Qualla: Republic of Upper Volta

Republic of Upper Volta: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The country was named after a river it sat at the head of. Three branches of the Volta - the Black, the White, the Red - rise in this landlocked corner of West Africa, and when the French drew up their colony they called the place simply the Upper Volta: the upstream part. The name said nothing about the people who lived there. It described hydrology. For nearly a quarter of a century after independence the Republic of Upper Volta carried that borrowed, geographical name, until a young army captain decided a nation should be called something its own people had chosen. The country you find on the map today, Burkina Faso, is the same land - renamed.

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Republic of Upper Volta: A Nation in Stages

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Upper Volta did not become a country all at once. On 11 December 1958 it was established as a self-governing state within the French Community, a halfway house between colony and nation. Full independence came on 5 August 1960. Maurice Yaméogo, born in the town of Koudougou and l...

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Republic of Upper Volta: The Years of Coups

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. What followed was a long sequence of soldiers in power. On 3 January 1966, the army chief Sangoulé Lamizana overthrew Yaméogo in a coup. Multiparty politics were nominally restored a few years later, but Lamizana dominated the country until he in turn was overthrown in 1980. A ru...

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Republic of Upper Volta: A Country Renames Itself

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Exactly one year after taking power, on 4 August 1984, Sankara changed the country's name. Upper Volta - the colonial label, the hydrological description - became Burkina Faso. The new name was stitched together from two of the nation's own languages, Mooré and Dioula, and it tra...

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Republic of Upper Volta: Upper Volta With Rockets

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The old name lingers in one strange corner of history. During the Cold War, Western commentators sometimes mocked the Soviet Union as 'Upper Volta with rockets' - a barb coined by the journalist Xan Smiley, meaning a state that poured everything into its military while its ordina...

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