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…

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…

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…

When asking about the tèen and the saansègè I was told there is a figure that is in charge of performing a sacrifice that asks permission to start the collective hunts and the fishing. Today I met a man about 55, called Sa-Sibiri Traoré. In Seenku he is called Juunsira (Juun=Bush, Sira=Master), in Jula Kungotigi (same meaning). There…

Today I went with a friend to visit his mother’s village near Bobo Dioulasso. It is a Bobo village on the road to Diebougou, and we visited in the period of the funerals. Much unlike the Sambla, the Bobo have many masks that come out for different rituals. Some of these have the peculiarity of…

In a previous post I wrote about the annual collective hunts that involve the male population in Karankasso, during the dry season, and after the ritual of the kurusa. For women it is forbidden to participate to the tèen, even to go into the bush in the direction the hunters will take. The tèen concludes with…

After the annual dankun sacrifice of Brahima Traoré in Samogohiri, masks come from the bush to roam in the village. They are animals, a buffalo, a black monkey, some dagwé (Roan Antelope, Hippotragus Equinus), and an old man. They are each accompanied by a warden, who has the task to “control” and communicate with them….