Lacole Traoré tells the story of how a balafon typical of Guinea arrived in his village of Samorogouan, in Western Burkina Faso, and entered the history of his family. The story is one of circulation of musical knowledge and defies most accepted wisdom on griots and musical traditions in West Africa. This music is now…

For the past 6 months I have been working as a filmmaker for Living the Weather, a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Jennifer Mason at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester. My task has been to realise a documentary film that could speak…

I am currently working on a film project that involves uninterrupted tracking shots, in which I plan to use an extreme wide angle lens to situate a character in the landscape. The documentary will be filmed around Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and is part of the larger Living the Weather project headed by Prof Jennifer…

Boubacar Traoré belongs to a family of renowned gunsmiths in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. In this short documentary he describes his work as a taxidermist and goes through memories of his first hippopotamus hunt. In the region killing one of these animals is still a serious matter, because they are held capable of tricking the hunter…

In the past two weeks I have been presenting some video fragments from the footage I am working on for the documentary The Sambla Baan. First for a presentation in Italy and later for my course on West Africa here in Manchester, I selected two short scenes that show interactions between the musician playing the…

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my PhD dissertation, slightly edited and enriched of various media. I prepared this post for the reading list of my course in Regional Studies of Culture – West Africa on Ways of Knowing in the Mande. Learning to hunt One of the crucial days of my fieldwork,…

When on fieldwork in Burkina Faso, working on donso hunters and their knowledge of the bush, I found myself to need a shotgun in order to join the hunters in their outings. In Bobo Dioulasso I came across Boubacar Traoré, who comes from a Jula family of blacksmiths. He sold me a locally made 12-gauge…