Mossi

PRONUNCIATION: MOH-say
ALTERNATE NAMES: Moose, Moshi, Mosi
LOCATION: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire
POPULATION: 5 to 6 million in Burkina Faso, 1.2 million in Côte d'Ivoire
LANGUAGE: Moré
RELIGION: traditional religion (3 main components: creator, fertility spirits, ancestors)
RELATED ARTICLES: Vol. 1: Burkinabe; Ivoirians

INTRODUCTION

The Mossi make up the largest ethnic group in Burkina Faso. Because of extensive migration to more prosperous neighboring countries, Mossi also are the second-largest ethnic group in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). The Mossi occupied the interior lands within the “boucle de Niger” (“great loop of the Niger River”) and thus controlled trade between the empires along the great Niger River and the forest kingdoms to their south. The three Mossi kingdoms were known for their resistance to Islam in a region where all other kingdoms and empires were Muslim, at least in their ruling elites, after about the 10th century. Mossi culture nonetheless shows Muslim influences.

The Mossi's story of their origins involves the conquest of native farming peoples by immigrant cavalry soldiers from the northeast, toward what is now northern Nigeria. From the beginning, the Mossi people moved, and their idea of society included people moving in, out, and around.

Mossi migration increased notably after the French conquest of the Mossi in 1896–97; the Mossi were one of the last peoples in Africa to be brought under colonial rule. Like the other colonial powers, the French wanted their colonies to generate money for their European homeland. In less than 10 years after the first conquest, the French demanded that the Mossi pay taxes in French francs. Traditional Mossi taxes to chiefs and kings had been paid in goods, and cowrie shells had served as money. By making the Mossi pay in French money, the colonial government required them to grow, dig, make, or do something the French were willing to pay for. As little was grown or mined in Mossi country that the French wanted to buy, many Mossi were forced to migrate to the Ivory Coast (then a French colony) and the neighboring British Gold Coast (now Ghana) to earn money there. The demand for labor on the mainly African-owned coffee and cocoa farms in the coastal forest in those countries coincided with the dry season in the savanna of Burkina Faso, so Mossi men could migrate south between growing seasons and bring money back to their families. Mossi men also traveled widely as traders and as soldiers in the French army.

The Mossi were organized into three kingdoms, Tenkodogo, Wagadugu, and Yatenga, along with a number of buffer states around their edges. All of them together are sometimes described as “the Mossi empire,” but there has never been a time when all the Mossi were unified under one ruler. Each kingdom was ruled by a king, with a court of officials who were responsible for various functions, such as defense, and who governed different areas of the kingdom. Within such areas, groups of up to 20 villages were ruled by a district chief, and each village had its own chief. There is one word for all these rulers—kings, district chiefs, and village chiefs: Naba. A Naba is a man who has been properly installed as ruler by the community and thereby has been granted the nam, which is the religious power to rule other people. A person who seized power without being properly chosen and without the correct rituals of installation would not be regarded as a real ruler by the Mossi. The fact that the political system of the Mossi was so closely connected to their religion was the main reason that their rulers resisted conversion to Islam at the time when their counterparts to the east and west across the savanna were accepting Islam. Even when individual kings converted, as happened once or twice, the society as a whole did not. Not until the French conquest showed that divine protection of the traditional system was not absolutely guaranteed did Mossi people in any numbers convert to Islam or to Christianity.

Nabas were chosen by the court officials from among the sons of the previous Naba. While in principle the oldest son should succeed his father, the ministers tried to ensure that the new Naba was capable of ruling well. In the case of kings, who had many wives, the number of eligible sons might be large. One of the ways that the Mossi states expanded their territory was that sons who were not chosen to succeed their fathers founded new political units on the edges of the Mossi area, conquering (or persuading) local peoples who had the same general way of life, but lacked kingdoms, to become Mossi.

Exactly when the Mossi states were founded is still debated, but a Mossi raid on Timbuktu in 1329 is recorded in Arabic histories written in that city.

LOCATION AND HOMELAND

The Mossi homeland is the central portion of Burkina Faso, known until 1984 as Upper Volta for its location on the three branches of what in Ghana becomes the Volta River.

Because the Mossi were the dominant people in the region before and during colonial rule, their population statistics in relation to the modern nation have been affected by political factors. In 1962, the French counted 10% of the population and estimated from that sample survey that 48% of the total population was Mossi. However, there has been suspicion that the number 48% was picked by the French so that the Mossi, who already were most of the leaders of the new country, would not have an outright majority as the Republic of Upper Volta became independent. The following censuses of 1975 and 1985 did not publish national totals for the country's ethnic groups, in order to avoid ethnic conflict. Therefore, estimating the Mossi population is a matter of dividing the national population roughly in half. In 1995, the estimated national population of Burkina Faso was 10,422,828, of whom some 5 to 6 million would be Mossi.

