Hold the line please …

Ok, time for something different – I’ve been meaning for ages to write about the phone system here – which of course is beginning to seem normal to me. Like many things here, it works – after a fashion. And there are workarounds to its limitations.

There are fixed telephone lines, provided by the national Onatel – most companies/organisations and some more affluent private individuals have them. But much more business is transacted from mobiles ‘portables’. Almost everyone I come across in town has one or more of if these, and people’s personal mobiles are routinely used for business purposes – if you want to reach someone, you go for their mobile. In the villages, phone ownership, and network availability, is more spasmodic.

Everyone at work has at least one mobile and there are 2 landlines – one is a ‘ligne verte’, that is a free line (from fixed phones and one network), which was set up as an HIV-AIDS help line, but is now more often used by family and friends as a way of contacting people who work or hang out there; the other is a standard line.

When I first arrived I was puzzled, then, as to why so much time was spent going to the neighbouring telecentre to make calls. There is a telecentre pretty much on every street corner. These are cabins where you can call from a landline, on a meter, and pay afterwards.

There are 3 companies providing mobile services. Calling to the same network is relatively straightforward and cheap, texting more so – although quite often even then calls and texts won’t go through, and the network is quite often too busy. Calling from one network to another is something else. So many people, certainly many people in business like, for example, electricians, will have a SIM card (‘puce’) for each network, and often therefore two or three phones. The networks can be identified by the first two digits of the phone number, so for preference you ring or text your contact from the same network. Or perhaps it may have to be from the network where you currently have some credit… So the directory on my phone has multiple numbers for lots of people, so I can recognise incoming calls, and if possible if I need to contact them, I can do so through my network. As not everyone has as many phones as they have numbers, there is a lot of inserting and removing of SIM cards, and calls and messages are of course missed as a result.

The telecentre is the cheapest way to make calls other than to the same network, and routinely used at work to phone a mobile. So someone may go to the telecentre, call a contact, and ask them to ring back on the ligne verte – and then scurry back to the office.


The fixed lines do work, but are temperamental. Whereas in the UK I was supposed to answer the phone at work within 3 rings, and this was monitored, here it is better to let it ring 3 times before answering, as this improves the success rate.

There are a number of other consequences of this elaborate system – often when someone rings up to speak to one of my colleagues, that person is out at the telecentre making another call; with so many phones in circulation, they are frequently out of battery power, or credit, or both; and a high percentage of all calls seem to consist of someone seeking the number, or the other numbers, of another person..

Ingenuity prevails as ever – there is much use of ‘beeping’ – ie making a call which is terminated before it connects – to deliver simple messages (eg I am ready, call me on the ligne verte…). And there is a cunning system, 'sap sap', which enables you to buy credit for someone else who is somewhere else - you buy the credit and text it to them! Do we have that at home? If so I haven't come across it.

And of course portable phones fulfil many other functions too – they are what people routinely use for calculator, camera, watch, portable music system, and torch. Saves on pocket space. So no wonder there are so many booths selling phones and accessories and carrying out repairs to them – more I think even than bicycle workshops.

A man with a story

Our trip to Gaoua and the Lobi country included some interesting villages. One, Gbombolora, was the home of the extended Da family. The current head of the family is a wonderful story teller, and told us that he had travelled to Germany and other European countries, and been interviewed by several anthropologists. The really famous one is his father, who is buried in this tomb – in the family compound. As you can see there is provision for food and drink, and there were originally elephant tusks on the tomb in recognition of his fame and success as an elephant hunter. He killed several elephants, with a gun, and he was never afraid of getting hurt himself because he had a very powerful elephant fetish. He would put this on the ground, and if the elephant came after him and reached the fetish, the elephant would walk around the fetish several times and then return to whence he or she came.

The grandfather was the head of a large dynasty. He had 39 wives, although admittedly he had only fully married – with dowry and celebration – 29 of them. He had 86 sons and 88 daughters, and to tell his children apart some of them were given facial scarifications – our host was at pains to point out that his facial markings were for identification within the family, not tribal markings.

To educate his offspring he persuaded Père Boulanger, a Catholic missionary, to come and build a school near the family compound, which was completely filled with his own relations. But the missionary was not allowed to build a church, and the family remain firm animists.

A year after his death, when the family gathered to mark the occasion, his children and grandchildren numbered 400.

A Remarkable Woman

At the weekend I went on a trip with 3 other volunteers (Nathalie, Benoit and Melissa) to Gaoua and the Lobi country, in the South of Burkina, near the border with Côte d’Ivoire. It was an action and event packed weekend, on which more will follow.

