© A. Pappone
Gaoua is a quiet provincial town in the heart of the fascinating Lobi region, where animist traditions and culture have remained unchanged over the centuries, in a curious local variant, similar to shamanism, a meeting point between typically Sahelian animism and the voodoo spirituality of the Gulf of Guinea.
While the city is interesting for its lively Sunday market, a crossroads of people and authentic merchandise, and its fine ethnographic museum, dedicated to the culture of the seven groups that make up the great Lobi family, the deeper essence of this ancestral land can be savoured in the rural areas close to the town.
Scattered through the dusty countryside are the typical unbaked clay dwellings, called soukhala, with a rectangular floor plan and a terraced upper floor accessed from the inside by means of fluted wooden trunks, and with a small turret at the top, which gives the whole structure the appearance of a miniature fortress. Unlike most rural areas, the Lobi dwellings are isolated from each other, in the centre of their own field, not assembled into villages, thus conceived as separate examples of defensive architecture. However, the real protection of a soukhala does not derive so much from its architectural design as from the “spiritual” defence system, implemented by the theory of protective fetishes and gris-gris (lucky charms or hunting trophies), scattered around the strategic points of the house: the door, the hearth and the main granary on the terrace. A visit to a soukhala not only provides an insight into the daily life of a typical Lobi family, its hierarchy and internal organisation, but also into the secrets and customs of a people who have remained entirely animist, and who still live according to the customs and traditions of an ancient society of hunters, warriors, farmers and feticheurs, in which traditional healings, steeped in naturopathy and mystical spirituality, play a central role.
Thirty kilometres from Gaoua, on the border with the Ivory Coast, not far from the town of Kampti, is one of the most important families of feticheurs/healers in Burkina Faso, whose ‘clinic’ of traditional medicine and healing is frequented not only by the Lobi, but by all the people of the country, and often also by those of the Ivory Coast.
Their soukhala, scattered with protective and therapeutic fetishes, sacrificial altars and family totems, consultation rooms dedicated to the various branches of “inexplicable diseases”, i.e. diseases that cannot be diagnosed by modern medicine, all those pathologies linked to animist spirituality and the evil eye, including mental illness or impotence, is the most suggestive place one can encounter in Lobi land, a place that instils a reverential awe, imbued as it is with a magical but also ghostly atmosphere.
The feticheur himself welcomes visitors and does the honours, offering a calebasse of millet beer, called tchapalo, or a small glass with a very strong palm spirit.
The many craft villages on the road to Kampti are worth a stop. Each village has its own craftsmen who specialise in a particular type of handicraft. There is the sculptor’s village, the blacksmith’s village, the women’s cooperative that weaves straw, or the village where pottery is made. These are products for the use and consumption of the population and not tourist souvenirs, so the quality, authenticity and refinement of the objects is guaranteed.
On the dirt track in the direction of Banfora, about 40 minutes from Gaoua is Obire, one of the sacred places of the Gan group, also Lobi, whose strict hierarchy refers to the king who rules over his people, in parallel with the institutional political power. A visit to the Sanctuary of the Kings of the Gan, where the tombs of all the chiefs who have succeeded one another over the centuries are to be found, will give an insight into the complex social structure of this clan and with a little luck, the King himself will give an audience to visitors.
Not far from Obire are the stone ruins of the Loropeni Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, about which many mysteries still remain, despite the archaeological excavations and analyses carried out by specialised teams. It is probably a complex dating back to medieval times, abandoned in the 19th century, which represents a unicum in the entire western sub-Saharan area, having been conceived to all intents and purposes as a fortified medieval town, surrounded by high walls, which used to be walkable at the top and tapered.
