritual is centuries old. The German explorer Heinrich Barth visited in 1853 and marvelled at the quality of the woven blankets on show, but even by that time the market was an ancient and venerable institution, part of the patchwork of weekly cattle fairs that stretches across the Sahelian plains.

We awake at dawn and head out. The road in front of our hotel, usually quiet with just a few goats or cows, is teeming with life. Along it passes a procession: donkey carts laden with goods, mopeds ridden by turbaned Tuareg, trucks bringing livestock and hitch-hikers from outlying villages, and a dazzling throng of colourfully-dressed pedestrians. We see tall, light-skinned Fula women with shawls billowing behind them and scarification marks on their cheeks; smaller Bella women – the former slaves of the Tuareg – with babies straddling their backs and clay cooking pots balanced on their heads; groups of Fula and Songhai men in long robes, holding hands; and teenage boys at the beginning of an insecure career dragging unruly goats by the ears.

We follow them down past Karim’s yoghurt shop, the street now suddenly transformed into a busy, noisy thoroughfare, to the far side of the town, where an avenue of tall, bushy trees borders a vast open maidan that stretches off into the distance. The near end of the avenue, beside a cluster of straw huts where Fula nomads have struck camp, is given over to cattle. Herds large and small are being led in across the dusty plain. The smaller herds stand in the shade of the trees, penned in loosely by wooden stakes. Herders with larger stocks remain out in the open, struggling to keep their restless charges in order. Many of the animals are scrawny and undernourished, but there are a few magnificent specimens with huge curved horns and noble bearing. One particularly majestic beast with a large hump flopping at the shoulder breaks loose from his comrades and is chased along the avenue, scattering onlookers in all directions. His owner, a young Fula, eventually catches up with him and ties him to a tree, where he remains unhappily for the rest of the day, pacing vengefully at the end of his rope and goring the dry ground and the innocent tree trunk with his horns.

We sit for a while on a tree stump by one of the sandy, bush-lined lanes that lead in from the outlying villages. A biblical parade passes before us. A bearded, rheumy-eyed old man in a black and white keffiyeh floats by on a donkey and salutes us with a wave; goatherds stroll in with their flocks; girls march past with enormous, cloth-wrapped bundles on their heads; a man in a straw hat leads a donkey cart carrying a woman and a pair of tethered goats. All the while, a stream of women and men pass by on foot wearing long robes of dazzling colours - purple, turquoise, lime and dark green, peach and cream, reds and blues and yellows, some of a single colour, many others patterned with flowers, geometrical shapes, or animals. Fula women sport silver earrings and heavy gold bracelets, the Tuareg more subdued indigo and blue. Most striking of all are the girlish Bella women, with silver discs hanging from their thickly plaited hair, glittering sequinned shawls draped across their shoulders, and long multi-coloured dresses flowing in their wake. Anything goes in the quest to add brightness to the monochrome Sahelian landscape. A Bella girl wears a red Manchester United football shirt over a yellow and black patterned skirt. Others prefer the crimson and blue stripes of Barcelona, adopted not just by young boys but by their mothers, on whom the famous Catalan colours merge seamlessly with the riot of reds and greens and silver and gold that adorns every other part of their body.

While the men and boys lead in their animals, the women bring other wares to sell. The influx of livestock and their owners attracts traders in a variety of goods. Some sell millet beer, poured from clay pots or calabashes into little mugs and dispensed to thirsty herders. Tuareg women in straw shacks sell finely worked silver bracelets and stouter bangles and earrings. Bella women sit on donkeys, resting their legs on large bundles of firewood tied to the beasts’ flanks. Also on offer in the shade of the trees are rice, smoked fish, grain, cold drinks, straw for fodder or building huts, rope for tethering livestock, fried dough balls, peanuts, succulent mangoes, and the thick woven blankets seen by Barth.

Further along the avenue, away from the cattle, dozens, perhaps hundreds of goats are tied to wooden posts. Young boys have two or three to sell, their elders many more. An old man offers us a healthy-looking black and white specimen, which we reluctantly decline. A group of moustachioed young Tuareg, foot-long daggers in leather sheaths attached to their waists, sit on their haunches by their own herd, waiting for customers and commenting wryly on passersby. From time to time a prospective buyer ambles up and inspects one of the goats, squeezing its haunches to check its strength. A long, patient haggling process ensues, involving much smiling and gesticulating, until at last the satisfied buyer hands over some cash, wrestles his chosen animal away from its companions, and leads it off by the horn.

At the far end of the avenue we come upon the donkey section. Well-groomed and looking well-fed, the meek, virtuous beasts stand in the shade with their secrets. A donkey seller from Gorom-Gorom to the north tells us his day is going well. Another young man comes up and asks if we are buying or just observing. He is a trader, here to buy and sell sheep and goats, ‘to make a little profit.’ It’s going OK, he says, before plunging back into the fray when he realises we are unlikely customers. In our ears are the sounds of chatter, of the lowing of cattle, the rap of stick on animal hide, and the rumble of hooves as a new herd trundles in from the plain and joins the mêlée. Everyone seems cheerful, pleased to see each other, engaging in long conversations even with those they have no plans to trade with, laughing, flirting, lecturing, exclaiming, and filling up on gossip and news to tide them over when the time comes to resume their lonely wanderings.

We move back to where the herds of cattle are stationed and sit on the ground under a tree among a gaggle of high-spirited men. Many of them greet us with a smile or a wave; others stare or pass amused comment to their companions. The chairman of the market crouches down beside us and welcomes us with a handshake. All around is bustle and activity. Whenever a new truck arrives, crammed with goats or cows and sprouting human passengers on top like stunted dreadlocks, a crowd swarms around to watch it being unloaded. Escapee bulls, chased down with sticks, cause a brief commotion, but it is not just these renegades that attract attention. The herds of cattle are the stars of the show, the Venuses de Milo in Dori’s Louvre. Each individual beast is apprised, admired and commented on. The Fula’s love of their cows shows no sign of weakening – it is a love that is passed down from one generation to the next, part of their genetic make-up. White-haired old men nod in approval as they stroke a tan-coloured flank or stand back to size up the curve of a horn; their sons discuss prices, grazing sites or the vagaries of the weather; and their grandsons, dreaming of future meanderings, look on with awe and envy as another huge lowing herd is brought in across the plain, kicking up clouds of dust.