The day we arrived we visited the Poni Museum (sorry equine fans, no ponies), and were shown round by Claire, who I think must be the Directrice. She is very knowledgeable, and has had an interesting life, some aspects of which are also illustrated by the museum. In Lobi country animism is still the dominant religion. The museum is illustrated with some wonderful photographs taken by Henri Labouret between 1914 and 1924, and Arnold Hein in 1934.

Claire is a Gan, one of around 7 ethnic groups making up the Lobi. Unlike other Lobi groups, the Gan have a king. Unusually, succession alternates between two rival royal clans. Claire was the daughter of a Gan King.


The Lobi are matrilineal – taking the line that there is always more certainty as to maternity than as to paternity. Children live with the mother’s extended family, and at birth are given standard names, indicating first daughter, second daughter, first son, second son, etc. The role of Head of the Family passes from uncle (mother’s brother) to nephew. Every 7 years there is an initiation ceremony, when the uninitiated – those who are deemed ready for it, both boys and girls – go off to the banks of the River Mouhoun, the river which marks the boundary between this world and the next, for an extended period. When they return – or rather those that do return, because every time there are some that do not – they are given new, individual names, this time, if I understood right, associated with their father. There is not a standard age for initiation, and some never go, but they are marked out by their birth names, and have a lower status than the youngest initiated child. Some, but not all, initiates have their top front teeth filed into points – and indeed we saw some of these around town.

At the age of 19, Claire was taken from her family, excised (ie clitoris physically cut out – more of this another day too) and married to a chief as his third wife. She later went on to work with the anthropologist Madeleine Père, who lived with the Lobi from 1961 until her death in 2002, helping to collect the objects on display and to set up the museum.

The Lobi have an intricate belief system, which they realise we may find hard to believe – for example, that children can ‘come back’ – a child which dies at or near birth is often marked with a scar of some sort, and then, when another child is born, if it has the same marking, it is ‘enfant revenant’. Also some beliefs around twins – if one twin dies at or near birth, one of the parents will soon die too. They make, and make much use of, fetishes, of which there were many in the museum – unfortunately not for photographing. More on fetishes later too.

Outside the museum are some reconstructed houses, with associated outbuildings and fetishes, and nearby is a wooded sacred spot where people go to seek help – for example with their exams, or to overcome infertility. Requests are accompanied by a sacrifice, perhaps of a chicken, sometimes a goat or even cattle. The remains of sacrificed animals are evident.


Claire has wider interests too: she has founded a Women’s Association amongst her people, to promote the ending of the practice of excision – with the coming of HIV-AIDS the use of a shared blade now has added health risks. Among its members are some of the excisors themselves – skilled practitioners, for whom new roles now need to be found. Claire has two daughters and a son; her daughters are not excised and she thinks her son is unlikely to excise any daughters he may have.

Money Matters

The currency here in Burkina and in half a dozen neighbouring states is the West African CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) Franc. It is pegged at 656 (655.96 for pedants) to the Euro – and so fluctuates against the pound, currently in the region of 755.

The smallest coin in regular use is 25 francs, so that’s between 3p and 4p. Coins of 5 francs have pretty much disappeared; coins of 10 francs turn up from time to time, usually used in multiples. 25 francs is what children solicit to buy sweets (not that I give it to them); it is the standard cost for pumping up bike tyres; it can also be the cost of a small quantity of vegetables in season, or a few cloves of garlic. A loaf of bread (baguette) costs 125, so just over 15p. A ride in a shared taxi anywhere within central Bobo in the day time is 300 per person (40p). At night it goes up to 500cfa.

The largest note in regular use is for 10,000 francs, so that’s about £13. This is what the bank machines usually give out. All transactions are in cash. I have a cheque book with my Burkina bank account (in to which my living allowance is paid); so far I have used cheques to pay the electricity bill and the monthly charge for my internet dongle, but nothing else. My use of plastic has been solely to get cash from the bank machines.

But there is a further complication when shopping by the roadside or in local markets. In Dioula, the local language, they count money differently – they count by the coins. When the cfa was introduced, the smallest coin was 5 francs, and so 5 francs became 1 – ‘kelen’ in Dioula. Although a few things, such as potatoes, are sold by weight using scales, most items are presented for sale in little piles or packets at a given price – for example 4 small onions or 3 larger ones, a small (really small) bag of salt or sugar, a dab of tomato paste in a twist of paper. So if you ask the price of a little pile of vegetables, and the answer which comes back is the Dioula word for ten, that means that each little pile costs 50cfa! It took me a while to work this one out – as I learned the Dioula numbers, they never seemed to match the prices in the market… anyway, a bit of mental arithmetic keeps the brain cells active!