What kind of colony could bleed France dry?
On June 20, 2021, American actress Angelina Jolie visited a refugee camp in Africa in her capacity as a UNHCR Special Envoy.
Facing refugees and journalists, Angelina Jolie delivered a speech. “In twenty years, I have never been as worried as I am today about the fate of displaced people around the world. And I admire refugees. I would rather be here with you today,” she said.
Her speech drew applause from journalists and refugees and received extensive media coverage. The scene looked deeply moving.
Yet the next day, Angelina Jolie was spotted with two of her children at an upscale restaurant in Los Angeles.
Online commentators joked that she had spent a full day with refugees in West Africa one day, only to reappear more than ten thousand kilometres away in Los Angeles the next. Her apparent spatial teleportation was, they quipped, heartwarming.
Supporters and critics of Jolie argued back and forth, yet almost no one paid attention to the refugee camp she visited. That camp sat in West Africa, inside a country barely registered on the global radar.
Burkina Faso. Most people hear the name and struggle to place it on a map.
Burkina Faso lies in West Africa, on the upper reaches of the Volta River. It covers 270,000 square kilometres and has roughly 20 million inhabitants. Measured by land and population, it is no tiny nation, yet its global profile is as thin as the air inside a Lay’s potato chip bag.
In 1919, French colonial forces seized Ouagadougou. To contain constant uprisings, France grouped the entire upper Volta basin into a separate colony called Upper Volta.
Once the colony was established, France quickly regretted its decision. They had picked the wrong spot.
During the colonial expansion era, Britain and France followed vastly different colonial models.
Britain’s approach resembled the ancient Chinese jimi system: local chiefs and tribal rulers kept their positions, with limited tax autonomy. The unspoken rule was “pay enough to the Crown, keep enough for the governor, and keep what remains for yourselves.” Britain governed India and much of Africa with this playbook, practicing sustainable over‑exploitation.
France took a different road. It pursued wholesale administrative assimilation, removing indigenous power structures and installing a brand‑new colonial bureaucracy. This model demanded heavy upfront investment and delivered slow returns, yet it gave France deep, tight control over its colonies. That explains why French influence lingered far more strongly across its former territories after the colonial empires collapsed, compared with British influence.
Upper Volta, however, taught France a brutal lesson. The French arrived and discovered they had stumbled on a dead‑end asset.
Landlocked in the West African interior, the country cleverly avoided every high‑value resource deposit. Its northern border abuts the Sahara Desert; two‑thirds of its territory is arid wasteland. The remaining third has marginally usable soil, yet the climate is brutal. Almost nothing grows reliably.
The local Mossi people also held distinct fertility norms, with extremely high birth rates and large households. On the surface, terrible farmland paired with rapid population growth seemed a textbook path straight into the Malthusian trap.
The reality was not quite so simple. A uniquely African balancing mechanism existed back then. Upper Volta’s population kept growing, while its southern neighbour Dahomey built its economy on raiding people for the transatlantic slave trade. A cycle formed: Mossi families bore children, and Dahomean raiders captured them. The loop closed.
By the time the French arrived, the transatlantic slave trade had already been abolished. Upper Volta was poor, utterly unable to generate surplus wealth for France. The very first French governor bought his post. To build local roads, he poured money until he went bankrupt. Rumours of gold drew prospectors, yet one tonne of ore yielded merely 1.2 grams of gold, nearly driving the governor to despair. The second governor arrived, stayed five months, wrote not a single official report, and abandoned his post, refusing to return to this forsaken place.
As a colony, Upper Volta drained French resources. France had never imagined colonialism could turn into a losing business.
Upper Volta gained internal autonomy in 1958, and full independence in 1960 alongside Benin, Niger and other neighbouring states. Once free, France moved quickly to install a hand‑picked local leader as Upper Volta’s founding president: Maurice Yaméogo.
French‑backed African presidents came to power for all sorts of reasons. Bokassa seized power through farce, Macías Nguema through foolishness. None of them, though, had an origin story as bizarre as Yaméogo’s — his presidency began, in a sense, with a lightning strike.
Born in 1921 into a poor rural family in Upper Volta, Yaméogo should have lived a life cut off from modern opportunities. Fate intervened when he was eight: a bolt of lightning struck him.
The strike rewrote his life. Young Yaméogo lay near death. Local healthcare was practically non‑existent, and most people in that condition would have been written off. But a Catholic priest arrived and administered emergency baptism.
Emergency baptism was performed for people on the brink of death. If the person died, the faithful reasoned, their faith was insufficient; if they survived, the credit belonged to God, and they would serve the church from then on. Yaméogo’s family followed indigenous traditional religion, but facing death, they agreed to the rite.