Burkina Faso is roughly the size of Colorado, with the Mossi area in the center running from Tenkodogo in the southeast to Ouayagouya in the northwest. The national capital, Ouagadougou, is also the capital of the largest and strongest Mossi kingdom, which has the same name. The importance of Ouagadougou as a kingdom was emphasized by the fact that its Naba was the only one whose title was not just the name of the kingdom, district, or village attached to the word Naba, but was Mogho (or Moro) Naba, meaning “ruler of the world.” The country is mainly savanna, or grassland, with scattered trees; unfarmed land is brush and trees. The extreme north of the country is part of the true Sahel, the transition zone between the Sahara desert and the savanna grasslands. The few rivers and streams are seasonal, with only scattered pools keeping water through the dry season; most water used by the Mossi is drawn from wells.

As the economies of Ghana and the Ivory Coast improved, and as transportation became easier, more and more of the Mossi did not merely migrate seasonally to work as farm laborers, but settled and became farmers or city or town dwellers. As a result, there is a network of Mossi across all three countries, greatly expanding opportunities for relatives back home. The Mossi are the second-largest ethnic group in the Ivory Coast; they were the majority of the 1.2 million Burkinabe counted in the 1988 census.

LANGUAGE

The Mossi language is Moré. It is a language of the Gur group within the larger Niger-Congo language family. Like many African languages, Moré uses tones (differences in pitch) as well as individual sounds to distinguish meanings; also, like many African and African-influenced languages, it indicates both tense and “aspect.” That is, a verb indicates both whether an action is in the past, the present, or the future, and also whether it is an ongoing action or one happening only at one particular time. Mossi speech, both in everyday use and in formal political contexts, is rich in proverbs.

A person's name is not a random choice by his or her parents, but it also reflects circumstances of birth. Names can refer to events that happened during pregnancy or just before or during childbirth. A baby might be named Gyelle if his or her mother accidentally broke an egg while she was pregnant. Many names refer to sacred places or forces whose protection was sought for the birth or the baby.

As with many other West African peoples, there are Mossi names indicating the day of the week when a person was born: Arzuma (boy) or Zuma (girl) signifies a child born on Friday, whereas Hado was born on Sunday and Larba on Wednesday.

Being born during a festival may also be reflected in a person's name. Festivals have one or more names associated with them, which are given to a baby born at that time; often the name is the same name as that of the event: Basga, for example, or Tengande. Such events might reflect Muslim rather than traditional Mossi holidays. Lokre is a name for someone born at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, while Kibsa names one born during the festival of Tabaski forty days later, when Muslims sacrifice a ram in honor of the biblical patriarch Abraham.

In much of Africa, high rates of infant mortality meant that twins (who were each usually smaller than other babies, and therefore weaker) were less likely to survive; twins therefore have a special religious significance (sometimes seen as a blessing, sometimes as the opposite, but almost always different) and have special names. For the Mossi, there are special names for twins, Raogo (“boy”) and Poko (“girl”), with diminutive forms for a “younger” twin of the same gender, the younger being the first one born and therefore in the uterus for a shorter time. There are even special names for the second, third, and fourth children born after a set of twins.

Children who are born in Muslim or Christian families, or persons who convert to those religions, have names common to Muslims and Christians everywhere in the world, which are Arabic forms of Quranic and Biblical names for Muslims (Adama, Aminata, Binta, Azara, Fatimata, Issa, Issaka, Karim, Mariam, Moussa, Ousman, Saidou), and French forms of Biblical names and (for Roman Catholics) saints' names (Abel, Daniel, Elisabeth, Etienne, Jean, Marie, Moise, Pascal, Pauline, Philippe, Pierre).

FOLKLORE

While there have always been some Mossi who were Muslim and literate in Arabic, in general there were no written records in Mossi society. Specialist praise singers, usually called griots across the West African savanna, were the keepers of royal traditions and genealogies, but the entire society relied upon folk-tales and proverbs to concentrate wisdom and experience and to pass them on to succeeding generations.

The Mossi's account of their founding is handed down through an oral tradition that nicely exemplifies important and necessary elements for such an origin myth. Long ago (over 40 generations), a king of the Dagomba, Mamprusi, and Nankana peoples in what is now northern Ghana, Naba Nedega, had a daughter whom he would not allow to marry because he valued her warrior skills so highly. Therefore, Princess Nyennega took a horse and fled north into what is now Mossi country, where she married a local man. Their son was named Ouedraogo (“stallion”) and after growing up with his maternal grandfather, he returned with Dagomba cavalry and conquered Tenkodogo and its indigenous people, his father's ethnic group, the Bisa. The Mossi people came from the inter-marriage of Ouedraogo and his cavalry with Bisa women. To this day the royal families of the two largest Mossi kingdoms, Ouagadougou and Yatenga, are named Ouedraogo. There is a statue of Princess Nyennega on horseback in the city of Ouagadougou to commemorate the story.

