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The decolonization of Africa coincided with intense Cold War competition. The opposing sides of the ideological divide were willing to invest considerable resources in expanding their influence to ...

Sub-Saharan Africa harbours the majority of the burden of Lassa fever. Clinical diseases, as well as high seroprevalence, have been documented in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Upper Volta, Gambia, and Mali. Deaths from Lassa fever occur all year round but naturally peak during the dry season. Annually, the number of people infected is estimated at 100,000 to 300,000, with approximately 5,000 deaths. There have been some work done on the dynamics of Lassa fever disease transmission, but to the best of our knowledge, none has been able to capture the seasonal variation of Mastomys rodent population and its impact on the transmission dynamics. In this work, a periodically forced seasonal nonautonomous system of a nonlinear ordinary differential equation is developed that captures the dynamics of Lassa fever transmission and seasonal variation in the birth of Mastomys rodents where time was measured in days to capture seasonality. It was shown that the model is epidemiologically meaningful and mathematically well posed by using the results from the qualitative properties of the solution of the model. A time-dependent basic reproduction number RLt is obtained such that its yearly average is written as R˜L<1, when the disease does not invade the population (means that the number of infected humans always decreases in the seasons of transmission), and R˜L>1, when the disease remains constantly and is invading the population, and it was detected that R˜L≠RL. We also performed some evaluation of the Lassa fever disease intervention strategies using the elasticity of the equilibrial prevalence in order to predict the optimal intervention strategies that can be useful in guiding the local national control program on Lassa fever disease to make a proper decision on the intervention packages. Numerical simulations were carried out to illustrate the analytical results, and we found that the numerical simulations of the model showed that possible combined intervention strategies would reduce the spread of the disease. It was established that, to eliminate Lassa fever disease, treatments with ribavirin must be provided early to reduce mortality and other preventive measures like an educational campaign, community hygiene, isolation of infected humans, and culling/destruction of rodents must be applied to also reduce the morbidity of the disease. Finally, the obtained results gave a primary framework for planning and designing cost-effective strategies for good interventions in eliminating Lassa fever.

At independence, African governments faced a challenge of building administrative and coercive capacities to extend their control over the state territory and the population. Colonial state institu...

Burkina Faso has a remarkable history owing to repeated dissolution and reunification of its territory. Following the French colonial conquest in 1896, a military territory was established over a large part of what would become Upper Volta. In 1905, the military territory was integrated in the civilian colony of Upper Senegal and Niger with headquarters in Bamako. Following a major anticolonial war in 1915–16, the colony of Upper Volta with Ouagadougou as its capital was created in 1919, for security reasons and as a labor reservoir for neighboring colonies. Dismantled in 1932, Upper Volta was partitioned among neighboring colonies. It was recreated after World War II as an Overseas Territory (Territoire d’Outre-mer) within the newly created French Union (Union française). In 1960, Upper Volta gained its independence, but the nation experienced a new beginning in 1983 when it was renamed Burkina Faso by the revolutionary government of Thomas Sankara. The policies and debates that shaped the colonial history of Burkina Faso, while important in themselves, are a reflection of the larger West African history and French colonial policy.

Ouagadougou is the dusty capital of a country without prospects. Burkina Faso in the Sahel, until October 1984 known as Upper Volta, has hardly any natural resources of economic value.

He would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2015, but finally, it doesn't matter, since by leaving his name to African meningitis belt, that isohyetal band in sub-Saharan Africa where epidemics of cerebrospinal meningitis are rife, Lapeyssonnie, the trailblazer at the end of his trail, has gone straight into the textbooks of tropical medicine. There was probably nothing he enjoyed more than wandering the lateritic paths and Sudano-Sahelian bush in that zone. His first job, in the Mossi country in Upper Volta that had not yet become Burkina Faso, was of course an initiation. At the age of 27, applying the Jamot doctrine and tracking the vectors of sleeping sickness down into the most remote villages, like his illustrious predecessor, the young physician who became a Physician-General never stopped defending these precepts of tropical public health and promoting the "eccentric battalions" (as the English physicians, Dr Waddy, described them) of bush doctors from the School of Pharo (Army Institute of Tropical Medicine in Marseille). Foreshadowing the French doctors and "without borders" movement, Lapeyssonnie was able to implement the results of research in vaccinology. Thus, in 1974, during a meningitis epidemic in Brazil, he convinced Charles Merieux to manufacture the lifesaving vaccine on a large scale. Merieux then mobilized all the resources of his company to produce and deliver millions of doses of the only vaccine then available. Ten million inhabitants of Sao Paulo were vaccinated in five days, 90 million Brazilians in 6 months. Another victory at the end of the trail. But Lapeyssonnie was more than a man dealing with great endemics, more than a researcher and a teacher. "Those who liked to be taught like to teach in their turn," he liked to repeat, talking about his time at Pharo. Writer and novelist, he could sometimes write poetry, recount the bygone époque when he went out hunting in the African bush and shared with nurses there unique moments of great humanity. It is probably because of this humanity that from his retirement in Brittany, in 2000, a year from the end of his trail, he could still inveigh in the Parisian newspaper, Le Monde, against the bureaucrats at the World Health Organization, who were asleep in the battle against sleeping sickness; his task then was to awaken consciences and Africa so that the populations at the end of the trail would not be forgotten.