But appearances are deceptive. Despite all the excitement, trade in cows is non-existent. While wads of low-denomination banknotes are occasionally exchanged for a goat or donkey, the cattle stay where they are, revered but unwanted. The mighty herds led in from miles around stand undisturbed, intact. Youssouf, a young Fula herder with whom we fall into conversation, explains why. Confident and friendly, with a round face, a moustache and large, deep-brown eyes under his navy blue turban, he stands before a small herd of eight or ten head of cattle. He does not expect to sell any of them today. ‘Business has been bad for the last three years,’ he says. ‘It’s very hard to sell cows because nobody trusts herding at the moment. There’s not enough rain and not enough pasture, so it’s difficult to keep a large herd. Sometimes you have to travel for three or four days with your cows to find water. Some animals don’t make it. It’s risky to buy cows, and it hurts you emotionally as well as economically – you are close to your animals, you don’t want to see them suffer.’ He shakes his head sadly. ‘The only people who buy cows these days buy them not to herd but to slaughter. Nobody can afford to tend them. Everyone is saving his sous, hoping that the climate will get better and the rains will return.’

Fula herders have no other source of income than their cattle. They can sell milk only on market days (as Youssouf explains, if you are two hundred miles from a market and have no means of refrigeration, you must drink the milk yourself), so most of the money they make comes from selling cows. They do not need to sell very often, of course, for their living expenses are minimal -they have no rent or mortgage to pay, no vehicles bar their feet, and the open spaces, the vaulting skies and the company of their herds provide sufficient pleasure that they do not yearn for the opiates of modernity. ‘We only sell when we have to, to buy food,’ says Youssouf. ‘We don’t like to sell. We love our cows, it’s hard to part with one.’ Today, however, even these fire sales cannot be relied on. The prices of stock are collapsing. Later in the year, as famine tightened its deadly grip, we would hear of aid agencies buying up thousands of sickening cows at rock bottom prices and taking them off for immediate slaughter. Seeing their beloved animals on the point of death and diminishing in value by the hour, the starving Fula would have no choice but to sell.

After an afternoon sleep, we return to the market in the early evening. It has quietened somewhat, but there is still a buzz about the town as the jamboree dies down. In the lengthening shadows under the trees, the inspections of goats continue. A few thin specimens are sold, the deal sealed with a handshake. A man in a red turban and white robes walks off with a small goat cradled in his arms like a baby. He pauses by a group of friends who are sitting in the dust, and puts his purchase on the ground to show them. They nod approvingly, and the man picks the animal up and continues on his way. People start to wander back to their villages in groups, chatting and laughing, discussing the day’s business. The rebel bull that was tied to the tree is led off by three wary herders. A thin cloud of dust floats on the air, filtering the fading sunlight. We stand for a while, leaning against a tree and watching as the herds of cattle trudge off into the distance across the endless, dusty plain. An old man in a white robe and skullcap is standing beside us with the small flock of sheep he has brought in to sell, most of them by now sitting quietly on the ground. I ask him how his day has gone. He nods in acknowledgement of my question. ‘Un peu,’ he says: a little. He seems satisfied with that, and turns to start untying his charges in preparation for the journey home.

It is difficult to speak to Burkinabes about the effects of hunger; people are understandably reluctant to talk about it. But food shortages are a reality from which northern Burkinabes in particular can never escape. Many live in a constant state of semi-starvation. ‘Even now, before the drought season starts, there is hunger,’ says Karim, with whom we spend the last few hours of market day chatting in front of his shop. ‘Food prices are still very high, and there is a lot of malnutrition.’

Few places in the world have higher proportions of under-nourished children than the Sahel. Malnutrition accounts for half of the region’s child deaths, while those who survive episodes of acute hunger are left more vulnerable both to disease and to the stunting of their mental and physical growth (the spindly children we see in Dori may never fully recover from being denied sustenance during the 2005 drought). But while childhood hunger is a disaster for individuals, it is the effect of famine on adults that can destroy societies. If famine takes the life of a child, he or she can be replaced and the family or community can eventually pick itself off the ground, but if adults die there is nobody to do the replacing, and nobody to feed others, care for the sick, or help a community regroup after the crisis recedes.

Adult malnutrition is an under-investigated subject, with childhood hunger attracting the greater part of research funding. But in 1944 an extraordinary experiment on a remarkable group of young men gave the world a new insight into the effects of food shortages on adults, and showed how a sudden drop in caloric intake can wear down even the strongest of minds and bodies.

As the Second World War entered its death throes and the liberation of Europe began, stories began to emerge that hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nazi-occupied territories were starving. These stories came to the attention of Ancel Keys, a young professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota in the United States. Keys had previously worked with the US War Department to develop pocket-sized food rations for the military, and he realised that the Allied forces had little idea of what they would find in the countries they were about to free, and no idea of how to cope with hordes of malnourished people. To help advance governments’ and relief agencies’ understanding of the problem, he devised a study. He teamed up with the US Civil Protection Service and placed advertisements for research subjects in its offices and circulars. ‘Will you starve that they be better fed?’ read the strapline. Thirty-six healthy, robust young men, who had conscientiously objected to fighting but wanted to help the war effort in some other way, came forward as volunteers.

For the first three months of the experiment, the men were allowed to eat normally. After that, their food rations were halved and they were subjected to a semi-starvation regime that would reduce each man’s body weight by a quarter (in most famines, semi-starvation, to which the body can with difficulty adapt, is more common than total starvation). For six months the men were fed an unbalanced diet containing approximately sixteen hundred calories per day. This is one-third lower than the caloric intake currently recommended for men by the UK Department of Health, but slightly higher than the average daily intake of the world’s poorest people.

The physiological effects of starvation, beamed regularly into our living rooms in television news stories from drought-hit areas, are by now familiar. As Ancel Keys reported in The Biology of Human Starvation, his account of the experiment, research subjects’ bodies buckled under the pressure of hunger. Their ribs protruded, their skin sagged and thinned, they developed eye problems that would take years to heal, and oedema swelled their limbs (when they were rehabilitated and the swelling in their feet subsided, the volunteers’ height decreased). Not surprisingly, there was a sharp deterioration in the men’s ability to tackle physical tasks. They suffered from sore muscles, headaches, reduced coordination, dizziness and extreme tiredness. While out walking they looked for driveways when crossing streets, to avoid having to step up onto pavements. Keys calculated that for every ten percent of weight lost, the men reduced their energy expenditure by a quarter. (Unlike West African famine victims, of course, the men from Minnesota did not have to withstand the additional energy-drainer of the African heat, or cope with the accumulated effects of a lifetime of under-eating.)

