Southwest Burkina Faso

In the Southwest of Burkina Faso, I was lucky to arrive at the beginning of the mango season. Almost every day my friends in the city of Banfora plucked mangos from the trees, ...



... delicious!

And beautiful too...


... not just the fruit but also the leaves...


... and the trees.


As there are really more fruit than can be eaten fresh, we prepared mango jam which was quite easy. The ingredients are just mangos, sugar and lemon juice, the trickiest part was to find good jars (which we then sterilised as I had seen it when I prepared strawberry jam with my grandmoter).


I spent most of the first weeks in the city of Banfora. Amongst others, I had some very interesting talks about politics in general and different personalities like the former president Thomas Sankara, the respected journalist Norbert Zongo and the current president Blaise Compaoré in particular. Burkina Faso is facing a big crisis which receives only very little attention outside the country. Even inside Burkina Faso, we get only scarce information because the media are not free. The impression that I got was that the current crisis is part of a much more long-lasting discontent and that most people here are unhappy with the country's leadership and waiting for change.

During strolls in the city, I saw a lot of interesting things like this small urban garden protected by a fence made from old tires.


A larger garden (approximately 25 x 25 metres) is kept by Sungalo and Moussa about half a kilometre outside the city's outskirts.

To start this garden, they had built a 100 m long protection and dug a 9 m deep well about two years ago. Also the preparation of the fields, seeding etc. have been a lot of work.


In the garden, they grow a variety of plants including aubergines, tomatos, maize, bananas, jatropha, local aubergines, cabbage and maniok.


In the dry season, which lasts until May, the hardest work is to irrigate the plants with water from the well.


A much lighter work was the spraying of some parts of the garden with a natural insecticide. We produced this insecticide using seeds from the Neem tree. We ground one kilo of seeds, soaked them in 10 litres of water for 3 days and then filtered the water before using it to spray it on the plants.


Talking about water: we were using the water from the well for all purposes until one morning, we found a dead frog in the well. The water was smelly and I didn't want to wash my hands (or clothes) any more, let alone drink it. Since then, we've been transporting water from a communal water point (about one km away) by bicycle or moped to the farm. Always quite time consuming and a bit difficult so we've been forced to economise a bit. A new experience for me to live with very little water and I now know exactly how much water I need for my different needs (e.g. 4-5 litres for taking a shower, 6 litres if I also want to wash my hair...).

We tried to clean the well by draining all the water from it and Sungalo even descended to the bottom to get the mud out in order to have it refill with clean water. The success was moderate and we're using water from the city up to now (also because there have been a few more dead frogs in the water in the meantime). For those of you who want to build a well, I recommend you try to reinforce it and cover it!


Beside the work in the garden, there are many other things that need to be done on Sungalo's little farm. Moussa spent a lot of time making bricks. This involves the transport of a lot of water from the well for a distance of 300m to the pit in a location where he found good soil.


The water serves to prepare the mud for the bricks.


The preparation of the bricks is quite exhausting, too. And then, after a few days of drying in the sun, the bricks can be used for construction.


In this way, the compound got better every day.

At night, I usually put up my mosquito net under the stars.



And this is the room where we spent most of the hot hours in the shade...


... and looked for shelter when it was raining. The rainy season has begun in Banfora...

... and often, the road to the city was flooded...


... but the sky was really beautiful.



Rainy season is the farming season here. Some of my friends told me that in a few weeks time, Banfora will be empty as many people will leave for their villages to work on their fields. Farming is thus a very important issue for most of the population here. As in other parts of the world, there are serious problems related to farming including the cutting down of trees and subsequent burning of the remaining plants in order to create new farmland.


It is sad to think that in this way much of the beautiful nature that remains might get lost soon. And there are still pockets of great natural beauty in the region, including the domes of Fabedougou...


... the waterfalls of Karfiguela...




...the cliffs near Niasogoni...




... or the forest near Oroudara.



We discussed a lot about forms of agriculture that can be carried out without the destruction of forests and the degradation of soil. This is a topic that has been interesting me for a long time. Last year, in Bolivia, I had the opportunity to visit one such farming system. It is called Successional Agroforestry System (SAFS) and has been developed and successfully applied by Ernst Goetsch in Brazil. In Bolivia, Joachim Milz is working very successfully with SAFS.

If you are interested in reading the short paper 'Break-through in agriculture' which Ernst Goetsch wrote in 1994, click here. I found this short text really enlightening, especially after visiting Joachim Milz' beautiful SAFS in Alto Beni, Bolivia!

On a visit to the village of Madiasso (about 60 km from Banfora), where Moussa wants to start farming soon, I had the opportunity to get to know some of his friends there.



During a discussion about possible alternatives to a field with just one crop (monoculture) - which by the way is called "pure agriculture" and recommended to farmers by the official farmer information service in Banfora - ...


... we developed a plan for an agricultural system with a series of different plants that can be planted in a row without negative interference (and sometimes, as in the case of legumes such as beans, benefits for the other plants) while trying to combine high growing trees with smaller trees and crops on the ground so as to cultivate various plants in different levels in the same spot. To visualize this, we used seeds, straws and other little things we found to represent different plant types that can be planted next to each other in one line in the field.



This would make for a very efficient use of space and resemble the natural state much more than a monoculture of maize or any other crop. Those areas of Southwestern Burkina Faso where nature is left to its own are usually covered in forest in which there are various levels of plants ranging from giant trees to smaller trees to shrubs to small plants on the ground (plus vines creeping up the stems of the trees etc.).



Inspired by these ideas, we went for a walk in Madiasso to discover that in many places, people have worked according to this principle before planting different trees very close to each other so that they overlap. An example is the big Néré that grows over the mango tree without disturbing it (we asked the farmer who told us that the mango tree produced the same good yield as the mango tree next to it which is not overshadowed by the Néré).



With things like these in my head, I have been trying to get more information about approaches like organic farming, permaculture, agroforestry (including the SAFS mentioned above) and conservation agriculture and other ideas that can be of use to us. You're very welcome to share your ideas, too!