Bwa Erotic

The Bwa live across the savanna of west-central Burkina Faso and into the southeastern fringe of Mali, scattered through villages along the Black Volta and its tributaries. They are farmers — sorghum, millet, yams, increasingly cotton — and they have been farmers in this stretch of country for a long time, long enough that neighbors generally treat them as autochthonous. Numbering somewhere around half a million, they are often confused with the Bobo, who occupy adjacent territory, but the two are distinct peoples speaking unrelated languages: Bwamu belongs to the Gur branch of Niger–Congo, while Bobo is Mande. The mistake is old, partly the fault of colonial cartographers and partly the fault of a market town, Bobo-Dioulasso, whose name attached itself to whatever Africans the French met first.

What sets the Bwa apart in the regional imagination is the absence of centralized authority. There were no Bwa kings, no chiefs in any meaningful sense before colonization imposed them on paper. Authority sat with the village council of male elders and with the earth-priest, who mediated relations with the spirits of the land. This is the framework that organized Bwa life for centuries and that made them, by reputation, the people the Mossi and Marka cavalry could never quite finish subjugating — a series of slave raids out of Ségou and Ouagadougou cut into them across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in 1915–1916 the Bwa rose against French conscription in one of the largest armed revolts colonial West Africa would see. The French response was severe and is still remembered in village histories.

Religiously, most Bwa hold to the older system, in which a distant creator, Difini or Dobweni, leaves the ordinary running of the world to bush spirits and ancestors. The famous leaf masks of the southern Bwa villages — bulky figures of vines and fresh foliage worn at funerals and initiation rites — embody these spirits directly; the wooden plank masks of the northern villages, with their tall painted boards and geometric faces, are a related but separate tradition, borrowed in part from Nuna and Winiama neighbors and elaborated. Islam has made inroads, particularly among Bwa who live near Marka or Dioula trading towns, and a Catholic minority took root around the missions at Toma and Houndé, but in much of the heartland the masks still come out, and the earth-priest still sets the calendar.