The tale of Princess Nyennega and Ouedraogo highlights several important points that illustrate how such stories serve as the basis for organized society. Princess Nyennega is a woman, who marries a man she finds in what becomes Mossi country. This is important for two reasons. First, like most African peoples, Mossi do not believe land can be bought or sold; it is in trust from the ancestors to the living, who must maintain it for generations still to come. Land is owned by the family that originally “domesticated” it by clearing uninhabited wilderness. Secondly, Mossi, like about two-thirds of peoples in the world, trace family membership and family names through the lineage of fathers and their fathers.

For the Mossi to be legitimate owners of their land, then, they had to have a story tracing their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the land, even though the kingdoms were founded by members of a cavalry (the dominant military technology of the West African savanna until this century) who were immigrants. By making the founding cavalry leader a son of a local man and an immigrant princess, the Mossi validate their claim to their kingdoms. That founder's name, and its perpetuation in the name of the royal clan, underlines the importance of horse soldiers in creating kingdoms where people previously had lived only in extended families.

RELIGION

The Mossi are like many African peoples in having traditionally had a religion with three main components. There is a belief in an all-powerful creator, Wende, usually discussed as Wennam, “God's power.” Nam is the power ritually granted to a naba to rule over humans. While Wende is all-powerful, he is also very distant and not concerned with the daily lives of people. More important in day-to-day religion are generalized spirits of rain and the earth, which govern fertility and crops, and the role of ancestors in the lives of their descendents.

The fertility spirits are worshiped as needed, by sacrifices of sheep or goats, or more often of chickens or guinea fowl, and of eggs by the poorest people, at sacred spots in the landscape, such as an outcropping of rocks or a notable baobab tree. Offerings of millet beer and millet flour in water also accompany prayers at such times when a whole village may gather, for example, to seek rain in time of drought.

The most immediate part of religion, however, is the part played by ancestors. Families are traced in the male line from founding ancestors through the living to future generations. The ancestors watch over their descendents, punishing them or rewarding them for their behavior. The cycle of rituals is mostly concerned with them. A household has a shrine, an inverted pottery bowl, with sacred plants and objects under it, which is honored once a year at the time of the harvest festival, when sacrifices and offerings are made to this shrine and to graves of male ancestors (which are located near where their houses stood); these offerings are like those given to the earth spirits.

MAJOR HOLIDAYS

The Basega festival comes in December, after the millet crop has been harvested. It is a festival of thanksgiving, thanking the ancestors for their part in bringing in a successful harvest and asking their aid with the coming year's crops. It is a family-based ritual even though it takes place in a political context. That is, a family cannot sacrifice to its ancestors until the day when their district chief sacrifices to his, and the chief cannot do so until the king has done so. While the king's Basega is a very large and impressive ceremony (with the luxury of bulls being sacrificed), witnessed by many of his subjects who partake in feasts he offers, strictly speaking he is sacrificing to his ancestors for his harvest, not for the whole kingdom's. Sacrifices and food offerings are also made on special occasions, such as the threshing of a family's millet.

The Muslim community pays formal respects to the king at his Basega but celebrates its own holidays, as do the Christians. Most Mossi Christians are Roman Catholic; the first African Cardinal in that Church was a Mossi. About one percent of Mossi are Evangelical Christians, members of the Assemblies of God Church.

While most Mossi are not formally educated—because the nation's poverty limits the number of schools, and children are needed for farming, herding, and household work—those children who do attend school have frequent holidays, since the schools and the government observe secular holidays as well as Muslim and Christian ones. The anniversary of the date marking full independence from France, 5 August 1960, has long been a holiday, as has December 11, the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic in 1958. Since the revolution of 1983, its anniversary, August 4, has been the official national day. National holidays are celebrated with parades and, in towns and cities, bicycle races.

Besides the national and religious holidays, the need to mobilize people for special tasks makes some days special events in a given community. Until modern times, the Mossi used horses (for the rulers and the rich) and donkeys for transporting goods and people but not for pulling plows. Farming was, and mainly still is, done with short-handled iron hoes. Tasks, such as preparing fields for planting, weeding them, harvesting millet, and threshing it, as well as house-building jobs, such as making a thatched roof and lifting it onto an adobe (mud-brick) hut, requires more labor than an individual household can supply. So, for such occasions, the family whose fields are being hoed or whose millet is being threshed summons neighbors and relatives (more or less the same people), prepares millet beer and food and hires drummers to provide a rhythm for working. People gather, work for intervals, take breaks for food and conversations, and work some more. People have a good time, the work gets done, usually in a morning, and in return the family being helped owes similar labor to the people who have helped them. These are not formally holidays, but they are special days.

