Something was decided about Burkina Faso before Burkina Faso existed. In 1884 and 1885, European powers sat around a table and carved Africa into administrative units that reflected the territorial ambitions of distant empires, not the social networks, trade relationships, ecological zones, or cultural geographies of the people they enclosed. The consequences of those colonial borders are still visible today. And nowhere is this more immediately visible than in Burkina Faso, a landlocked nation in the Sahel that has experienced five military coups since independence in 1960, with the most recent occurring in September 2022 under the leadership of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who at thirty-four became one of the youngest heads of state on the continent. To understand the present state of affairs in Burkina, one has to understand what colonialism actually did: not just to land or economies, but to the organizing logic of identity and nationhood that societies use to hold themselves together.

This paper argues that colonialism and its aftermath imposed a model of nationhood onto African societies that often conflicted with existing forms of social organization and political identity. Rather than emerging organically from shared historical or cultural cohesion, many African states inherited territorial boundaries and governing institutions created by colonial administrations. The result is a continent defined less by what its people have built than by what they were forced to inherit. Three texts help illuminate this argument: Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Taken together, these works help explain how colonial rule disrupted older forms of identity and governance while also shaping the psychological and cultural assumption that continued after independence.

I. Khaldun's Asabiyyah and the Question of Organic Cohesion

Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century North African historian and sociologist, shares in The Muqaddimah one of the most durable and sophisticated theories of political life ever written. His central concept is asabiyyah, the felt solidarity of people who share descent, proximity, struggle, and a common understanding of who they are. It is not sentimentality, but rather is the binding force that allows a group to act collectively, to defend itself, to place the interests of the whole above the anxieties of the individual. Khaldun argues, bluntly, that without asabiyyah, political authority is unsustainable.

What Khaldun understood is that political authority cannot be separated from its social substrate. He writes that "group feeling results only from blood relationship or something corresponding to it,"(Khaldun 173) meaning asabiyyah does not require literal kinship but does require the emotional reality of shared belonging. What makes a nation real to Khaldun, is not a constitution or borders (as much as present-day America would like to disagree), but rather the degree to which the people inside actually feel themselves to be one people.

This framework carries strong explanatory power when applied to post-colonial Africa. The deeper work of the Berlin Conference was the destruction of asabiyyah, the dissolution of any natural correspondence between who governed and who belonged.

The Mossi kingdoms of what is now Burkina Faso, for instance, had sustained complex, deeply coherent political structures for centuries before French colonial administration dismantled them and reorganized the territory in pursuit of economic resources. The French colonial project in Upper Volta (as Burkina Faso was formerly known) was never designed to build a nation, it was designed to produce soldiers and labor. When formal independence arrived in 1960, the country inherited a territorial unit devoid of any meaningful asabiyyah: no shared myth of political founding, no unified governing class with roots in the society it was supposed to lead, no institutional memory that was not also a colonial memory.

The post-independence governments of Burkina Faso attempted to fill this vacuum. Thomas Sankara, who governed from 1983 to 1987 and remains the country's most lionized leader, explicitly tried to construct a new Burkinabè identity. He renamed the country itself, replacing the French "Upper Volta" with Burkina Faso, meaning "Land of Incorruptible People," as a deliberate act of sovereignty.

Sankara understood what Khaldun had theorized: that a nation without a felt identity is not really a nation at all. He was, in this sense, a rare post-colonial leader who attempted to convert the psychological material Nandy describes into the kind of lived, collective solidarity that Khaldun would recognize as genuine asabiyyah. His assassination in 1987, widely believed to be linked to French intelligence operations and regional political pressures, ended one of the most serious attempts to build genuine asabiyyah, and serves as critical support for this argument. The structures that replaced him reimposed an externally dependent governance model that had no emotional claim on the population it administered.

Ibrahim Traoré represents a different kind of attempt. Young and radically anti-French in policy and rhetoric, Traoré has expelled French military forces, revoked mining licenses, and pursued engagement with Russia's Wagner Group as a counterweight to Western influence. Whether or not his governance is effective or ethical in outcome, his political vocabulary is organized around national dignity and anti-subjugation sentiment. He is, in Khaldunian terms, attempting to manufacture asabiyyah through politics of cultural restoration. Whether his attempt is genuine, and if the social conditions exist for it to succeed, is one of the defining political questions of the contemporary Sahel.