The experiment also had serious psychological impacts. In conditions of total starvation, hunger pangs subside, but with semi-starvation they are a constant companion. The men could think of nothing but food. It haunted their dreams, dominated their conversation, and became the only topic that could rouse their interest. They read cookbooks, studied menus, and hoarded items of crockery. ‘It made food the most important thing in your life,’ reported one. ‘Food became the central and only thing.’ As the experiment progressed, apathy set in. The men grew withdrawn and isolated, unable to muster the confidence to engage in social interaction. A number of them experienced depression, with three suffering severe breakdowns. One man was so stressed he cut off three of his own fingers with an axe. Even the most robust of the volunteers reported heightened anxiety and irritability, and in several cases the psychological damage lasted long after the experiment concluded.

These individual impacts of hunger are mirrored in its effects on communities. Another American academic, Robert Dirks of the University of Illinois, has examined how societies respond to famine. As drought and competition for food in the Sahel make such crises more frequent, what he found may become a familiar pattern.

The first signs of famine are hard to spot. People are used to shortages, and the initial increases in food prices do not cause widespread consternation. As the shortage persists, however, and prices continue to rise, the realisation dawns that this time it is something more serious. A tremor of alarm ripples through the community. People become garrulous and excited as they wake up to the danger. They discuss what is happening and debate what can be done. They talk to everyone, expound their theories, and crowd around those who have opinions or news. They are generous, too, their hunger drawing them together. They share their dwindling resources and hand out scraps of food.

As the famine gathers strength, alarm turns into panic. A few pioneers decide to move in search of food. But where will they go? Anywhere, anywhere but here, it doesn’t matter: there is no food here, so we must try elsewhere. In their confusion they do not consider that other places might have even less food, that in those places, moreover, they will be outsiders, strangers, and therefore last in line at the feeding queue. They do not consider, either, that movement itself is dangerous. Their bodies are weakening by the hour, and moving uses up valuable energy. Exhausted, starving, and thirsting for water, some of the wanderers collapse and die on the way.

With fatigue and hunger come increased irritability and anger. As the crisis deepens people begin to look for scapegoats, for someone to blame. Their frustration turns outwards, often towards their governments, which have failed to prevent this disaster. Sometimes their discontent can flare up into violent protest or the rioting and looting seen in Burkina Faso in recent years (were these the first scenes in a long Burkinabe famine?). This is a dangerous time for a country’s leaders – many governments have been overthrown during the early stages of famines.

But if they can ride the early storm, leaders’ prospects of survival greatly improve. For the protests cannot last. As the hunger continues to gnaw away, relentlessly sapping their energy, the protesters become too weak to maintain their revolt. Like the young men in the Minnesota Experiment, they quieten and withdraw into themselves. Their anger fades, and they concentrate instead on conserving their strength. They stop working and spend their time sleeping or sitting; restlessness gives way to lethargy. They stop talking - the desire for social interaction, so strong in the initial stages, melts away. They hunker down in smaller groups and share food only with a tiny group of close relatives. Visitors are no longer welcome – even the ancient law of hospitality cannot withstand this cataclysm. And since most ceremonies involve sacrificing animals or donating food, the old religious rituals, too, are suspended. It is hoped that the ancestors will understand that such gifts must be temporarily withheld, and that the offerings will be redoubled if the family makes it through.

Outside, in the dusty lanes of the village or the nomad encampment, the world is descending into chaos. Crime mushrooms - the desperate search for food, and for energy-efficient ways of acquiring it, forces people to steal (another sign that Burkina may be in the midst of a long famine: theft from granaries is increasing, and it is no longer safe to leave stocks of food in the fields). As disorder spreads and the populace yearns for someone to restore stability, leaders who have kept a low profile since the earlier unrest re-emerge as people to be respected (the men in the Minnesota Experiment asked to be subjected to stricter authority halfway through). These leaders, moreover, control most of a country’s resources; their subjects have no choice but to bow down before them. During the Russian Revolution political fugitives were forced by famine to hand themselves in to the police. In the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine, hitherto law-abiding citizens committed crimes so that they would be arrested and have access to food. At this point governing becomes easy, and those in power can entrench themselves for when the emergency finally passes.

As the end approaches, even the close family unit, Africa’s most enduring institution, comes under stress. Supplies are so meagre that families can no longer hold. Food becomes more important even than blood ties. First, the elderly are ejected from the home and left to fend for themselves. Then, shockingly, children are cut loose (yet another indicator of Burkina Faso’s long famine: the talibé children, cast out when their families can no longer feed them). Parents take their sons’ and daughters’ rations - in the Irish famine, one observer reported that he had ‘seen mothers snatch food from the hands of their starving children, known a son to engage in a fatal struggle with a father for a potato.’ Children and adults alike are reduced to beasts, their own survival their sole imperative.

Finally, there is silence. Exhaustion overwhelms the survivors. They sit in the dust, alone under the burning sun, and wait to die.

Karim himself may be a victim of his country’s prolonged famine. The eldest of seven children, his parents could not afford to keep him, and when he was six or seven they entrusted him to his maternal grandparents and moved away, joining the three million other Burkinabes living in the Ivory Coast. Karim did not see them again for eleven years. ‘My grandparents are my parents now - I call them mother and father,’ he says sadly as we sit watching the last stragglers from the market making their way home along the darkened street. ‘When I saw my mother again after all that time I didn’t recognise her. She was very upset and cried because I didn’t hug her and didn’t show her any warmth, but how could I? They had abandoned me for eleven years.’

Although he knows that what happened to him is a common occurrence in his country, Karim is still bitter about his parents’ desertion. The pain seems to have weakened his resolve - he is less stoical than most of his compatriots, more prone to self-pity. ‘I have no friends or relatives here in Dori,’ he says. ‘At home in Bobo I have many, but there is only one who really understands me. The rest are not serious. They go out and mess with girls. They have children too young, and then leave the girl alone with the baby.’ His friends do not live up to his ideal of the nuclear family, an ideal perhaps held more strongly because of his own family’s disintegration. He himself intends to marry some day, ‘but not until my life is stable and I can support my wife and children.’