On a more regular cycle, and one going beyond individual villages, there is market day. In Mossi society almost everyone is a farmer, but some people are also merchants in a cycle of markets. Because buyers want as many choices as possible, and a merchant can be in only one place at a time, each region of Mossi country has an organized market system. Each day is a market day somewhere within a walkable distance, but only one place has a market on a particular day. Each market recurs every third day. When a market falls on a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, which happens every 21 days, it is especially large and draws people from greater distances. This is so even though most Mossi are not Muslim.

RITES OF PASSAGE

From birth until death (and, indeed, after death, in the ceremonies honoring ancestors), major transitions in a person's life are marked with formal rites of passage. In much of Africa, the number three is associated with males and four with females. A Mossi baby is formally presented to the community three days after birth for a boy and after four days for a girl. At that time, the baby's name is announced, and the child is formally welcomed into its lineage and becomes a bearer of the family name.

In the past, children at one or two years of age were given distinctive facial scars, but since children who are marked in this way may not be enrolled in school due to modern laws against the practice, markings have been eliminated.

Before puberty, both boys and girls, in separate groups, are circumcised. Boys go in groups of 15 to 30 to bush camps, where they stay for 90 to 100 days. This allows time for them to recover from the operation, to form a group that will be closely linked for the rest of their lives, and, not least, to be instructed by older men in what they need to learn to become members of society. Full adulthood is marked by marriage.

In a society with few or no written records, the cumulative experience of elders is crucial to everyone's life; for example, an elder might recognize a particular kind of crop blight that no younger person has ever seen before and could be the only one who would know what to do about it, or, at least, what to expect as a result. The great respect shown by all African societies toward elders is in part a recognition of this all-important store of wisdom they hold for the community and is at the same time, and for related reasons, a consequence of the fact that the elders are “almost ancestors” and will soon make the transition from living members of the community to (deceased) spiritual guardians of the community.

Therefore, Mossi funerals are important family and religious events. A funeral is different from a burial, although both are rituals. In a tropical country, burial must occur very soon after death. Men are buried at the edge of their home, just west of the patio area outside the walled family compound. Women are buried in fields; while they are buried in their husband's village, the burial ritual is done by members of their own family, symbolizing their continued membership in it even though they have borne children for, and lived among, their husband's family.

The funeral occurs ordinarily up to a year after a burial and may be very much later. It is the ritual that confirms the transition of the dead person to the ancestors. The next of kin is responsible for the funeral—the eldest son for his father's, for example. If the son were working in another country, in an extreme case a funeral might be held 20 or 30 years after the burial.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Mossi greetings are very elaborate, more so than in most African societies. The persons greeting each other shake hands while each asks how the other is. The questions extend to how each other's wives are, and their children, and their cows, and sheep, and so on. A full Mossi greeting of an honored elder can take half an hour. While the greeting is taking place, the person who is of lower status shows respect to the other by placing himself or herself in a lower position in relation to the other. If a commoner is formally greeting a chief, he will lie down in front of him and symbolically throw dirt onto his head to show how much lower he is in status.

If two people of equal status meet, however, each tries to respect the other by slowly dropping from a standing posture to a crouching one. Since each person is simultaneously trying to show respect to the other one, two people start out standing shaking hands and finish up, still shaking hands, each crouched low and sitting on their heels.

When visiting a household, a guest stands outside the walls of the compound and claps his or her hands to announce his or her arrival. The head of the household then comes out of the walled compound to greet the visitor. Only a close friend or relative would go into the walled compound.

LIVING CONDITIONS

The Mossi live in villages of extended families. The village boundaries may be streams or other natural features, but in general the village is a social unit more than a geographical one. This is because houses are 75 to 100 yards apart and surrounded by fields, so that when the main crop, millet, is fully grown to 10 to 12 feet in height, the houses are invisible to each other. Where one village stops and another begins may not be obvious from the landscape.

The traditional Mossi house is a number of round adobe huts with conical thatched roofs, all surrounded with an adobe wall. The household might include a man, his younger brothers, and their married sons. Each of them, and each wife, would have their own hut, and there would be other huts for kitchens, storage, and the sheep, goats, and chickens. There would also be granaries for storing the threshed millet. Houses face west, and the notion of the house is wider than just the walled compound; it includes a patio-like area of pounded, swept dirt with an awning, where people rest during the day and guests are greeted.

