In 1932 it was partitioned between Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and French Sudan. The country at first was attached to Upper Senegal–Niger (as that colony was called from 1904 to 1920 now Mali) but was organized as a separate colony, Upper Volta (Haute-Volta), in 1919. The French divided the country into administrative cercles (“circles”) but maintained the chiefs, including the morho naba, in their traditional seats. An Anglo-French convention of 1898 fixed the frontier between France’s new acquisitions and the northern territories of the Gold Coast. The Gurma accepted a French protectorate in 1897, and in that same year the lands of the Bobo and of the Lobi were annexed by the French (though the Lobi, armed with poisoned arrows, were not effectively subdued until 1903). France obtained a protectorate over the Yatenga empire in 1895, and the French officers Paul Voulet and Charles Paul Louis Chanoine (also known as Julien Chanoine) defeated the morho naba Boukari-Koutou (Wobogo) of Mossi in 1896 and then proceeded to overrun the Gurunsi lands. The German explorer Gottlob Adolf Krause traversed the Mossi country in 1886, and the French army officer Louis-Gustave Binger visited the morho naba in 1888. Headed by an emperor, the morho naba (“great lord”), the Ouagadougou Mossi state defeated attempted invasions by the Songhai and Fulani empires yet maintained valuable commercial links with major western African trading powers, including the Dyula, the Hausa, and the Asante.īurkina Faso: History European exploration and colonization Several Mossi kingdoms developed, the most powerful of which was Ouagadougou, located in the centre of the country. About the 15th century ce, conquerors on horseback invaded the region from the south and founded the Gurma and Mossi kingdoms, in the eastern and central areas, respectively. The Bobo, the Lobi, and the Gurunsi are the earliest known inhabitants of the country.

Early historyĪxes belonging to a Neolithic culture have been found in the north of Burkina Faso.

The capital, Ouagadougou, is also the country’s largest city and has been the cultural centre of the region since it became the capital of the Mossi kingdom of Wagadugu (Ouagadougou) in the 15th century. A landlocked country in western Africa, Burkina Faso gained independence from France in 1960 and was originally known as Upper Volta before adopting its current name in 1984. History of Burkina Faso, survey of the important events and people in the history of Burkina Faso.

Capital of upper volta