Munumunu [walkabout] is a 45 minute-long sequence shot created in collaboration with donso musician Adama ‘Kanké’ Sanou. Kanké lives in Bolomakoté, Bobo Dioulasso, and makes a living as a musician playing at festivals for the local hunters associations. He asked me to record a ‘music video’ and I accepted – little did I know that…

Today is the first day of this year’s cycle of funerals in Karankasso Sambla. Music has played all night yesterday, and today in the early afternoon there is more music and various rituals are performed. I have joined the hunters who gathered to honour the mother of one of them, Karim Ouattara. Karim is the…

One of the main aims of my April 2015 trip to Burkina Faso is to screen my documentary Kalanda – The Knowledge of the Bush to the hunters who are its protagonists. But the trip is also an opportunity to meet again, after three years, my fellow students in donsoya. As far as the group…

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,…

I first met Adama Woni in Banzon, in the house of Bakari Ouattara, the musician who played at my initiation. Adama is from the Dafing country, a village near the border with Mali, but spent most of his life in Banfora. He moved to Banzon in 2011, but keeps travelling all over Burkina. He is…

After about a week of delays due to the massive rain that keeps falling on my research area, I managed to have Diakari Traoré and Bakari Ouattara playing at the compound of my teacher Adama Traoré. My idea was to realise a special recording, that of the maana of my teacher, performed by his own…

This is, so far, perhaps the post with the longest preparation I put together. I started gathering material in October 2011, and now can say I have more or less assembled all the materials I needed. Its focus is the characteristic uniform of the donsow, a powerful means of identification recognised by both initiated members and…