As the modern economy has involved increasingly greater numbers of Mossi, the rural standard of living has changed. Corrugated-aluminum roofs are sometimes seen; they are something of a status symbol although they are hotter and are noisier during rainstorms than the traditional thatched straw. Bicycles are common for transportation, with better-off people owning motorbikes. Transistor radios are also common. Radio programming includes “personal notices” programs that allow people in separate parts of the country to pass messages to each other. Vans have replaced trucks as the main form of long-distance transportation in Mossi country. Most people, even in cities, cannot afford an automobile.

Malaria remains a chronic health problem among the Mossi; the cost of importing malaria-suppressing drugs is so high that most people cannot afford them. The fact that most people are infected with malarial parasites makes them less able to fight off other diseases. Measles is a major health problem for children, for whom it is often fatal. Again, the cost of foreign-made vaccines and the staff and transportation to administer them means that this entirely preventable disease continues as a serious health problem.

The impact on the Mossi of the great Sahelian drought of the 1970s was compounded by the fact that some of the potentially most fertile land, along the larger rivers with year-round water, was uninhabitable due to onchocerciasis, or river blindness. This disease, whose parasite is transmitted by the bite of the black fly, can eventually result in blindness. In the 1970s and 1980s, the world's largest public-health project attempted to eliminate this disease and allow people to resettle from crowded parts of the country into potentially fertile lands that had become infested. This has been done by suppressing the black flies that carry the parasite. But, since the flies can only be suppressed, not wiped out, the new, mostly Mossi, villages will be kept habitable only through regular helicopter spraying of the rivers for the foreseeable future.

FAMILY LIFE

As noted above, traditional Mossi villages are groups of households surrounded by fields, where men related to each other through their fathers live with their wives and children. Because the incest taboo means that a man must marry a woman from another family, women ordinarily live in a village other than the one where they grew up, in a household of closely related men and the women from various other families who have married in. This makes life harder for women, who are outsiders in the household. While many Mossi men have only one wife, there are two reasons wives often want their husbands to have an additional wife or wives: the sheer drudgery of household work makes it useful to have another wife to help, and another wife is equally a stranger and someone to talk to when a husband is surrounded by his relatives for support and advice.

Marriage is ordinarily arranged between families. The idea that the family is a continuous set of kin from ancestors to as-yet-unborn descendants gives the whole lineage a stake in making sure there are children to carry on the family. Since the wives who will bear the children have to come from other families, the whole family is involved in arranging the marriage. Because the reproductive power of the woman is taken away to bear children for a different family, her own family is compensated upon the marriage by payments from her husband and his kin. Traditionally, this “bridewealth” was in the form of cattle and trade goods, but in the modern world there is a wider range of possibilities for payment.

Paying bridewealth is sometimes labeled “bride price” by writers describing societies, such as the Mossi, that practice it, but it does not mean “buying” a wife, any more than the European or Asian custom of dowry meant “buying” a husband. It does underline, though, the fact that marriage in many, if not most, societies is not based upon romantic attraction between two individuals, but instead is a much more complex relationship involving families' need to perpetuate themselves and individuals' need for both male and female skills and roles to make a household economy work. (For example, Mossi men weave cloth, but the women spin the cotton thread from which it is woven.)

In the modern era, with more Western-style education, more ways of earning a living than farming, and, especially, easier long-distance transportation, it is less rare for men and women who have fallen in love to elope if they cannot convince their families to agree to the marriage. It has never been true that all marriages were arranged.

The importance of complementary roles in the daily household routine extends to more than husbands and wives. Children have important roles to play in watching the family's sheep and goats, and in helping to haul water and gather fire-wood for cooking, both of which are major tasks. There is so much work to be done in the kitchen, for example, that if a household does not have a preadolescent girl to help with the cooking, it will foster one from another part of the extended family. Major modern improvements in rural life have been the digging of deeper, cement-lined, year-round wells to ease water hauling, and the acquisition of gasoline-powered mills to grind millet seeds into flour, previously done by hand with a grindstone.

It seems that household sizes are getting smaller in modern Mossi society as more people pursue more varied ways of earning a living and become more involved in a money economy, in which they are more interested in spending their cash on their own children and are less involved in the joint farming of a larger household. But, it is certainly not unusual for households to have more than one wife, or more than one set of husbands and wives. The high infant mortality rate and the lack of social security payments for most people still place a premium on having lots of children to ensure that some will survive to help in making a living and to support their parents in their old age. The infant mortality rate has dropped in the last 30 or so years from roughly 50% to an estimated 11%.

Within the walled compound of the Mossi house, each wife has her own hut for herself and her children and prepares meals for herself and for them, with her husband joining each in rotation if he has more than one wife.