Demographic data indicate that urban areas are growing more rapidly than rural areas in the whole of West Africa. While this tendency is especially pronounced in some of the coastal countries, the same phenomenon can be observed in the interior. This urban growth is the result of two factors: the natural increase in the present and expanding urban population, and in-migration to the cities from rural areas. The second factor accounts for most of the difference between rates of urban population growth and rates of rural population growth. The chapter presents a brief discussion of urbanization and development in Upper Volta provides some support for these assertions. These data are incomplete and are being supplemented by research under way in Upper Volta and Niger. The developmental strategy in Upper Volta is in the process of being redefined by a new plan, which is due to take effect in 1972.

Pecularities of the Rural South: The Legacy of Slavery and Cotton ProductionEMPIRE OF COTTON: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2014.RAISED UP DOWN YONDER: Growing up Black in Rural Alabama. By Angela McMillan Howell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2013.ONE PLACE: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia. Edited by Tom Rankin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013.Popular understandings of the rural South have historically been permeated with romanticism. Even texts that are critical in some respect tend to quite easily lapse into a sordid opportunity for unearned redemption. As Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1929) and Kathryn Stockett's The Help (2009) demonstrate, even the noble quest of Southern white women to break free from the shackles of patriarchy can morph into a thinly veiled homage to slavery and capitalism. In tandem, slavery and capitalism produced the human grist for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' industrial mills of Europe and North America. Three books, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Angela McMillan Howell's Raised Up Down Yonder: Growing Up Black in Rural Alabama (2013) and Tom Rankin's One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia (2013) capture the peculiarities of Southern rurality, and to varying degrees articulate why poverty continues to persist across large swaths of the rural South well into the twentyfirst century.African Americans in the rural South were essential to the development of capitalism globally. Sven Beckert, the recipient of the Bancroft Award for Empire of Cotton, argues that the expansion of capitalism went hand-in-hand with the enslavement of Africans and cotton production in the South. "So crucial was slave labor," wrote Beckert, "that the Liverpool Chronicle and European Times warned that if slaves ever should be emancipated, cotton cloth prices might double or triple, with devastating consequences for Britain" (110).Empire of Cotton examines the relationship between cotton production in the rural South and the distribution and manufacturing of cotton globally. Cotton manufacturing is an ancient cultural practice that remained a cottage industry globally for thousands of years before Europeans began cultivating it in the western hemisphere. This subtropical plant flourished in areas where the temperature remained above fifty degrees Fahrenheit and the annual rainfall was at least twenty inches. It grew "[f]rom Gujarat to Sulawesi, along the banks of the Upper Volta to the Rio Grande, from the valleys of Nubia to the plains of Yucatan" (4). People planted cotton along with other crops, nursed it to maturity, and harvested it as they did the crops they ate. For thousands of years, the cotton goods manufactured in the homes of peasants rarely circulated beyond the plant's natural growing zone. According to Beckert, India and China were the centers of the cotton industry while Indian weavers dominated intercontinental trade. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the balance of power in the cotton industry shifted. As Beckert notes, "European trade in cotton textiles tied together Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe in a complex commercial web" (36). Unable to get a stronghold on the industry through technological innovation, argues Beckert, Europeans used brutality to insert themselves into the worlds of cotton and to dominate global cotton networks. Textiles from Indian weavers paid for millions of enslaved Africans who toiled on Southern cotton plantations. The cotton that enslaved Africans harvested went to factories in Europe and New England where poor white women and children constituted close to 90 percent of the workforce.Empire of Cotton shows how cotton production and slavery catapulted the rural South onto the center stage of the world economy. …