II. Nandy's Colonized Mind and the Psychological Inheritance

Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy (1983), argues that colonialism's largest achievement was not economic extraction but psychological reconstruction. "Modern colonialism won its great victories," Nandy writes, "not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order" (Nandy 9). Colonization did not simply impose foreign rule, but rather taught colonized people to see themselves through a foreign lens — to measure their worth, their intelligence, their civilization against the standards of the colonizer.

This is the concept that makes Nandy indispensable for understanding post-colonial Africa. The strangely damaging thing about the colonial mission is that it did not always arrive as violence. It also arrived as an invitation: to progress, to modernity, to rationalism, to the universal values of the Enlightenment. And the invitation was seductive.

For elites educated in colonial institutions, who wrote in colonial languages, who wore colonial suits and read colonial philosophy, the categories of the colonizer became the categories of thought itself. When these elites inherited political power at independence, many of them governed in the European style not because they were forced to but because they had been thoroughly convinced it was the correct way to rule. The colonized mind, for Nandy, is a mind that has internalized the colonizer’s values so completely that it polices itself.

The implications for African governance are stark. The nation-state form, with its emphasis on formal sovereignty, bureaucratic administration, constitutional legality, and territorial integrity, is a Western export. It arrived in Africa not as one possible way of organizing political life but as the only legitimate way, because the colonial powers recognized no other form. African leaders at independence were given a choice between governing according to European institutional models or not being recognized as legitimate governments at all. This was itself a form of ongoing colonization.

Burkina Faso is a country with more than sixty distinct ethnic groups. The Mossi are the largest, comprising roughly half the population, but the country also includes the Fulani, Lobi, Bobo, Mande, and many others. These groups have different languages, different economic practices, and different historical relationships with one another. None of them ever regarded themselves as part of a "Burkinabè" identity before that identity was administratively imposed. The post-colonial state asked these profoundly different communities to share a bureaucratic nationality and to organize their political lives through a single set of French-derived institutions. It is not a surprise that this would produce recurring instability. It was, in a sense, designed into the structure.

Nandy would recognize in this situation the continuation of what he calls the "second colonization," the colonization of minds that survives the formal end of empire (Nandy 11). The educated Burkinabè elites who governed in the decades after independence were, by and large, graduates of French universities. They thought in French, administered in French, and oriented their governance toward Western standards of legitimacy. The rural Burkinabè populations they governed did not share their frameworks. The result was a recurring legitimacy problem: governments possessed formal sovereignty, but often struggled to build lasting trust or shared national identity across the population.

III. Benedict's Patterns of Culture and the Integrity of Cultural Wholes

Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, makes an argument that is both anthropological and deeply philosophical. Her core claim is that each culture is an integrated whole: the beliefs, rituals, kinship structures, economic practices, and political forms of a society are not random assemblages of traits but coherent expressions of an underlying cultural orientation. She describes this orientation through the metaphor of an epigraph she takes from a Digger Indian proverb: "In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life" (Benedict 15). Each culture drinks from its own cup, and the cup cannot simply be replaced without destroying the life it sustained.

Benedict's framework argues that cultural forms are not interchangeable. A society organized around certain principles of kinship and reciprocity cannot be smoothly reorganized around the principles of market competition or bureaucratic authority without generating profound disruption. Applied to Africa, this framework exposes something that neither purely economic nor purely political analyses capture. The colonial project did not simply add new structures to African societies, but instead attacked the coherence of existing cultures, replacing African legal systems with European ones, disrupting kinship networks with labor migration, and undermining traditional authority structures by making them dependent on colonial recognition. As a result, African societies after colonialism were made incoherent at the level that Benedict identifies as most fundamental — the level at which a people holds a shared understanding of what matters and why.

The Fulani pastoralists of Burkina Faso, for instance, operate within a cultural logic of trans-Sahelian mobility, seasonal migration, and community governance through age-grade systems and Islamic jurisprudence. The colonial and post-colonial state imposed upon them a logic of fixed territorial residence, national identity documentation, and administrative law that is fundamentally alien to that cultural whole. The Jihadist insurgency that has devastated Burkina Faso since roughly 2015, which groups like Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) have prosecuted with devastating effectiveness, has recruited heavily from precisely these marginalized Fulani communities. The insurgency is not simply a religious movement, but is, in significant part, a response to the accumulated failure of the post-colonial state to offer any meaningful political framework for communities whose cultural integrity was never recognized.