Yaméogo survived after several days and converted to Catholicism.
Conversion unlocked tangible opportunities. He entered the Patré Seminary. It was no elite university, yet it was a world away from the mass illiteracy around him.
More importantly, France recruited its local proxies largely from seminary students. Remember France’s assimilation strategy: it cultivated local elites fluent in French, steeped in French culture, loyal to Paris. Yaméogo, saved by lightning, landed in this talent pipeline.
At seminary, though, academics held little appeal. He fixated on chasing girls, especially those from privileged families. Poor, plain‑looking and academically unremarkable, he was bold and persistent. He courted a woman from a well‑off household, who opened doors to French colonial social circles. With that connection, his career advanced rapidly.
Yaméogo climbed the colonial administration ranks and became Minister of the Interior in 1958. When Upper Volta gained independence in 1960, Paris told him directly: France had decided he would be president.
That is how a boy struck by lightning grew into Upper Volta’s first president.
Once in office, Yaméogo stacked multiple portfolios including Veteran Affairs, running almost a one‑man cabinet. He banned opposition parties and suppressed powerful local chiefs. To shore up control, he rotated officials constantly. Many received no written appointment; they learned they had new jobs through radio announcements.
Most leaders consolidate power to govern. Yaméogo did something unexpected once rivals were neutralised: he left. Not stepping down from office, but physically leaving the country. Like Angelina Jolie, he pulled off a long‑distance vanishing act. With power secured, he boarded a plane to Paris, where he lived lavishly, driving expensive cars and keeping company with the wealthy. For most of each year, the president of Upper Volta resided in Europe, ruling his African nation remotely.
Africa had seen many corrupt rulers, but a president governing his country from overseas was unprecedented.
Consider Yaméogo’s logic. Even France had failed to extract profit from Upper Volta after a century of occupation. The newly independent state was catastrophically poor, with a per‑capita income of just $68. Ordinary families lived in mud huts. Smallpox, measles and malaria ran rampant. One in five infants died before their first birthday, and average life expectancy stood under forty.
Yaméogo reasoned there was no wealth to squeeze from starving citizens. If he wanted to profit, he had to target deep‑pocketed donors.
He caught the right historical wave. After the fall of European empires, former colonial powers issued loans to retain influence over their ex‑colonies. Yaméogo set his sights squarely on that money.
France lent funds for cotton farming; he spent the money on villas. French grants for hydroelectric plants paid for his private palace in his hometown. School funding bought fur coats for his wives and sports cars for his sons.
One might ask why France tolerated this theft. That was Yaméogo’s clever trick: he still made France profitable.
France had lost money on Upper Volta for decades because the cost of running colonial institutions outstripped all output. Yaméogo abandoned his nation’s interests. He sold cotton and minerals to France at far below market rates, while importing French manufactured goods at inflated prices. France was delighted. After decades of losses, it finally turned a profit in Upper Volta.
Inevitably, the state treasury collapsed, and ordinary people suffered. Yaméogo did not care. He saw Upper Volta locked in permanent, grinding poverty. Things could scarcely get worse. “If I have no bottom line, no one can threaten me with one,” he seemed to think.
In 1965, Yaméogo held a lavish wedding for his new bride, a former Miss Côte d’Ivoire. He imprisoned his ex‑wife and spent $200,000 on the ceremony. It was modest compared with Bokassa’s coronation, yet Yaméogo claimed it was a frugal gesture to “understand the people.”
Under his rule, society crumbled. Teachers went unpaid, schools closed, and enrolment fell to 8%. Civil servants took a 20% pay cut, veterans 16%. Even that failed to stabilise the budget.
In late 1965, the government imposed a flat 10% income tax on every citizen, including priests. The tax became the final straw.
Nationwide strikes erupted in September 1965. Workers, police and soldiers joined the protests.
Yaméogo only flew back from Europe on New Year’s Day 1966. General Sangoulé Lamizana told him he could order troops to fire on demonstrators, but Lamizana refused to take responsibility without a formal written presidential decree. Yaméogo verbally pushed for crackdowns yet refused to sign the order. Cornered, the army chose to remove the president instead of shooting civilians. Soldiers marched on the presidential palace, and Yaméogo was forced to resign.
After five years in power, the country came under military rule. African military juntas were common, many led by tyrants like Bokassa or Idi Amin. What sort of leader was Sangoulé Lamizana?
Lamizana suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, and announced four years of military rule. He promoted himself to brigadier general and stacked multiple ministerial posts. The pattern was familiar.