He says he is optimistic that he will soon be back on track, but his words do not convince. He talks often about making plans, perhaps returning to Bobo-Dioulasso, perhaps to Ouagadougou, but although he has plenty of time to think, with the yoghurt shop seeing only a trickle of customers throughout the day, he has alighted on nothing concrete. Like a young Sartrean existentialist, he talks and dreams of action but takes solace instead in thinking and planning. Thrown off course first by his parents’ desertion and later by having to give up his studies, he is still reeling, unable to regroup. The wonder, of course, is that Karim is the exception here rather than the rule, that so many of his fellow West Africans can pick themselves up from setbacks, dust themselves down, and plough on. With my own demons continuing to cast a shadow over the last weeks of our journey (we have decided to bring forward by a month our return home), I can only wish that I too possessed such resilience.

We turn in early that evening in the hope of waking at dawn to catch a ride north. It proves to be a strange night. We are awoken in the middle of it by a maniacal banging on the metal door of our room, accompanied by loud shouts in a language we do not understand. I have been dreaming about being robbed, so I leap out of bed as if on springs. Without thinking, I open the door, but there is nobody there so I dress and walk out to the long balcony that fronts our floor. A petite, pretty African woman is standing there in the darkness. Off to the left, inside, I see a Chinese man lurching drunkenly into another room. The woman apologises in French for the man’s behaviour. He had got the wrong room and was yelling at us to let him in. The Chinese owns the photography shop downstairs and is here on a short visit (the shop never has any customers, and I wonder whether it might be a front for something shadier). The woman was his prostitute.

Once the adrenalin has subsided we manage to go back to sleep, only to be woken soon after by a power cut. Burkina Faso’s towns (although not its villages) have a more reliable electricity supply than those of Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, but power cuts are nevertheless common. When the ceiling fan stops turning you are immediately soaked in sweat, as if somebody has wrung you out like a sponge and all the water inside you has instantly percolated to the surface. We get up off our drenched sheets and open the window in search of cool air, but since the outside temperature too is in the high thirties, our best hope of relief is to wait for the hallowed fan to resume its circular journey.

Outside is darkness, only the stars providing a faint glimmer of light. The sandy lanes between the mud walls that enclose the compounds appear empty, but after some time staring out of the window, off to the right we see a flame. In a lane on the far side of one of the walls, perhaps a hundred yards away from us, a tall, dark figure has lit a fire under a tree. It is difficult to make out what he is doing (we assume it is a man, although we cannot be sure), and even whether he is alone, for once or twice we think we see another, smaller figure on the opposite side of the fire, half-obscured by the mud wall. The flame gradually gathers strength, until it grows almost as tall as the man. What is he doing? It is three in the morning, and baking hot. Why has he lit a fire? Why under a tree, whose lower branches hang perilously close to the flame? Why, indeed, is he awake at this time of night, wandering the deserted streets? He stands looking at his creation, his shadowy companion occasionally drifting into and out of view, so diaphanous that we eventually conclude that he is not some sacrificial lamb but a trick played by the flames. We worry fleetingly that the tree might catch alight and the fire spread through the compounds, but after perhaps thirty minutes, perhaps fewer - time unwinds at this hour - the flame dies down and the mysterious figure, the evidence of his intentions reduced to ash, recedes into the darkness whence he came.

The next day, Saturday, Dori returns to its usual sleepy state. The streets and lanes are empty, the Fula nomads’ straw huts have been packed up and carted off, and the only movement on the plain at the edge of town is of dust clouds dancing in the gentle harmattan breeze. It is as if yesterday’s great spectacle had never happened, as if it were a mirage conjured up by the dry desert heat.

It is time for us to move on, to wade further into the Sahel, to the very edge of the Sahara itself. We hump our bags down to the bus stand and look for a vehicle to take us north. We are shown to a clapped out pick-up truck with two facing wooden benches out back under a metal canopy. Fortunately, we are among the first passengers to arrive and are given a more comfortable seat in the cabin. We settle down to wait for the truck to fill up.

The rutted road from Dori to the far north was until recently infested with bandits, who would hold up the few passing cars and relieve their occupants of money, jewellery, animals and food. The local government put a stop to this practice by placing police checkpoints along the route, but the bandits were not long in finding other ways to make a living. Two months after our passage through northern Burkina, the region would suddenly find itself on the travel blacklists of the British, French and American foreign ministries. Aid workers would be evacuated in haste to the capital, tourists and businesspeople strongly advised to steer clear. American intelligence had got wind of a plot wherein unemployed former bandits would kidnap Westerners and hand them over to an Islamic terror group linked to Al Qaeda. Northern Burkina Faso was pinpointed as the most likely hunting ground.

The West African Sahel is covered in these black spots. At the time of writing, early in 2011, vast swathes of Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and now Burkina Faso are considered unsafe for Westerners to visit. A series of abductions has shaken foreign governments’ confidence and put a stop to the region’s fledgling tourist industry. Attendances at Mali’s great musical showpiece, the Festival in the Desert, have slumped. The Paris-Dakar Rally has had to move to South America. The Sahel is rapidly becoming a no-go zone, and such is the fear Al Qaeda instils that it would only take one kidnapping in a major southern city to put the whole of Mali, Niger or Burkina Faso off limits to foreigners (during our brief stay in the Malian capital, Bamako, when a late night taxi drove us home from a nightclub through the dark, deserted streets, I remember thinking how much more lucrative it would be for the driver if he were to hand us over to kidnappers rather than drop us at our hotel).

The exact provenance of this new threat is unclear. The Afghan arm of Al Qaeda was alleged to be involved in diamond smuggling during Sierra Leone’s civil war, and it may also have had a hand in the cocaine trade through Guinea-Bissau and in heroin trafficking through Nigeria. The group’s Sahelian offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, is thought to have arisen out of an Algerian Islamist movement and established loose links with the Afghan faction at a later date. Some observers believe Algerian security forces are involved, just as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency supports the group in Central Asia, although the government in Algiers vehemently denies this.

