We left Dogon country and headed into Burkina Faso, formerly called Upper Volta.

Immediately we saw a vulture, which our guides said were very common in Burkina Faso. It's a challenge to the tourism minister, that the first identifiable thing you see when you get to a country is vultures.

Stopping for some tea and to give the engine a break.

Tuareg tea is quite a ritual. Mohamed poured the water through the tea several times. It also seemed to me that there were ritually fewer glasses than people, so that they would always be passed around.

We were in Marlboro Country. The vultures are no dummies. Let's not forget, with respect to the health warning printed at the bottom of the billboard: Literacy: definition: age 15 and over can read and write total population: 26.6% male: 36.9% female: 16.6% (2003 est.) (CIA World Factbook — wow, I just noticed that the url for that link ends in "uv.html", dating from the days when Burkina Faso was called Upper Volta.)

Tiebele is a small village near the Ghana border. After breakfast, which included presumably two presumably scrambled pale presumed eggs (what do they feed American chickens to make the yolks so orange?) we were joined by our Ouagadougou guide, Ibrahim. He shook my hand and when Dave came out he shook Dave's hand and as near as I can tell that was all he did for the rest of the day. He certainly had no interaction with either of us. On the way back from Tiebele he streamed Tuareg French continuously at Kone, getting very little reaction except every ten or fifteen kilometers Mohamed would say something and about half as often as that Kone would say something. When we got to the hotel, he disappeared without a goodbye. I don't understand French, of course, but from cognates and proper nouns and so forth I have decided in my own mind that it wasn't anything deep. A lot about phone cards about km 130. I assume he was there as a talisman or a payback or some other African welfare substitute which allows useless chattering relatives of powerful men not to starve to death while keeping them out of casinos and beds and the like. The substance of the day was that we drove to Tiebele and were lectured on a way of life which has probably been replaced by generic poverty, and drove back. The decorations were nowhere near as vivid as on the Internet, but the anthropology was much richer. I was steeling myself for a wildly painted village of wildly painted village souvenir salesmen. It was much more placid. It may be that they live there. There were about 8 guys vying to be the sub sub guide — "Bernard" won out. He says he's an animist even though Bernard is a Christian name. How does one "believe" in a multicultural country such as America or Burkina Faso? But I keep forgetting — belief never enters into it, only behavior. We toured a compound consisting of a few houses where an extended family lives. The room we entered smelled like the peanut butter which had just been freshly ground.

This is what the residents of Tiebele get when they remodel their kitchens. It is a hearth. The guides took pains to explain that this architecture was meant to symbolize the Female Body. Get it? You can see her knees sticking up there. I don't know if the guides thought that we were not of a symbolic frame of mind, or deduced that we weren't familiar with female anatomy. Either way, their kitchen got finished.

Many of the buildings are painted like this.

Everywhere we went in West Africa people were selling petrol for motorcycles in liquor bottles.

Egg-shaped woven Burkina Faso granaries. In Tiebele, a woman is not permitted to look inside a granary because to do so would indicate that she was looking around for new seeds, i.e., to cheat on her husband. Once again, I am moved to muse upon the possible irony levels obtained in other societies. Are the informants who repeated this story in the same frat as the sources who told a credulous American media that hippies called sunglasses "tea shades" and that twenty-somethings say "Word!" and "Dog!" as a matter of course? When Burkinabes come to America, do they learn of American mores from the Hokey Pokey and Susan Jane?

Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, and while Senegal seems to be where most of the movies in the area are actually made (judging from the SF International Film Festival), there's an annual film festival here, for which this is the monument.

The highlight of our visit to Ouagadougou was the music. After walking through several dusty rooms in La Musée de la Musique de Ouagadougou containing old instruments we couldn't touch or hear, we were shown to an auditorium where there was a live band playing on those instruments. The best drumming we heard the whole trip was that afternoon. These people call themselves Tagnin Percussion but they don't have a CD or anything. They do rate a mention on the museum's web page. I think they are a little sad that primarily tourists are listening to the traditional music of Burkina Faso now, and everybody else is, you know, Wutang ... maybe if copyrights were strictly enforced, it would have the effect of cutting down invasive weed trees in the forest of the world's indigenous music.

Another highly photoshopped photo from the badly-lit room.

On to Niamey to Agadez