Increased agricultural production is an urgent issue. Projected global population is 9 million people by mid of this century. Estimation projects death of 1 million people for lack of food quality (micronutrient deficit) and quantity (protein deficit). Majority of these people will be living in developing countries. Other global challenges include shrinking cultivable lands, salinity, and flooding due to climate changes, new emerging pathogens, and pests. These affect crop production. Furthermore, they are major threats to crop genetic resources and food security. Genetic diversity in cultivated crops indicates gene pool richness. It is the greatest resource for plant breeders to select lines that enhance food security. This study was conducted by Masinde Muliro University to evaluate genetic diversity in 19 cowpea accessions from Kenya national gene bank. Accessions clustered into two major groups. High divergence was observed between accessions from Ethiopia and Australia and those from Western Kenya. Upper Volta accessions were closely related to those from Western Kenya. Low variation was observed between accessions from Eastern and Rift Valley than those from Western and Coastal regions of Kenya. Diversity obtained in this study can further be exploited for the improvement of cowpea in Kenya as a measure of food security.

Joseph Ki-Zerbo perfi ló en su quehacer dos facetas que mantuvo en constante actividad hasta el ocaso de su vida: la de político y la de historiador. En cuanto a la primera, su posición anticolonialista lo llevó a ser un combatiente para lograr la independencia del continente africano y especialmente su país, Alto Volta o como se le conocerá posteriormente Burkina Faso. Por otra parte, su producción intelectual representó enormes contribuciones que incidieron en la modificación de la concepción que de África se manejaba desde la perspectiva históricohistoriográfica, contribuyendo en el derribamiento de prejuicios inmersos en los estudios históricos. Joseph Ki-Zerbo outlined in his work two facets that kept constantly active until the end of his life: political and historian. As to the first, his anticolonial position led him to be a fi ghter for independence of the African continent and especially their country, Upper Volta and was later known as Burkina Faso. Moreover, intellectual production accounted enormous contributions that infl uenced the change of conception that Africa was handled from the historical historiographical perspective, contributing to the overthrow of prejudices immersed in historical studies. 57-78 njgarciaula@hotmail.com semestral

This chapter focuses on the socio-economic background of the landlocked West African country Burkina Faso, formerly called Republic of Upper Volta. It is geographically situated in the Sahel--the agricultural region between the Sahara Desert and the coastal rain forests--and has a size of 274000 km2 (75% the size of Germany). With 17,8 million inhabitants (CIA – The World Fact Book, Population: 2013a), of whom 43.9 % live below the poverty line, Burkina Faso is classified both as a least developed country and a low-income, food-deficit country (Auswartiges Amt, 2013: 1st break).

Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) is a food plant introduced in Africa from America by the Portuguese in 1558. The objective of this study is to establish cassava origins, production, and utilization in Burkina Faso. The investigation was carried out in the regions of Center West, Cascades, Boucle du Mouhoun, Hauts Bassins, South West, and Center East of Burkina Faso. Eighteen cassava processing units and 226 farmers in 57 communities from the selected regions have been involved in the survey. The investigation showed that cassava was introduced to Burkina Faso, former Upper Volta from the costal countries, Gold Coast (now Ghana), by both local traders and the Roman Catholic White missionaries. This happened between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The main variety introduced was Banfti. Some improved varieties like V5 (94/0270), Banké (V2), 68.61, 30572, KTMA developed by research are now available and used by farmers along with the traditional varieties like manchien, santidougou, tchinda yaar, léo. The cases of intoxication evoked by some farmers are evidence that some of those varieties may have a high level of cyanohydric acid content. Cassava is available all the year throughout the country. But the top of cassava production is reached in July. Most of the small‐scale farmers (98%) grow cassava both for household use and as income generator. About 83.92% of cassava farmers have less than 10 tons as annual production and only 1.72% of them can produce more than 100 tons. The main food products based on cassava found in communities are raw roots, boiled roots, roasted roots, tô, attiéké, tapioca, ragout, beignets, boiled leaves, soup (with leaves), cassava juice, etc. And the main cassava‐processed products in the processing units are attiéké, gari, tapioca, and flour. Cassava contributes greatly to household food security during food shortage period. It sustains families for weeks as food and is also exchanged with other foods or sold to buy food or meet household needs.

During the rainy season in 2007, reports about exceptional rains and floodings in the Sahel were published in the media, especially in August and September. Institutions and organizations like the World Food Programme (WFP) and FEWS NET put the events on the agenda and released alerts and requested help. The partly controversial picture was that most of the Sahel faced a crisis caused by widespread floodings. Our study shows that the rainy season in 2007 was exceptional with regard to rainfall amount and return periods. In many areas the event had a return period between 1 and 50 yr with high spatial heterogeneity, with the exception of the Upper Volta basin, which yielded return periods of up to 1200 yr. Despite the strong rainfall, the interpretation of satellite images show that the floods were mainly confined to lakes and river beds. However, the study also proves the difficulties in assessing the meteorological processes and the demarcation of flooded areas in satellite images without ground truthing. These facts and the somewhat vague and controversial reports in the media and FEWS NET demonstrate that it is crucial to thoroughly analyze such events at a regional and local scale involving the local population.