These, then, are the rumours. The only facts are a succession of attacks on Mauritanian army barracks, a handful of bombings in Algeria, and a few dozen kidnappings of Westerners. The abducted are snatched in towns or on major roads, sold on to the Islamists, and then marched across the desert to remote camps. Most are eventually freed, their governments either stumping up multi-million dollar ransom payments or persuading their West African counterparts to release convicted terrorists back into their societies in exchange for the captives’ liberty. A few, however, have been less fortunate. A French aid worker died or was executed (again, it is not clear) after the French army botched a raid on the camp where he was being held; two others died in Niger after another bungled French rescue mission; and an English tourist had his throat cut in Mali after his government refused to negotiate over his release.

Whether the kidnappers’ motives are financial or fanatical is uncertain. There are two factions operating in the desert, only one of which so far has blood on its hands (the other, headed by a former cigarette smuggler known as Mr Marlboro, seems more interested in extracting ransoms than punishing infidels). But as they accumulate wealth and grow in power, the demands on the group’s leaders will intensify. Like the region’s dictators, they will not be able just to rest on their laurels and enjoy the fruits of their labours; wealth and power bring obligations, and now that they have money they must share it. Those who have helped them will require recompense - cash and jobs must be doled out to relatives, old friends and other community members. If the leaders saw the kidnappings merely as a quick route to riches, they made a gross miscalculation. As the ransom payments roll in and the number of supplicants swells, the pressure to keep going will prove impossible to stave off.

The group has duly begun to broaden its horizons. In 2010 it made overtures to radical Islamists in northern Nigeria, announcing: ‘We are ready to train your sons on how to handle weapons, and will give them all the help they need – men, arms, ammunition and equipment – to enable them to defend our people and push back the Crusaders.’ Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb appears to be planning expansion, a pan-West African terror network seemingly the goal. The reference to Nigerian ‘sons’ provides a telling clue to their intended methods. The ransom bounties will buy more weapons, better communication systems and faster jeeps, but if they are to extend their holy war across the region, eject the old colonial powers, and bring down insufficiently Islamic governments, it is young men that the terrorists will really need. Al Qaeda’s leaders know that the youth of the Sahel, like the drug mules of Guinea-Bissau and the rudderless fighters in the Sierra Leone war, are for sale. Desperate, poor, and with no other means of carving out a path in life, they have no choice but to sell their bodies to the highest bidder; for jihadists looking to invest their newfound wealth in widening the scope of their operations, they are the obvious first port of call.

As our pick-up truck sets off from Dori, we are unaware that this escalation in Al Qaeda’s activity might threaten Burkina Faso; of more concern to us is whether our conveyance will survive the sixty-mile journey. Four miles outside Dori it breaks down for the first time. Unperturbed, the driver and his young assistant haul a jerrycan round to the front of the truck and pour water into the engine. There is a hole in the radiator, they explain; they have come prepared. Four miles later we break down a second time, the vehicle, whose brakes do not work, rolling slowly to a stop on the empty road as the engine gives out. Again, they pour in water and we continue on our way for another four miles before breaking down a third time. And so on. Eventually, in the middle of what appears to be empty desert, they run out of water. With a lack of hesitation which suggests they have done this many times before, the driver and his boy traipse off into the distance with their jerrycans and evaporate into the heat haze. The passengers sit and wait, boiling slowly in the sun. Most of those on the benches out back fall asleep. We are not yet halfway through our journey.

As the minutes extend into hours, we fall into conversation with the gaunt man sitting next to us. He is from Niger, and has come to Burkina to visit relatives. In an evident effort to look smart, he is wearing a jacket and trousers over a white shirt, but the jacket is too big for him and it hangs off his shoulders as if on a coat rack, and the white shirt is grubby and creased. He tells us that he used to be a talibé child, but escaped when the beatings grew too severe. Now he is an independent tour guide in Niger, but business is bad because tourists, frightened off by the terrorists, have stopped coming. He gives me a crumpled business card – “Ismael Baré, Guide Touristique“, it proclaims – and tells me to call him when I next visit Niger.

After two hours the driver and his assistant return, their jerrycans full of water that they have somehow found in the desert. We continue on our spasmodic journey. Ismael’s destination, Gorom-Gorom, is very close to the Nigérien border, but direct transport is expensive and to save money he has come the long way round, catching a much cheaper bus to Ouagadougou and then heading north from there. This entailed a detour of several hundred miles and an additional fourteen hours of travelling. Unfortunately, however, he has taken inadequate account in his plans of the risk posed by checkpoints. We are stopped twice during the first half of our journey. Each time, scenting a hapless foreigner, and one who being West African and therefore powerless is unlikely to cause them any trouble by complaining, the police manning the barriers summon Ismael out of the truck to question him. His papers are in order, but if he wishes to continue his journey he must nevertheless pay a bribe. The other passengers complain to our driver about the unfairness of it all, but there is nothing anybody can do. Ismael coughs up a total of about eight dollars – almost a week’s average salary. All the savings he made by spending fourteen extra hours on the road are wiped out. As he climbs back into the truck after the second checkpoint, he appears on the verge of tears.

At the transport park in Gorom-Gorom, by which time all the other passengers have been dropped off, Ebru and I switch to another vehicle for the final stretch of the journey. This one, a jeep in good working order, belongs to a local Tuareg man, a physician who also owns the campement in the remote desert village of Oursi where we plan to stay (without your own car or camel, there is no other way to reach the far north). As we hurtle over low sand dunes on a rough track that is barely distinguishable from the surrounding desert, it does not occur to us, the only white people for miles around, how easy it would be for kidnappers to hunt us down.

Oursi is a small village surrounded on three sides by high sand dunes. Its inhabitants are mostly Songhai, but it also hosts an itinerant population of Fula, Tuareg and Bella herders, whose temporary straw shelters abut the periphery of the permanent, mud-brick settlement.

The nomads are drawn here by the lake, the great Mare d’Oursi, which flanks the fourth side of the village. The lake is an oasis. For hundreds of miles in all directions there is nothing but merciless desert, but here, perhaps dug out by a pitying God, this glistening body of water sits like a diamond stud in a woman’s navel. The Mare is a magnet for herders from northern Burkina Faso and southern Mali and Niger, who lead their cattle and camels in from the sand dunes to graze and drink. They are joined by women from the village and other nearby settlements, who draw water or wash clothes on the lake’s grassy fringes. Young girls bend over the mud, burrowing for roots to take home for dinner. Although the water level at this time of year is low, the lake hosts a steady stream of human and animal visitors, all dependent on it for their survival.