Pets are not usual in Mossi society. Dogs are used for hunting and as watchdogs but are not treated with the affection and pampering that Europeans and Americans usually give them. A rural household will have chickens and guinea fowl, sheep and goats, and sometimes pigeons, as household animals, but they are raised for food, for market, and for sacrifices, and are not pets.

Wealthier Mossi may own cattle, but these are not kept at home. Instead, they are cared for by Fulani herders who live in the unfarmed lands among the Mossi. The Fulani, who live all across the West African savanna, are herders rather than farmers. For the Mossi, having cattle with the Fulani means both that the animals are in the care of specialists and that a man's wealth in the form of cattle may be kept hidden from government tax collectors and from his own relatives. Only in the last 20 or so years have some Mossi begun to use oxen or donkeys to pull plows, and donkey-drawn carts were also introduced only in the modern era.

Horses were the basis of the Mossi kingdoms and chieftain-cies because cavalry was the basis of military power, even after guns began to be traded in from the Ashanti states to the south. The lack of wheeled transportation for hay made it difficult to concentrate horses, and the lack of pastures to keep them in have meant that horses were, and are, status symbols whose cost in care and feeding limits their possession to chiefs and other nobles and a few especially well-off commoners.

CLOTHING

The Mossi grow cotton and weave it into cloth. The traditional loom wove a long strip of plain or patterned cloth about six inches wide. Strips were sewn together to make cloth for clothes or blankets. In pre-colonial times the Mossi exported large “wheels” of cotton strips, carried on donkeys, to other West African peoples. The French greatly encouraged the growing of cotton as a cash crop, as does the Burkinabe government.

While traditional strip-woven cloth is still available, and is still worn, most everyday clothing is made from factory-woven cotton cloth in one-by-two-meter panels. Such cloth is manufactured in Burkina Faso and is also imported.

Women wear a long skirt made of a cloth panel wrapped around the waist. It is now common to wear a top as well, but this is a recent change in rural areas. It is increasingly common for men to wear shirts and trousers, whether of Islamic or European style. Wealthy men and chiefs wore, and wear, richly embroidered robes in the Muslim-influenced style of the savanna. Modern sewing machines have made the embroidery easier to do, but it is still a luxury.

In the last 30 years or so, a major trade in used American clothing has reached into even rural Mossi markets, so that the everyday working outfit of a farmer is likely to be a strip-woven shirt and a pair of cutoff blue-jean shorts. Rubber shoes and sandals have been added to the leather ones Mossi have traditionally worn.

FOOD

The staple of the Mossi diet is millet, along with its relative, sorghum. These crops require less rain, and less regular rain, than wheat. Millet is ground into flour and made into porridge by boiling in water. The result, a loaf-like bowl of somewhat doughy food, is called sagabo in Moré and tô in West African French. One eats it by breaking off a piece with the right hand and dipping it into a sauce made of vegetables, spices, herbs, and, sometimes, meat. The sauce supplies the protein and most of the flavor. Sorghum is used to brew a cider-like beer that is drunk from calabashes, half-gourds, by all except Muslims and Protestant Christians.

Rice was domesticated in West Africa and has long been a luxury food for the Mossi; it is served for weddings and other special occasions. It is cooked to a very soft consistency and formed into balls the size of baseballs and is eaten in the same way as the millet porridge.

Corn (maize) is a recently introduced crop that is grown widely; since it depletes soil nutrients faster than millet and is less tolerant of irregular rain, millet remains the staple food.

Peanuts, also native to West Africa, are widely grown; they are eaten boiled, roasted, and ground into sauces.

The extended families to which people belong are grouped into larger clans. Except for chiefs' families, who must be able to show exactly how a claim to a position is justified, most families do not keep detailed genealogies, but just maintain enough sense of kinship to share lineage land, and in the wider community, to know who is an eligible marriage partner and who is not. Members of clans often cannot state exactly how they are related, but they will share a family name and a claim of common descent from some distant, usually heroic, ancestor. Each clan's story of its origin frequently includes an account of how its ancestor was saved at some point of danger by an animal, which then has a special relationship to the clan's members. One clan would not eat crocodile meat because a crocodile was said to have helped hide its ancestor from his enemies; but Mossi in other clans could, and would, eat that animal. Food taboos, then, tend to vary from clan to clan. Some families will eat dog meat, for example, and others will not.

In a farming society where most families do not have electricity, people rise early and go to bed soon after dark. Breakfast may be leftover millet porridge, or, today, French-style bread and coffee. The main meal is in the evening. Food is taken out to those family members working in the fields. Meat is enough of a luxury that it is usually added to sauces in small amounts; grilled meat is for special celebrations.

