2. “Sometimes when you don’t know where you’re heading,
you have to return to where you came from in order to
think things over before continuing your journey. Today,
with all the things happening to her, Africa has trouble
finding which direction to take—modernity, tradition,
or some other road. We are not really capable of
digesting all these things. We don’t know who we are,
and we don’t know where we are going. We are between
two things. Between our traditions and our modernity”.

3. BURKINA FASO
• Colonized in 1896 by the
French.
• Made French official
language.
• Established French
education system.
• Gained full independence
in 1960 from France.

4.  Suffered from numerous
military coups.
 In 1983 Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabe military captain,
and Marxist revolutionary became president.
 Aim was to restore the dignity and pride of the African
people.
 He was an anti-imperialist fighter who wanted to stop
receiving aid from the imperialists and turned away
from the IMF and the World Bank.
 He carried out a radical land reform to make the
country self-sufficient.

5.  1987 a French-backed coup overthrew
and assassinated Sankara.
 Captain Blaise Compaoré came into
power (and just recently resigned).
 He reversed all previous reforms.
 In 1991 he received a loan from the IMF
which required a Structural
Adjustment Program.
 With the help of the French
government, he managed to stabilize
the situation.
 More than half of the population was
living in poverty.
 This is the result of the policies
imposed by French imperialism and
the IMF.

6.  With over 60 ethnicities and as many languages,
Burkina Faso’s level of literacy in 1990 was 12.8% and
25.3% in 2008 and because of that it relies on oral
tradition to pass on their history and culture.
 Since 1994, the Swiss Organization for Workers’
Solidarity (OSEO) and the Government of Burkina
Faso) have been implementing the Bilingual
Education Program.
 Despite efforts to increase school attendance and
literacy, technologies such as film making allow the
story-teller to reach larger audiences including those
who cannot read or write.

7.  "Education System in Burkina Faso." Classbase. Foreign Credits,
n.d. Web. Mar. 2015.
<http://www.classbase.com/countries/Burkina-Faso/Education-
System>.
 Ilboudou, Paul. "Bilingual Education Programme." Effective Literacy
Programmes. UNESCO, 19 July 2010. Web. Mar. 2015.
<http://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=13&programme=58
>.
 Kabore, M. "Education." Burkina Faso Embassy in USA. Wordpress,
n.d. Web. Mar. 2015. <http://burkina-
usa.org/about/education/>.
 Morken, Ben. "The Revolutionary Reawakening of Burkina
Faso." In Defence of Marxism. International Marxist Tendency,
31 Oct. 2014. Web. Mar. 2015. <http://www.marxist.com/the-
revolutionary-reawakening-of-burkina-faso.htm