Every Mossi king can, in theory, trace his lineage back here. The founding story begins not with a man but with a woman: Yennenga, a legendary princess and warrior whose son Ouédraogo is remembered as the first to build at Tenkodogo. From his line came the rulers of Fada N'gourma, Boussouma, Zondoma, and eventually the great kingdom of Ouagadougou itself. Tenkodogo never grew into the largest of the Mossi states, but it holds a different kind of authority - the authority of being first. To the Mossi, this is the ancestral hearth, the place the genealogies always return to. Whatever later kingdoms achieved in power or territory, they could not claim what Tenkodogo claims: to be the beginning.

At the heart of town, close by the market, stands the Palais Royal de Tenkodogo - known locally as the Na-Yiri, the "king's house." The institution it represents has outlasted empires. When King Naba Saga died in 2016, he was counted as the twenty-eighth king of Tenkodogo in the traditional reckoning, succeeded in turn by Naba Guiguem-Pollé. Many descendants of the royal line carry the surname Sorgho and are known as the naabisi, the royals of the city. This is no museum-piece monarchy. The royal family still mediates disputes over land and family, and their word still settles arguments that courts cannot. In Tenkodogo, the past is not a closed chapter but a living office, occupied to this day.

Life in Tenkodogo turns on a three-day rhythm. Every third day the main market fills - the Raaga, in Mooré, or the Daassi in the Bissa tongue spoken alongside it here, for this is a place where two peoples and two languages have long shared the same ground. Traders come in from the surrounding villages, where families raise cattle, goats, and sheep across the semi-arid scrub. The climate is hot and dry, a borderland between the savanna and something harsher. Between market days the town quiets, then swells again as vendors return with grain, livestock, and goods, the oldest commerce of the Sahel playing out under the same sun that warmed Ouédraogo's first walls.

For all its deep history, Tenkodogo does not stand still. Ahead of the 2019 celebrations of the 11 Décembre festival - Burkina Faso's national day, which the town has hosted - new roads and roundabouts were paved, and movement through the city quickened. The old dirt airstrip was cleared away to make room for a new neighborhood, the Cité 11 Décembre, rising with modern villas where planes once landed. Roughly 185 kilometers and three and a half hours by road from the capital, Ouagadougou, Tenkodogo remains connected to the wider country by a steady stream of buses. The ancient land, it turns out, is still being built.