EDUCATION

In traditional Mossi society, most education came from living with, watching, and helping more experienced people older than oneself. The circumcision camps provided a few months of group instruction to boys. There have always been some Muslims among the Mossi, and especially among those who were long-distance traders for whom Islam was a key link to traders in other places. For them, there were Koranic schools where Arabic and the Koran were taught. On the other hand, even though most Mossi did not go to school, they often spoke other African languages besides their own, especially Fulbe (Fulfulbe), the Fulani language.

Modern education is becoming available, but it is not universally offered anywhere. Thirty years ago only 7% of Mossi children attended school. As of 1990, only 18% of the population over age 15 could read and write; they comprised 28% of men and 9% of women. Such education is given in French, the national language of Burkina Faso. The government has established standards for writing the Mossi language, but little beyond Christian religious texts and some agricultural information is written in it.

The rather small number of schools in existence during the French colonial period meant that independence brought job opportunities for Mossi and other Burkinabe who had even an elementary education. As more schools have reached more students, however, the limited number of jobs in one of the world's poorest countries has meant that today's students do not qualify for jobs that their parents or older siblings might have gotten in the past with the same educational qualifications.

CULTURAL HERITAGE

Music has been important to Mossi society for entertainment and also for work, in setting rhythms for tasks such as hoeing and threshing. The main instruments are drums. Some drums are large calabashes with leather drumheads and are played with the hands. There are also wooden drums played with sticks, whose pitch can be changed while it is played by a change in arm pressure on the strings tying the head to the drum. There are also flutes and stringed instruments. Drums are made and played only by members of a specific clan, which is also the only Mossi clan that makes pottery.

Some, but not all, Mossi, have traditions of masked dancing for rituals such as funerals. More secular dancing occurs at celebrations and festivals.

The Mossi have a rich literature of proverbs and folktales. Proverbs are not merely a means of transmitting traditional wisdom, but in political debate they provide a way to make the discussion less a contest between rivals and more a weighing of the collective wisdom and experience of the whole society.

WORK

Besides the drummers and potters just mentioned, ironworking among the Mossi (as in many African societies) has been restricted to only one clan, whose members were both feared and needed because of their skill. Smelting iron requires mining; and digging in the earth, the source of fertility, is considered supernaturally dangerous. Mossi smiths no longer smelt iron from ore, but work imported and recycled iron into hoes, knives, and axes.

Traditionally, Mossi were farmers, some of whom were part-time traders or soldiers (although wars tended to halt during the farming season), with a few specialist artisans and the chiefs and their courts who governed. Modern Mossi, of course, have all the occupations of a modern nation open to them, and have gone into all of them, but most are still farmers. Farming is nowadays a mix of subsistence farming and cash crops; cotton is grown, but so is the millet needed for city dwellers. Some farmers grow vegetables or fruit for urban markets and for export, and they increasingly use modern technologies, such as fertilizers and insecticides, as well as animal- or tractor-drawn plows.

SPORTS

Traditional Mossi society had little leisure time. There were games like warri, in which stone or seed counters are moved in pits on a board or in the dirt in a game of strategy aimed at capturing the opponent's pieces. Military training required practice with swords, spears, and bows and arrows.

As part of modern Burkina Faso, the Mossi participate in soccer and bicycle racing, the two major national sports. Towns and cities have bicycle races on most holidays. Basketball has a small presence and a national team, but reaches few Mossi or other Burkinabe.

ENTERTAINMENT AND RECREATION

Aside from music, dance, and conversation, there were not many forms of entertainment or recreation in traditional Mossi society. Griots recited genealogies and traditions at weddings and other events. Radio is important to modern Mossi both for entertainment and for communication in a society with few telephones and relatively few people able to read or write letters.

Television is barely a factor in Mossi life. In 1992 (the most recent available figures), there were only two television stations in the country, one each in Ouagadougou and in Bobo-Dioulasso, the county's second-largest city, to the west of Mossi country. There were only some 41,500 TV sets in this country of some 10 million persons, and the TV stations broadcast only two hours a day during the week and five hours each on Saturday and Sunday.

Movies are important, although theaters are limited to the larger towns and cities. Relatively few movies are made in Africa, or in African languages, so that the movies people see are often from foreign cultures and in foreign languages (Films from India, for example, are widely viewed in Africa.). This is changing, however, and Burkinabe and Mossi filmmakers are playing a major role. The main film festival in Africa is FESPACO, the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma d'Ouagadougou. Mossi filmmakers, such as Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouédraogo, are making feature-length films that are seen increasingly in Europe and North America, but also, because they are in Moré, are fully accessible to the Mossi themselves. As videotape makes it easier to bypass theaters, more and more Mossi will be able to participate in this modern expression of their culture.