Our campement, a scattering of simple straw huts on a low sand dune, lies at the edge of the village. We are separated from the lake by a narrow road and a line of tall, dark trees and low, thorny bushes. To our left as we look towards the water a group of Fula have set up camp, taking advantage of a nearby borehole. The women of the community, who visit the borehole throughout the day to refill jerrycans or clay pots, wear long scarves wrapped over the head and around the neck, for the harmattan here is blowing at full force. Only at night does the storm relent; during the daytime it spews an unceasing horizontal shower of sand along the road, around the straw huts and across the lake. The sun is once again blotted out, although it has left a legacy of intense heat from which the wind provides no relief.

Modernity has made an even smaller imprint on Oursi than on Dori. There are no cars here, no Western clothes, no electricity, television aerials or radios, no foreigners but us. Village life continues as it has for centuries, punctuated only by the weekly market, the advent of the rains, and the dry season exodus of the nomads, whose hemispherical straw huts have not changed since Richard Jobson visited West Africa in 1620. ‘The forme of their houses is always round,’ the explorer wrote, ‘and the round roofes made lowe, ever covered with reedes, and tyed fast to rafters, that they may be able to abide, and lie fast, in the outragious windes and gusts.’

In the early evening we wander down to the lake. Shallow and marshy, its furthest reaches fade away into the dusty haze. With the water level so low we are able to walk far out from shore across the mudflats. Brilliant purple starlings cackle behind us, as if speculating on when we will start sinking. Two Bella women in yellow and blue dresses pass on donkeys, aiming for a waterhole. A few yards ahead of where we stop, a heron stands to attention, while nearby a glossy ibis pecks in the mud. Flocks of small birds wheel above, feasting on clouds of insects. In the distance, only faintly visible in the haze, we can make out the gauzy silhouettes of an untended herd of horses. The heavy scent of mud and grass clogs the air.

Not much happens. We stand watching the birds. The Bella women draw water from a hole in the lake bed. A few boys gather firewood while their sisters scavenge for roots. Back on shore a camel groans plaintively. After a time, two young boys and a girl who have been watching us from afar pluck up the courage to approach us. Barefoot and dressed in scruffy T-shirts and shorts, they walk tentatively in our direction, carving a wide arc in order to bear down on us from the rear. They chirrup at us as they draw nearer. ‘Ça va? Ça va? Ça va?’ they trill, their voices high as songbirds‘. We keep our backs turned, pretending not to hear them, playing the game. When we do not return their greeting they slow down and grow more hesitant. ‘Ça va?’ they call again, more sheepish this time but still creeping closer and giggling. When they are within a few feet I turn round suddenly, waving my arms in the air and roaring. The children, terrified, flee the white man, hollering and wailing. They run and run, not looking back until they are at least half a mile away. Even then, and although we have stayed where we are and are watching after them guiltily, realising that the game has not been taken in the spirit intended, they do not stop running until they have reached the safety of the lakeside trees. As they finally disappear into the bush and out of our lives, I can only hope that I have not scarred their perceptions of white people forever.

Dusk draws in, and people finish their business and drift unhurriedly homewards. Boys carry their bundles of wood back to the village. Girls skip back happily over the mud, shouting greetings at us. Trains of men and women on donkeys make for the far side of the lake, where a thicket of trees hides unseen hamlets. Behind us, far beyond the village, a lone nomad in dark red robes disappears behind a sand dune, heading home to his makeshift shelter.

Our own hut at the campement is designed in the Fula way – a shoulder-height, armadillo-shaped dome with a knee-high entranceway and a woven straw panel acting as a door. Inside is hot and airless, so at night we pull the cane bed out into the open and lie down under a clamouring crowd of stars. We are lulled to sleep by the lowing of cows and the waves of chatter and laughter from the Fula camp, rising and then subsiding, the deep rumble of the men’s voices interrupting only occasionally the sing-song burble of the women. The wind has at last petered out, and we sleep peacefully and well.

We are woken just after dawn by the steady drumbeat of pestle on mortar as the women in the camp begin pounding the day’s millet. By the time the men and children push aside the door panels of their huts and crawl out blinking into the resurgent dust storm, fires have already been lit and those women who have acquired some food are cooking. The sound of human voices drifts lightly across the dunes as morning greetings are exchanged and plans made for the day. While their daughters sweep inside the huts or collect water from the borehole, the men, aware that today is market day, do not tarry long before taking their cattle or goats off to the lake.

The road that passes the campement is a popular route into Oursi’s market. As we sit outside our hut watching, a cavalcade of donkey carts passes. On them sit women in colourful patterned dresses, their faces decorated with ritual scars – a gash across the cheek, a notch or two by the eyes, arrow shapes on the forehead. Their husbands either walk beside them or ride donkeys themselves. There is the usual cheerful chatter. At the Fula camp, a group of women have come in from the sand dunes, each with a baby straddling her back. They stop outside one of the huts and crouch by the low entranceway to greet its occupants. When a woman in a red dress and headscarf emerges, they continue into town together, talking animatedly and excitedly.

We take the lakeside route to the market. Sprawling herds of goats traipse in across the marshy flats. Before them on large brown camels trot proud Tuareg, only their dark eyes visible behind their turbans. Ahead of us a family of Bella ride side by side astride donkeys, their feet dangling almost to the ground. Ebru notices that one of the men is wearing Converse training shoes under his long tunic. Another has a mobile phone around his neck - the trappings of Westernisation, from which Oursi’s remoteness and poverty have for so long shielded it, have made their first tentative inroads.

The market is in the middle of the village. It is smaller and more modest than the Dori spectacular. Here in the arid far north the herding of cattle is dying out, and the market is dominated instead by goats, sheep and the occasional camel. Amid the bleating animals we are pleasantly surprised to see a Tuareg man selling grey slabs of salt brought in from the Sahara. Salt has been mined in the desert for thousands of years, dug up from the pans at Bilma and the quarries of Teghaza and ferried south across the sands by camel trains. In 1352 the legendary Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta described towns and houses with walls built of rock salt and salt slabs for paving stones. Nearly three hundred years later the Moroccan sultan Moulay-Ahmed el-Mansour, observing that ‘the Sahara lives on the salt trade,’ embarked on the successful military campaign to occupy Teghaza that triggered the downfall of the defeated Songhai Empire.