Largement ignores par l'historiographie, les catechistes sont des personnages centraux de l'epoque missionnaire. Integres au sein des strategies apostoliques, ils devinrent les parangons de l'evangelisation catholique en Haute Volta. Ils profiterent de leurs prerogatives pastorales pour se construire une aura aupres des populations. Mais l'emprise du milieu social et les conditions de leur fonction eurent aussi un impact sur leur exemplarite. Et malgre les actions des Peres pour depasser les deboires de leurs auxiliaires, l'emergence d'un nouveau contexte dans les annees 1950 annoncant la fin de l'epoque missionnaire compromit finalement le prestige des catechistes qui depuis, a l'image de l'epistemologie, reste sous-valorise.

Distribution of the Tsetsefly Glossina tachinoides West. and G. morsitans submorsitans New. in the Republic of Niger. The distribution of the tsetseflies Glossina tachinoides W. and G. morsitans submorsitans N. in the Republic of Niger is shown. The tsetseflies are restricted to the rivers Niger, Tapoa and Mekrou. There is only one isolated Glossina spp. breeding area of 6.5 km2 on the eastern river bank of the Niger near the Nigerian frontier. The tsetsefly distribution in the south-western area near the border of Dahome and Upper Volta does not extend further north than Darybangou. Zusammenfassung Das Verbreitungsgebiet der Tsetsefliegenspezies G. tachinoides West. und G. morsitans submorsitans New. in der Republik Niger wurde von Dezember 1970 bis Januar 1972 untersucht. Es ist auf den Niger und seine Nebenflusse Tapoa und Mekrou beschrankt. Seine Nordgrenze befindet sich am Ort Darybangou, im Osten stellt das linke Nigerufer die Begrenzung dar und im Suden endet es beim Orte Boumba. Lediglich 15 km sudlich von Gaya befindet sich noch ein isoliertes, 6,5 km2 groses Glossinenvorkommen. Nach Westen dehnt sich das Verbreitungsgebiet ohne Begrenzung am Flus Mekrou nach Obervolta aus.

This essay examines the relationship between Western notions of modernity and Wahhabi-inclined Islamic reform in Ghana and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta until 1984) during the early decades of independence. I will highlight ways in which Western/secular education facilitated the early diffusion of this genre of reform. Over the past decade or so, historians have explored the extent to which the appeal of the Wahhabi movement in urban West Africa, toward the end of French and British colonialism, can be traced to Muslim attempts to find a middle ground between Western “modernity” and authentic spiritual purity. In what follows, I employ comparative, ethnographic, and historical analyses to draw attention to the pivotal roles Western-educated urban Muslim professionals played in the development of this reform. Despite the active participation of these professionals in transforming the Wahhabi message into urban mass movements, scholars have paid scant attention to the factors that drew them to the Wahhabi doctrine in the first instance.

International audience; A major direct use of water from West African small reservoirs is irrigation. Analyzing the performances of irrigated agriculture is therefore a useful way to measure the impact of small reservoirs on food security and livelihoods of local communities. The aim of this study was to assess the performance of two such irrigated schemes in the Upper Volta basin (one in Burkina Faso and the other in Ghana) through participatory methods, to jointly identify major constraints, and to discuss possible solutions with local communities. The agronomic and economic performance of irrigated agriculture at both sites were far from satisfactory, due to the lack of maintenance of the small reservoirs and irrigation schemes, sub-optimal crop management, and poor product marketing. These issues were analyzed with the farmers across differing sub-schemes and cropping systems and some solutions were envisaged. Our assessment showed that farmers often had difficulty obtaining quality agricultural inputs and marketing their products. The poor performance of irrigated crops, due to poor condition of hydraulic infrastructures, poor agronomic management, and organizational failure provided only limited incomes for local households. Nevertheless, the existence and the many uses of small reservoirs improved food security and created indirect activities that also enhanced livelihoods. The local authorities generally considered preserving water to be a priority in small reservoir management, but the degradation of irrigation schemes could happen quickly and result in scheme failures, thus reducing indirect economic activities and causing under utilization or even abandonment of the small reservoir, unless appropriate measures are taken.

For about five decades, the French colonial government in the Volta region of West Africa failed in its repeated attempts to replace the local monetary form of cowry shells with its own monetary system of francs, largely because of local opposition. This article provides an account of these events and explores the reasons for the opposition and why the opposition was successful. Despite government prohibition, the cowries even acquired increased vitality as they became the main money in the emerging urban market. Government measures were partly motivated by practical difficulties that stemmed from the conflicts that the colonial system and monetary policy generated. The article ends with a critical discussion of how money and the colonial transition are treated in anthropology.

