Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso holds a Muslim majority of roughly two thirds, a Christian minority that is mostly Catholic with a growing evangelical share, and a traditional religion that is practised both on its own and alongside the other two by a great many people who would answer a survey with a world religion.

The Mossi kingdoms that dominated this region from the fifteenth century are the reason the religious settlement looks as it does. They resisted incorporation into the Islamic empires to the north and west for centuries while trading with them and admitting Muslim scholars and merchants to their courts, so Islam entered as a presence rather than as a conquest and the Mossi political order was never defined against it. Christianity arrived late, with the White Fathers at the end of the nineteenth century.

The result was a society that was for decades cited internationally as a model of interreligious ease. Mixed families are ordinary, conversion within a family is not a rupture, and the Catholic archbishop of Ouagadougou and the grand imam appearing together at national occasions was routine. Cardinal Paul Zoungrana and later church leaders were mediators in national political crises.

That settlement has been under severe strain since 2015. Armed groups linked to al Qaeda and to the Islamic State have attacked churches during services, mosques whose imams preach the wrong doctrine, and traditional shrines, and have killed Muslim and Christian religious leaders alike. Around two million people have been displaced, large areas of the Sahel and Est regions are outside government control, and both churches and mosques have closed across those areas.

Across the Voltaic peoples of Burkina Faso and its neighbours, political authority and ritual authority over land are held by different people, and the division is the key to how these societies work.

The naaba, the chief, holds political office and descends from the conquering lineage. The tengsoba, usually translated earth priest, descends from the lineage held to have arrived first, and holds the relationship with the tenga, the earth itself, understood as a power that must be addressed before land is cleared, a grave is dug, a house is founded or a wrong committed on the soil is put right. The earth shrine is his to sacrifice at, and his authority over land allocation is independent of the chief's authority over people. A newcomer seeking land goes to the tengsoba, not to the naaba.

That arrangement produces a distinctive politics. It gives the descendants of the conquered a permanent institutional position that conquest did not remove, and it makes the two offices mutually dependent, since a chief who has lost the cooperation of the earth priest cannot settle anyone. Anthropologists have treated it as one of the clearest examples anywhere of a deliberate separation of powers arrived at without a written constitution.

It also explains one of the less reported dimensions of the current insurgency. Jihadist groups in the Sahel have targeted earth shrines and traditional authorities as directly as they have targeted churches, because the tengsoba is both a religious figure of the wrong religion and the person who allocates land, and displacing him transfers control over the land itself.

The office continues in most communities, including where the family concerned is nominally Muslim or Christian.