More Intestines for the Chief

Everyone dressed up to dance the Rasandaaga.



The Ouedraogo family gathers at Christmas.



Around dusk in late December, we were sitting around the cabaret when everybody suddenly got up. They all were looking at the sky to the west. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re looking for the moon,” they told me. After a minute or two one of the men claimed to see it and started trying to describe its position relative to some tree branches. I was skeptical until a gunshot from somewhere in the village confirmed the sighting. Naturally I was the last to spot the moon by several minutes but I didn’t feel bad, because what I finally did see was just the slightest sliver, barely visible in the fading light.

The moon’s appearance marks the traditional start of the New Year, called “Filiga.” The party starts that night with calabashes of the local millet beer, called dolo, then continues the next day as a celebration in honor of the customary chief. The chief does not have the power that he used to, and these days most of the governing and administrative work falls to an elected mayor and appointed prefet. However as the traditional leader of the village, the chief is still accorded a good deal of respect, and his voice still carries weight in disputes and discussions—and he gets his very own party. Not bad, if you ask me.

The mixing of traditional, Muslim, and Christian cultures means that Burkinabe have a lot of holidays and celebrations to choose from. And they don’t run strictly along religious lines—while a Muslin family will say they don’t celebrate Christmas, they’ll still go say hello to their Christian neighbors to mark the occasion, and vice versa for Ramadan.

For that matter, the manner of celebration for Ramadan was fairly similar to that of Christmas. Wives cooked up special meals, which mostly consisted of spaghetti and meat, and people go from courtyard to courtyard visiting each other. Alcohol flowed freely on Christmas, and somewhat on Ramadan, depending on how seriously people followed the rules of Islam.

One of the traditional parties is called “Rasandaaga,” held for the youth of the village. Ostensibly Rasandaaga celebrates the end of the harvest but because there are a number of them over the year, some occurring many months after the harvest has been finished, it seems more like a party held for its own sake than anything else. The celebration starts with a traditional dance where lines are formed about 30 people wide that slowly progress across the terrain. Although the Rasandaaga is for the youth it is the older people who dance the most enthusiastically, because, as some elders mentioned, many young people do not bother to learn the traditional dances. While moving, people beat on tom-toms and chant a song that means, roughly, “The joy is not yet here, the joy is to come later,” referring to the modern dance that follows later at night.

After the dances makes its way around the village grounds in a wide circle, people break up into small groups to eat, drink, talk, or go join in the modern dance, which isn’t scripted like the traditional, and isn’t all that different from what you might see in a club in the US. A friend pointed out another similarity between Burkinabe and American parties: all the alcohol and dancing can lead to situations conducive to the spread of infectious disease.

Back at the Filiga party, I woke up early the next morning to eat spaghetti with friends, then went to greet the chief. More of the usual going on in his courtyard—people dancing and playing tom-toms, drinking. Since I am a foreigner I was an honored guest and the chief invited me to eat lunch with him. I was excited by the prospect, because the standard Burkinabe fare can get tiresome after awhile, be it the millet based break-like paste or the endless plates of rice and sauce.

The spaghetti was nice but here with the chief I was hoping to get something really special. It wasn’t going to be pizza or anything, but this was the chief I’m talking about so I was sure he had something delicious up his sleeve.

We washed our hands, a girl brought out the dish and lifted off the cover to reveal—a plate of intestines. The deliciousness was questionable, but it was his party, after all, so who am I to complain?