A major agricultural development project was commissioned to celebrate Ghana's independence in 1957. In the Upper Region along the border with Upper Volta now named Burkina Faso, a total of 185 clay-core dams were constructed in 15 years to enhance village water supplies during the 6-month dry season. In a concentrated area of N.E. Ghana (now the Upper East Region) no fewer than 104 dams were erected in only 3 years. The beneficial impacts of the dams are indisputable, and life today would be unthinkable without them, despite severe problems of neglect of maintenance. Equally undeniable has been a negative disease impact whereby the regional rate of schistosomiasis tripled in 1 or 2 years from 17% to 51% prevalence. Thus, an agriculturally induced hyperendemicity of "red water" or "bloody urine" disease was established. To test the longevity of community disease impact, a survey of hematuria (bloody urine) was conducted in the same areas in 1997. It showed a 40-year ecological entrenchment of elevated levels of schistosomiasis, that is, seemingly permanent alteration of regional disease ecology. The consequences of planning negligence have left a generational impact in that hematuria has become a "rite of passage" for young boys and girls. Unprepared and overburdened rural health care systems are ill-equipped in the face of competing demands to respond to the presence of schistosomiasis. Yet excellent medication is available to break the transmission cycle provided that there is a sufficiency of political will, accompanied by effective, inter-sectoral campaign coordination.

À propos de : Guy Le Moal, Les Bobo. Nature et fonction des masques, Tervuren, Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1999, 338 p., ill. (« Annales Sciences Humaines »).

The Akosombo dam was constructed on the Volta river primarily for the generation of hydropower. The resultant Volta lake which was formed between 1962 and 1966 in Ghana will probably long be one of the greatest man-made lakes. It produces 912 MW of electricity at its maximum operating capacity. The Akosombo hydroelectric project (HEP) was meant among others to open up Ghana to rapid industrialization and hence modern development. Other positive impacts of the HEP include fishing, farming, transportation and tourism. However, there are equally negative impacts, some of which the project did not envisage and these are felt on the physical, biological and human subsystems within the immediate project environments and places much more distant from them. Recently, there have been declines in the lake levels resulting most probably from inadequate rainfall and/or runoff from the river catchments that feed the lake, and also from the observed rising temperatures. Comparisons of the runoff from two most important tributaries of the Volta (White Volta and Oti) for two time periods of 1951–1970 and 1971–1990 showed reductions in mean streamflows of 23.1% on the White Volta and 32.5% on the Oti. Similarly, a plot of the mean annual temperatures for the upper Volta basin indicated a 1^C rise in temperature from 1945–1993.

From 1984 to 1989, five populations of the Nile grass rat, Arvicanthis niloticus solatus, living in five different habitats of the Sahelian region were studied in northern Burkina Faso (Oursi, 14°N). The following were investigated: (i) seasonal variations in the percentages of sexually active males and females and the percentage of the population less than 6 weeks old, and (ii) seasonal variations in testis and seminal vesicle masses and plasma testosterone levels in adults. Both the large form of A. niloticus occupying habitats with stable trophic resources and the small form of the species occupying habitats with fluctuating resources showed seasonal breeding, mainly in the dry season, in contrast with what we have observed elsewhere in other species in this region. In dry years with normal rainfall (rains between June and September), breeding occurred from mid-October to mid-July in habitats with constant trophic resources and from mid-October to mid-April in habitats with fluctuating resources. In 1986, a year with exceptional rainfall (additional rains in January), breeding was continuous in habitats where this climatic disturbance caused a reappearance of primary production and there was a population outbreak of A. n. solatus. Relationships between (i) breeding cycles, (ii) long-day periods, which have a gonadoinhibitory effect, (iii) seasonal variations in relative humidity and temperature, and (iv) dietary characteristics of A. n. solatus suggest that this subspecies is capable of breeding throughout the year. This is due to its adaptable dietary habits, which allow it to take advantage of resources that are either constant (insects, harvest wastes, and the water-rich bark of certain woody plants) or seasonal (rain-dependent herbaceous plants and farm vegetables). The end of breeding appears to be related to the relative timing of the stimulatory effect of certain foods and the inhibitory effects of photoperiod, temperature, and humidity. Under this hypothesis, the gonadoinhibitory effect of long days was masked in 1986 by an earlier stimulatory effect related to the reappearance of vegetation following the exceptionally heavy rainfall in January.