The Moroccans abandoned the Sahel at the end of the seventeenth century, but little else has changed. The people of Oursi – those who can afford it – still use Saharan salt to season their millet. They still follow the old camel trails across the dunes. They still dismantle their huts when the seasons change and move off with their families in search of fresh pastures. It occurs to me that the rise of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb might have the unintended consequence of protecting these rituals, of ossifying the Sahel’s ancient traditions. Now that the governments of Europe and America have ruled this part of the country off limits to foreigners, it may be that the old ways will gain renewed strength, that they will hold out against modernity’s tide, and that those Converse boots, that solitary mobile phone will remain anomalies, curiosities for future generations, slowly fossilising relics from a different, far off world.

Back at the campement in the late afternoon, as the donkey carts and herds of goats make their slow way home, we sit talking to Hassan, the Fula man who looks after the huts. Tall, thin and fine-featured, with the long straight nose characteristic of his people, he wears a white turban over a loose blue shirt and trousers. It is hot, and the harmattan has been blowing all day. Lacking turbans of our own, Ebru and I spend much of our time towelling a gritty film of sand and sweat off our necks and faces.

Hassan is a reluctant employee. When I ask him if he has ever been a herder, he looks at me as if I am stupid. ‘Yes. I’m a Fula,’ he replies once he has recovered his composure, his ethnicity and the pastoral life inseparable in his mind. ‘I had over forty head of cattle. In the dry season I would take them to Mali and stay there until the rains. Then I would bring them back here. But the weather has changed. There used to be grass and water, but not now.‘ Like many other Fula, Hassan has had to give up the herding life. ‘The cows can’t survive the long journeys,’ he says sadly. ‘Most of my herd died, the rest we had to kill to eat. I only have eight cows now.’

Forced to find a job in Burkina Faso’s threadbare (and now threatened) tourism industry, Hassan spends his days sitting and staring into space, thinking of lowing herds and patient journeys. He breaks off his reveries only to greet those passing on the road. We sit in silence for a few minutes, our host contemplating, Ebru and I struggling to find words of comfort, as if someone has died. Eventually, he awakes from his daydream. ‘The people of Oursi are tired,’ he says quietly. ‘Many have had to move to Ouagadougou to hawk in the streets. They don’t know commerce, they only know herding, but there’s nothing for them here.’ For the moment, Hassan is resisting the pressure to move south. He hangs on in the Sahel, clinging to the hope that the climate will relent, that his old life will once again become feasible, and that one day he will be able to quit the dull, confining job in the campement and go back to his ambling herds.

A few days later we make our way back to the capital. In the weeks since we were last there it has warmed up. The harmattan has eased off, reduced to the occasional blast of hot dry wind, and the sun is making up for lost time. The midday temperature reaches forty-five degrees. In the streets, drifts of prone bodies are piled up in the shade of walls, sleeping through the hottest hours. Only towards the tail end of the afternoon does the city stir again, but nobody can do much or walk very far or fast. There is nothing for it but to sit still and stare, conserving the energy that the heat is attempting to suck from you. Even at midnight the temperature remains in the high thirties. Life has slowed to a crawl.

My state of mind is less fragile than during our previous spell in the city, but the heat plays dangerous tricks, and if you do not respect it, it will destroy you. One afternoon, after walking no more than two hundred yards, I feel dizzy and have to sit down on a step outside a bank. The security guard brings me water. ‘Next month it will be even hotter,’ he warns. ‘You can’t walk from one side of the street to the other. It’s so hot you can go mad.’ The following day I am again out walking, in the late afternoon. It feels hot, but by breathing life into the otherwise motionless air the gusts of wind give you the impression of relative comfort. The wind is deceptive, however. In reality it makes no difference to the temperature; it is still murderously hot, the sun still pounds you with its hammering rays. I see a young man marching down the street with a jagged rock in his hand and a homicidal look on his face. He appears to have come down with the soudanité, and four or five other men have to restrain him from smashing the rock into his terrified target’s face. Continuing on my way down one of the city’s broad avenues, I suddenly find that I have veered off a straight line and drifted into the oncoming traffic. Only after two or three seconds do I realise where I am and steer back, shaken, towards the dusty verge.

It is time, it seems, to go home. I talk about carrying on for a few more weeks, but Ebru, the more sensible partner, has had enough, not least of worrying about me. Defeated, we make for the Air France office to bring our flight forward. We are left with just three more days in the country.

Large parts of those days are spent in our hotel, keeping out of the heat and hoping that nothing else will go wrong before we reach the safety of home. Over breakfast of omelettes and coffee one morning we meet Jan, a Christian woman who works in the hotel restaurant. A mother of three, she has had her job for twelve years, a long time in a region where only a tiny minority are formally employed. A job, however, does not mean financial security; Jan earns in a month what our double room costs for a night. She lives far away in the suburbs, in a district without running water or electricity but where rents are cheap, and comes to work every day on a moped. Before she leaves home she does the housework, fetches water from the well, and dresses and feeds her children. Then she oils and straightens her hair and dresses herself, Western-style, in a skirt and blouse. Her husband, a waiter in a café, takes the two eldest children to school, with the youngest entrusted to a grandparent.

Jan’s position is under threat. Business is bad, and the hotel’s owners have recently cut staff salaries. This prompted one of her colleagues to quit, and since the owners have no intention of finding a replacement, Jan now has to do two jobs, starting at six in the morning and finishing at eight at night, for the same pay as before. Petrol eats up half of what she earns, and as her wages fall and fuel prices continue to climb she will soon be unable to afford to work here. She has asked for a pay rise to reflect the increased workload, but her bosses told her that if she is unhappy she should leave. ‘They told me there are plenty of people searching for jobs,‘ she says, her brow furrowing in anger. Unfortunately, they are right.

Like most West Africans, who are eternally concocting schemes to improve their lot, Jan has made plans to get back on her feet. If she has to leave the hotel, she tells us, she will set up as an onion trader. Once a week, she will travel by bus to her ancestral village in the north-west and buy sacks of onions from farmers. After spending a night in the village, she will return with her sacks to Ouagadougou the following morning and sell them to market women. ‘It is hard to find jobs,’ she explains, ‘especially for women. Trading is a better career for women.’ From the comfort of the hotel restaurant Jan will be plunged into a life on the streets. I wonder what will become of her. Will she become one of those desperate hawkers who besiege buses or fight – sometimes with their fists – for your custom in the markets? Will her kindly disposition give way to the pushiness and cunning demanded on the streets? Will her soft, warm face become hardened and aged in the struggle? She seems optimistic, taking the imminent upheaval in her stride. How else, after all, can she respond? Events are beyond her control; there is nothing for it but to adapt, to keep going.

