Today I had the first contact with hunters, during a small festival next to the city council in Bobo Dioulasso. I was invited there by Pascal, the uncle of a friend of mine who has been for years my music teacher in Italy. He is a donsojeli, or donson’gonifola, a musician of the hunters’ brotherhood. It is with him that I am going to leave for the village of Karankasso, next week, and hopefully learn how to go hunting.The Donsow participated to a festival dedicated to the shitumu, the caterpillar of the karite tree, which is gathered during the rainy season. It is often dried and fried. I don’t find it particularly tasty, if a bit crunchy. I was also told not to eat too many because they can have unpleasant side-effects. I am not sure what the connection was between the hunters and the association of shitumu producers, but in the more ceremonial parts of the day speeches were made that framed the caterpillar as a natural resource, and encouraged to protect the environment by avoiding to cut trees. Hunters were present as members of formalised associations, like Benkelema or the Fédération des Chasseurs Traditionels Dozos de l’Ouest du Burkina, with its president André Sanou. I noticed he has the card number one of his association.They also advertised very much the fact that in July Blaise Compaoré, Burkina’s chef d’état, decorated the hunter’s president with a medal and donated to the association a motorbike and some money. The festival was basically constituted of speeches, alternated do the performances of the donsow‘s musicians. The trademark musical instrument of the donsojeli, the donson’goni harp-lute, was accompanied by drums, something that I didn’t see very often. Hunters danced spinning quickly  during the most animated sections, or swinged slowly with their gowns covered in amulets. All around the square was a series of tents with chairs and tables covered by different recipes based on shitumu. Food was offered for free to the hunters, courtesy of the producers’ association. Nearby, I could see Bobo Dioulasso’s old mosque, and as midday approached people gathered in and around it to pray. It will be interesting to see what the relationship between donsow and Islam are like in Burkina, for I know that in Ivory Coast there are quite a bit of frictions. Anyway, I will be filming again on Sunday, there will be more hunters and they fill perform kabako, magic tricks for the public.

On a side-note, today I really tested for the first time the camera I brought for filming and shooting stills, a Panasonic GH2. It worked really well, in combination with the hand-held rig I assembled. The sound was recorded with a separate recorder mounted on-camera. The only problem was the Neutral Density Variable filter that gave some vignetting in a corner, otherwise I am very pleased with the quality of the images. Most pictures in this post are in fact still frames from video.