Archival Documents on Upper Volta: Here, There, and Everywhere

Extract

Fluctuations of colonial policies toward territorial integrity were not without effects, first on the people of these colonies and then on the organization of their own administration. A case in point is the tortuous history of colonial administration in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Created in 1919 out of the oversized Haut-Sénégal-Niger—which extended from the Sénégal river to lake Chad—in order to rationalize the administration Upper Volta survived as an autonomous colony until January 1933, when it was officially dismembered. The northwestern part (i.e., Ouahigouya) was ceded to the French Sudan, the central and southwestern regions (Mosi and Bobo) to Côte d'Ivoire, and a small portion of the eastern portion (Fada N'Gourma) to Niger. After harsh negotiations the colony of Upper Volta was recreated in 1947. Researchers who have worked on this part of the French empire know that every adjustment brought to the administrative arrangement also caused personnel and documents to be displaced to the new centers—Abidjan, Niamey, or Bamako.

This institutional constraint on the organization of complete sets of archival documents for the study of the region's past has been strengthened by a well-known post-independence symptom: bureaucratic plethora. Indeed Burkina Faso is probably the only country in the world to possess more archivists than organized archives. The Direction des archives, with its dozen archivists in the 1980s, had not produced a single inventory of what could be found in the capital (Ouagadougou) or in the regions, although important work had been done by individual archivists appointed to specific Ministries or by expatriate researchers.