She takes comfort in religion. Christians are in a minority in Burkina Faso, but Jan has recently added one to their number by converting her husband from Islam. She is delighted, and as the conversation switches from her problems at work to the glories of Christ the gloom lifts from her face. ‘We’ve been married for fifteen years,’ she says in her lilting West African French. ‘We got married in church. He was Muslim but he wasn’t very religious so he didn’t mind. I’ve been trying to persuade him to become a Christian ever since, but he always said he didn’t want to convert or didn’t have time. Every Sunday I take my three children to church - he is the only one who doesn’t go.‘ The combined artillery of cajolery and ostracism had no effect; her husband‘s defences held out. Finally Jan resorted to more radical measures. ‘I prayed solidly for three months and every Wednesday and Friday I fasted, going without food and water.’ Eventually her asceticism bore fruit. ‘One day he woke up and said he wanted to become a Christian,’ she beams. ‘He will be baptised on Easter Sunday.‘

Jan is a member of the Mossi, the largest of Burkina’s ethnic groups. Traditionally a tribe of horsemen, they are ruled by the Moro Naba, the King of the World, who oversees the activities of the country’s various royal courts from his palace in Ouagadougou. The Mossi kingdom dates back to the fifteenth century. It was famously close-knit and well organised, with power centralised in its leader, and while other tribes were devastated by slavers and marauding Muslims, the feared Mossi cavalry held out against repeated invasions. Visiting at the end of the nineteenth century, the French historian Louis Tauxier noted ‘the absolute security that the population enjoys, where everywhere else war and slave-raiding parties desolate villages. One notices with envy the Mossi peasants who go out alone to their fields, where among other groups the head of the family must have, night and day, his weapon ready in his hand.’

The arrival of the French colonisers put an end to this serenity – the horsemen’s muskets and spears could not compete with European machine guns - and Paul Voulet’s destruction of Ouagadougou marked the end of Mossi hegemony in the region. But Voulet placed a puppet king on the throne and left the existing power structures largely intact; although gravely weakened, therefore, the institution of the Moro Naba survived the colonial period. The Mossi king remains an influential figure today, and, is regularly consulted by the country’s president, Blaise Compaoré (even the most modern and powerful of dictators cannot escape the clutches of old Africa).

On our last day, a Friday, Jan advises us to get up early to attend the Nabayius Gou, the weekly ceremony at which lesser Mossi kings and other local dignitaries pay their respects to their ruler. We rise at six and take a taxi to the palace. Closed to the public, the large, plain building sits behind high walls in the middle of an expanse of dry earth. Although we have arrived at the scheduled time, there is nobody around. The taxi driver points us to a large, tree-lined rectangle of bare ground by one of the walls, and we trudge over and sit in the dust to wait.

After some time, a man with a white horse materialises by the palace. Holding the horse’s reins in one hand, the man sits down on the ground, cross-legged, and waits. A little later two older men – dignitaries of some sort - walk in from the road and lower themselves carefully to the ground, facing the palace. They too sit and wait. Other men arrive in dribs and drabs, many on foot, some on mopeds, a few in battered old Mercedes. They wear long gowns and fez-shaped caps; many have swords attached to their waists in tasselled scabbards. They are all men, mostly old, preserving an ancient rite in the face of the weakening interest of the young. The only onlookers are tourists or expatriates - few Africans punctuate the thin line of spectators standing under the trees, and fewer still who are below the age of thirty. In decades past, great crowds of people would have gathered here to pay homage to their beloved leader, but today’s disengaged youth see no meaning in the ritual. The ceremony continues without them, the old patriarchs, undeterred, clinging on tenaciously, raging against the dying light, re-enacting the age-old scenes for their own benefit while outside, beyond the rectangle of trees, the modern world rushes obliviously past.

The men in fezzes sit in rows facing the palace. They are dignitaries of different ranks - chiefs from outlying districts, ministers of the Mossi kingdom, and assorted other courtiers. There is a strict hierarchy, with the most important at the front and lesser minions at the rear. Before he takes his place, each new arrival must first sit on the ground in front of the most senior dignitaries, bow until his head touches the hard earth, and then, as he rises, rub his hands together in a circling motion and splash imaginary dust over his face. Having paid his respects in this timeworn way – the splashing of dust as a symbol of deference was recorded by Arab merchants in West Africa a millennium ago - he is free to sit with his colleagues and join in their conversation and laughter, which have not abated since the first two old men arrived.

There are, as ever, conflicting histories of the Nabayius Gou. In the most romantic version, the wife of an eighteenth-century Moro Naba was kidnapped by a hostile tribe while on a visit to her family in the north-west of the kingdom. The ruler of the world set out to rescue her, but before he could saddle his horse he was stopped in his tracks by courtiers, who told him he was needed in the capital to defend his territory against the enemies who were massing at its borders. The king, putting duty before his broken heart, reluctantly stayed, and the ceremony to celebrate such selfless dedication to his people was born.

Once everyone – perhaps two dozen notables – has taken his place, a lone figure, standing not far from the white horse, takes out a crooked stick and begins to beat a drum cradled under his elbow. The man is a griot, from the ancient storytelling caste of West Africa, fulfilling his age-old calling of singing the praises of his king. As he drums, three men beside him chant a dirge. Presently, the Moro Naba himself emerges from a low door in the wall of the palace. A large, imposing man, he is resplendent, but fearsome, in the bright red that symbolises war. He sits on the ground as three of the most important dignitaries break ranks and walk over to beg him not to sally forth to rescue his beloved. They bow, rub their hands together, and douse themselves with imaginary dust, before returning to join their still-chattering colleagues.

A cannon is fired. The Moro Naba withdraws into his palace. He re-emerges soon after dressed in white, the colour of peace. A collective sigh of relief is breathed, and the King of the World, closing the door on this glimpse of old Africa amid the din of the modern city, disappears for the last time. The ceremony is over; our journey too. The dignitaries rise to their feet, say their farewells, and we and the other bystanders disperse with them into the teeming streets.