CHI Update: Collaborative Heritage Education to Overcome Community Stigmatization in Burkina Faso

Smelting and ironworking have a long history in Burkina Faso dating back to at least the 8th century BCE. The countryside is dotted with furnaces, mines, and other traces of the metalworking process from subsequent periods. Although traditional iron smelting is no longer widely practiced, blacksmiths continue to play an important role in the economic and social lives of their communities as a source of tools, mediators in disputes, and ritual practitioners.

Traditional blacksmithing in Arbollé, Burkina Faso. Photo Credit: Koombi Solidarité/ASOR

Burkinabé highly value this heritage and have inscribed some of the earliest evidence of it on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Despite this appreciation, modern practitioners of this art are viewed with some unease. On the one hand, they are valued for their critical services; on the other, they are mistrusted for their specialist knowledge and abilities to influence the material properties of the world. Partly as a result of this suspicion, blacksmiths—known locally as les forgerons—often intermarry and live as a minority community within Burkina Faso.

Furnace at the site of Tiwêga, built ca. 15–18th centuries CE. Photo Credit: © DSCPM/MCAT; Photographer: Sébastien Moriset

In order to strengthen relations between the blacksmiths and their neighbors as well as to promote awareness of the craft, ASOR and its local partner Koombi Solidarité organized a three-day event in June in the town of Bouria (Passoré Province). The event included members of three local minority communities—the blacksmiths of Bouria, the Peulh of Gomyiri, and the Yarsé of Yako—in a collaborative construction of furnaces. Participants then used these newly built furnaces as part of blacksmithing demonstrations for the residents of the wider region. As a symbol of their unique backgrounds coming together to form a stronger whole, participants from each minority community contributed a different element to the process: the Yarsé brought levigated clay, a nod to their traditional background as merchants; the Peulh—traditionally involved in nomadic pastoralism—donated special stones gathered during their migratory activities; and the blacksmiths provided charcoal produced especially for this occasion. In addition to the collaborative work on the furnaces, attendees also played in a community soccer game and shared numerous meals.

Collaborative furnace construction in Arbollé, Burkina Faso. Photo Credit: Koombi Solidarité/ASOR

Attendees from all three communities praised the event and the opportunities it gave them to meet directly with people whom they had feared from a distance. One participant observed:

Members of the blacksmith community expressed similar attitudes. One blacksmith noted:

The event in Bouria vividly demonstrates the positive effects that collaborative heritage education can achieve among communities that mistrust or fear each other. As attendees emphasized, these collaborative activities offer an opportunity for different communities to learn more about and actively participate in each other’s beliefs and experience. In diminishing stigmas and misconceptions held by different communities, events such as these advance human rights by countering threats to freedom of belief and strengthening tolerance for differences of opinion among minority and tribal communities. Further, such opportunities for exchange provide an avenue for countering narratives of exclusion that are currently being advanced by extremist groups in parts of the Sahel.

Blacksmithing demonstration for local communities. Photo Credit: Koombi Solidarité/ASOR