In 1967, he rolled out a four‑year national development plan. He lifted the ban on political parties in 1969 and won a formal presidential election later, cementing military rule.
Lamizana genuinely wanted to rebuild the economy, yet luck deserted him. Yaméogo’s looting had emptied the treasury; annual revenue could barely cover interest payments on foreign debt. With almost no domestic industry, Lamizana’s top priority was restoring production. Then drought struck. The 1970s brought brutal heatwaves, turning farmland into desert and wiping out cotton and grain harvests.
The 1973 oil crisis sent energy and consumer prices soaring. Desperate, Lamizana begged for international aid. Yet no country offered meaningful support. Most only sent token handouts.
In October 1973, Lamizana travelled to the White House. He described the famine in detail, emphasised his government’s anti‑communist stance, and pleaded for American help. Nixon listened politely, offered kind words, and instructed his staff: give everything except real aid. To Washington, a poor, resource‑less, strategically insignificant country like Upper Volta was not worth investing in. The Watergate scandal already consumed US attention.
For nations like Upper Volta seeking meaningful aid, the United States was a dead end. Online commentators joked: Nixon was no longer Nixon, but Brezhnev would always be your patron.
Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union ran aid programmes across 64 Asian, African and Latin American states. When Soviet aid records were declassified in 1989, they revealed that up to that point, the USSR had issued loans totalling roughly $149 billion to 61 countries, far exceeding Western aid budgets. That figure excluded massive free shipments of supplies. Soviet aid peaked during Brezhnev’s rule. Between 1979 and 1980, 17 out of 25 new aid agreements were 100% grants with no repayment required.
By 1982, the Soviet Union ran 4,512 aid projects, with 2,707 completed. These installations could generate 475 million kilowatt‑hours of electricity, produce 77 million tonnes of steel, extract 49.3 million tonnes of oil and mine 27.8 million tonnes of coal — the equivalent of exporting an entire industrial nation’s capacity.
Soviet‑built projects made up 17% of India’s industrial base, 15% of Syria’s total investment, and 32% of Afghanistan’s industry. Sixty percent of major infrastructure in Algeria, Egypt and Iraq came from Soviet engineers. Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam received near‑full Soviet backing.
Most of these investments were not designed for financial returns. The logic was purely political. Soviet leadership once believed the poorest allies were the most loyal, and the nations least able to repay loans deserved the most support. No project was too ambitious: the Aswan High Dam, the Kabul highway — the USSR took on all large‑scale national projects.
From the Soviet perspective, this aid system was a failure. Less than 5% of loans were repaid. Billions vanished with no tangible strategic gain. When the 1989 report came out, Soviet public opinion exploded. Citizens could not understand why their government spent so heavily on foreign nations while struggling at home. Generous aid created a class of states that engaged Moscow only to grab handouts, and damaged Soviet diplomacy.
American aid, by contrast, was calculated line by line at the State Department. Upper Volta had no minerals, no repayment capacity and no strategic value, so it received no substantial US support.
Lamizana’s best path might have been to turn to the USSR, but he never did.
Conditions kept worsening. Strikes flared repeatedly. By 1979, 70% of the national budget relied on foreign aid. The government dared not borrow more; it had already lost the ability to service its debts.
At the end of 1979, unrest erupted again. Civil servants went unpaid. Rumours spread that Lamizana had diverted 400 million CFA francs. Public servants walked out.
Faced with widespread anger, Lamizana addressed the nation publicly in December 1979. He admitted his government survived only on Western handouts, and that national sovereignty had been severely eroded. He called himself a failed president. About the 400 million CFA francs, he confirmed he had moved the funds — but not for personal enrichment. He had bought grain to feed famine victims. He could not prove it, and there was little he could say.
He did not need to defend himself for long. In 1980, his former subordinate, intelligence chief Saye Zerbo, launched a coup. Lamizana surrendered power without resistance. Relief, he later implied, outweighed sorrow. He had hoped regime change would let Upper Volta default on old debts. Reality disappointed him. The new junta refused to repudiate the loans, borrowed heavily, bought 100,000 tonnes of grain, and resold it to starving citizens at inflated prices. The grim African cycle repeated.
Dictators were common, but leaders like Lamizana were rare. Upper Volta’s future still seemed trapped in permanent, grinding poverty.
So far, the story lacks a famous tyrant like Bokassa, and the country remains destitute. What makes it worth telling?
You may have noticed one big unanswered question: how did the Republic of Upper Volta become Burkina Faso?
In local languages, Burkina Faso means “Land of the Upright People.” The man who pushed for this name change and gave the nation its soul was Thomas Sankara.
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