#burkina

#France cut off aid to Burkina Faso. Traoré didn't flinch.

He didn't call Paris. He didn't send a delegation. He didn't beg for the money to keep flowing. He looked at the record and said the quiet part out loud.

"Sixty-three years of French aid and #Burkina Faso never developed. Losing it won't kill us. It will force us to work and rely on ourselves."

That's the whole argument in one sentence.

Think about what 63 years means. Independence in 1960. French troops stationed on Burkinabè soil. The 1961 military assistance agreement keeping French forces embedded for six decades. Budget support arriving every year. Development programs announced every year. And at the end of it, Burkina Faso was still one of the poorest countries on earth.

Traoré looked at that record and asked the obvious question. If the help never helped, what was it for?

The suspension came after he expelled French troops and tore up the 1961 agreement. France pulled its budget support. His response was not anger. It was arithmetic. "If after 63 years the aid didn't allow Burkina Faso to develop, I don't believe its absence will be fatal. On the contrary, it will put us to work."

That line separates two kinds of leaders. One waits for the next check. The other asks why the check never changed anything.

He is not anti-French. He has said so himself. His terms are simple. Come as an equal or don't come. "The resources belong to us 100%. Depending on what you bring, we can evaluate."

The aid is gone. Burkina Faso is still standing. And Traoré is asking a question every African leader should have asked decades ago: if their help never helped, why were we afraid to lose it?

The homeland or death. We shall overcome.

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#HistoricalAfrica #azatell #IbrahimTraore #BurkinaFaso #Sovereignty #AES

Burkina Faso is rewriting its schoolbooks. Not revising them. Rewriting them.

The Ministry of Secondary Education announced on September 7 that 54 new lessons in history, geography, and #citizenship will be introduced from CP1 to Terminale starting this school year . The minister, Moumouni Zoungrana, was blunt about why. "Those who came to conquer Africa, we call them explorers, conquerors. Were they conquerors? They were spies. They were #invaders" .

He said the old curricula used words that "infantilize" and "animalize" Africans in the teaching of their own #history . The new textbooks will not call them explorers. They will call them invaders.

The new lessons will center the Charter of Kurukan Fuga, African contributions to science, slavery, African resistance to colonization, and the history of major revolutions. In geography, the focus shifts to #Burkina Faso's strengths and the AES . Specialists are preparing the content, and teachers will get guidebooks.

This is not just a curriculum tweak. It is a decolonization of the classroom. For decades, Burkinabè children learned about the French Revolution before they learned about the Moose kingdoms. They learned that Europeans "discovered" Africa before they learned that Africans had universities and empires.

The Charter of Kurukan Fuga is the clearest example of what was missing. It is a 13th-century constitution from the #Mali Empire, adopted in 1236 after the Battle of Kirina. It established rules for #governance, women's rights, and the treatment of strangers . It is one of the oldest known texts of its kind in West Africa. Burkinabè students will now study it as a founding document of their own #political heritage.

Zoungrana said the goal is to "extirpate the words that infantilize us, that animalize us" . That is the point. A child who learns that his ancestors were "explorers" and "conquerors" grows up thinking he was the one who needed civilizing. A child who learns about Kurukan Fuga grows up knowing his ancestors wrote constitutions before #Europe had parliaments.

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