FOLK ART, CRAFTS, AND HOBBIES

Pottery is limited to the one clan of potters and drummers. For those Mossi communities that have masked dancing, the carving and painting of masks is a major art form; Mossi masks are in most major collections of African art. Unlike some other peoples sharing the same general culture and related languages, the Mossi do not paint designs on houses. Metal earrings and jewelry are produced. Hats, bags, and cushions are made from dyed leather. Cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean were once used as money by the Mossi and are still used as decorations for clothing and hats. Venetian glass trade beads have been worn by Mossi for centuries. Children often make toy cars and airplanes from wire; these are now sometimes seen in American museums and shops. Some craft techniques, such as batik dying of cloth, have recently been introduced into Mossi culture to produce craft items for export or for sale to the relatively few tourists who visit Burkina.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

The Mossi share the social problems that many African societies and peoples face in dealing with very rapid social change in some areas, and not enough change, not fast enough in others.

As more Mossi live in Ouagadougou and other cities and large towns and earn their living in an increasing variety of ways, traditional gender and family roles come under pressure. A man is supposed to grow his family's millet, but urban wage-earners cannot. So far, urban life for the Mossi is less dangerous than urban life in many other parts of the world. Ouagadougou is hundreds of years old, so cities as such are not new to the Mossi. At the same time, some of the most powerful films by Mossi filmmakers have dealt with the pressures of urban life and the pressures of traditional life upon women and young people.

Burkina Faso was long noted in modern Africa as having more political freedom than most countries, even (paradoxically) when there was a military government. African governments face the task of meeting many demands with few resources, which can result in few tangible accomplishments; in turn this can make way for the military to seize power in the name of honesty and efficiency. Burkina has the distinction of twice having the army seize power, without injuring anyone, and then eventually returning the government to civilian rule. When younger officers led by Thomas Sankara seized power in 1983, however, there were casualties in the fighting and from execution of political rivals. Sankara made a strong effort to break the country out of its dependence on foreign aid, but in 1987 he himself was killed by his associates, who continue to rule the country. Burkina has multiparty elections, but they have been extensively boycotted by parties that argue that the government is manipulating the political system.

Alcohol and drugs are not major problems. While there is a brewery in the country, and there have been complaints of French army veterans drinking their pensions instead of investing in development, the cost of commercially-produced alcohol is too expensive for many Mossi to consume in quantity. The traditional millet beer is alcoholic but is an established part of both traditional society and household organization and is therefore a culturally controlled substance. Kola nuts, rich in caffeine and the basic ingredient in cola drinks, are widely chewed and are a routine gift to a host, three or four (according to gender) being offered. They are imported from Ghana to the south. They are the preferred stimulant for Muslims, who do not drink alcohol.

GENDER ISSUES

As in most African countries, traditional practices have kept women in a subordinate position. In the traditional setting a woman is considered to be property that can be inherited upon the death of her husband. As such, traditional law does not recognize inheritance rights for women. Women suffer from frequent domestic sexual abuse and violence, and no specific laws have been put in place to protect women. Abusive husbands go free as there are no legal channels to investigate or prosecute such individuals. Another problem for girls is that they are married early in life. It is estimated that about 52% of women are married before the age of 18.

However, female excision (commonly known as female genital mutilation) was abolished in 1996. A committee known as The National Committee for the Fight Against Excision was also established in 1996 to work toward complete eradication of this practice in Burkina Faso. Estimates indicate that up to 70% of girls and women had undergone the procedure before it was abolished in 1996. Since then, incidences of excision have declined by about 40%, and more than 400 people have been sentenced for performing the practice.

Women are responsible for subsistence agriculture, and few are involved in the more lucrative private sector. Women hold only about 11.7% of the seats in parliament and form about 25% of the government workforce. Many of the women in government earn low wages as they generally hold low paying jobs. In terms of human rights, excessive poverty has seen many Mossi living deplorable lives with no access to basic human rights. Child labor, child trafficking, violence, and discrimination against women and children are quite rampant in the country. People are also arrested without charge or trial and excessive force is often used against civilians with official impunity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cordell, Dennis D., Joel W. Gregory, and Victor Piché. Hoe & Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.

Decalo, Samuel. Burkina Faso. World Bibliographical Series, vol. 169. Oxford, England; Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Press, 1994.

Guirma, Frederic. Princess of the Full Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

———. Tales of Mogho: African Stories from Upper Volta. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

McFarland, Daniel Miles. Historical Dictionary of Upper Volta (Haute Volta.) Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978.

McMillan, Della E. Sahel Visions: Planned Settlement and River Blindness Control in Burkina Faso. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.

Skinner, Elliott P. African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.

———. The Mossi of Burkina Faso: Chiefs, Politicians, and Soldiers. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1989.

—revised by Ezekiel Kalipeni)