IV. A Counterargument and Its Refutation

The obvious counterargument is that this analysis romanticizes pre-colonial Africa and ignores internal dynamics that made African societies vulnerable. African empires were not peaceful, the Mossi kingdoms themselves were built on raiding. Attributing primary responsibility to colonialism might seem to deny African agency or excuse political failures.

Although initially convincing , this counterargument misidentifies the nature of the claim. The argument is not that pre-colonial Africa was perfect or that colonialism invented violence. The argument is specifically about institutional form, about the mismatch between the bureaucratic nation-state model and the social realities into which it was inserted. And here Nandy provides the clearest refutation of the counterargument, because Nandy explicitly addresses the tendency of anti-colonial thought to fall into its own trap: "Even those who battle the first colonialism, often guiltily embrace the second" (Nandy 11).

The sophisticated version of the counterargument — the one that says African states must modernize, must build effective bureaucratic institutions, must grow in favor of nationalism — is itself an expression of the colonized mind. It accepts the colonial premise that the Western institutional model is universal and that failure to implement it is a cultural deficiency rather than a structural impossibility.

More specifically, the evidence from Burkina Faso does not support the idea that closer adherence to Western governance models produces better outcomes. The periods of most formal democratic governance in Burkina Faso's history, namely the multi-party elections of the 1990s and 2000s under Blaise Compaoré, were also periods of systematic corruption, inequality, and the consolidation of elite interests at the expense of the rural population. The Sahelian insurgency did not arise despite the existence of formal democratic institutions; it arose partly because those institutions were, in Khaldunian terms, utterly devoid of asabiyyah — they had no genuine popular legitimacy, nor connection to the social life of the communities they represented.

V. Traoré, Dignity, and the Unresolved Question

Ibrahim Traoré is a figure who resists simple classification. His government has suspended civil liberties, forcibly recruited civilians into auxiliary defense forces called the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), and presided over documented human rights abuses. He is not a democrat, and he is not obviously accountable to any institutional check on his power. Yet the popular support he commands, especially among younger Burkinabè, is real and not entirely manufactured.

It is rooted in something genuine: the felt humiliation of sixty years of governance that served everyone except the governed. When Traoré expels French ambassadors and military advisors in front of cheering crowds, he is performing a ritual of social liberation that carries real emotional weight for populations who have experienced French interference in their political life.

Nandy's framework helps explain this without endorsing it. The yearning for dignity, for a politics that speaks in one's own name rather than in the name of externally-imposed standards, is not irrational. It is the entirely predictable response to the "second colonization" Nandy describes. But Nandy also warns against what he calls "official dissent," the anti-colonialism that remains, at its structural core, a reproduction of colonial logic. The danger of Traoré's project is not that it is anti-French, but that it may simply reproduce the same basic structure: a strongman sitting atop an unaccountable state, governing populations whose actual cultural coherence he lacks the tools to cultivate.

Conclusion

The present state of Burkina Faso is the legible outcome of a thorough process of cultural and institutional disruption that began with the Berlin Conference and continued through nearly every phase of Western engagement with the continent. Khaldun teaches us that political authority without genuine social solidarity is inherently unstable; the colonial project deliberately destroyed the pre-existing forms of asabiyyah and replaced them with nothing. Nandy teaches us that this destruction was not merely material but psychological — that colonized peoples were made to doubt the validity of their own cultural frameworks, to see their indigenous ways of organizing life as primitive obstacles to progress. Benedict teaches us that cultures are not modular, that you cannot extract the political institutions of one civilizational context and install them in another without producing incoherence.

What would it mean to take these three arguments seriously simultaneously? It would mean acknowledging that the nation-state form, as applied in Africa, is not a neutral administrative tool but a culturally specific technology of governance that requires, for its stable operation, a kind of civic solidarity it actively works to prevent from forming. It would mean taking seriously the possibility that the political instability of the Sahel is not a problem of African governance but a problem of the governance form itself. And it would mean that the West's continued prescription of institutional reform, democratic procedure, and economic integration as solutions to African instability is itself a continuation of the very process that produced the instability in the first place.

Works Cited

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 1983.

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935.

Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton University Press, 1958.