Bobo-Dioulasso
Bobo-Dioulasso is Burkina Faso's second city and its first for music: a green, easy town of the west, at the foot of the country's few hills, where the balafon — the wooden xylophone with gourds beneath — is played in courtyards every night and where, every second March, the Semaine Nationale de la Culture fills the streets with masks and dance from the whole country. Its heart is Dioulassoba, the old quarter of mud houses around the Grand Mosque of 1880 — a small, dark, beautiful ancestor of the Sudanese style, its towers spiked with palm beams — and the Houet, a stream at the quarter's edge whose catfish are sacred and fed by hand. The French left a market hall and a railway station in a mud-inspired Sudanese style of the 1930s; the Guinguette, a forest of springs a few kilometres out, is where the town swims on Sundays; and Banfora, an hour and a half south-west, has the country's landscapes — the pinnacles of Sindou, the domes of Fabédougou, the falls.
The traveller who has cause to be there arrives on the road from the capital or, when the trains run, from Abidjan, and gives the town its slow rhythm: the mosque and Dioulassoba in the morning with a guide from the quarter, the oldest house and the sacred catfish; the Grand Marché for the cloth and the bronze; the station for its façade; the afternoon at the Guinguette in the water under the trees; the evening at a maquis for brochettes and dolo, the millet beer, and then wherever the balafon is being played, which someone at the maquis will know; and, with two days more, the road to Banfora and Sindou.
The Guide's honesty, gently: Burkina's winds have been hard these years — much of the country lies beyond prudent reach, chancelleries counsel against non-essential travel, and the Guide does not argue with them: this page, too, holds a measure of patient love, and keeps its lamp for the night the balafon can be heard again by anyone who walks in —; for those with cause to be there, the city runs on cash, French and Dioula greetings, motorbike-taxis and courtesy; the mosque is entered with a guide and covered shoulders; the masks are sacred and come out on their own calendar — ask, do not chase; and the balafon at midnight in a courtyard in Bobo is one of the sounds of the continent, which is why the Guide holds this page as it does.