The Bobo people of Africa are located in the western part of the country Burkina Faso. The population of the Bobo is slightly over 100,000 people. The Bobo have lived in the western region for centuries. Some believe they have been settled in the area since as far back as 800 A.D. These individuals have their own language that we know as simply the “Bobo” language, or “Mande”. Some of the other groups with whom the Bobo occasionally interact are the Senufo, Bamana, Lobi, and Bwa.
Some interesting facts about the Bobo concern the art they produce, and their clothing. They tend to create masks fashioned from leaves, fibers, cloth, and wood. They use leaves and fibers for their costumes also. The costumes and masks are used for many different rituals. Farming is very important to the Bobo people. Their major crops are red sorghum, pearl millet, yams, and maize. The Bobo people have also been known to cultivate cotton, which they would sell to various textile mills.
The Bobo people are an inherently decentralized group. The various villages that break down their group have their own method of organizing a “political system”. They base it on the relationship among individual patrilineages. The idea of placing political power in the hands of an individual is foreign to the Bobo people. The Bobo, like most other cultures, have their own religious beliefs. The creator god of the Bobo is Wuro, who is never physically represented and cannot be described in words according to the Bobo. The god Wuro is the individual responsible for ordering all things in the world into pairs, which must always remain balanced. However, man, through everyday existence is usually responsible for upsetting this balance. The Bobo religious system involves restoring order through a series of offerings.
Though this page has been carefully researched, the author does not claim expertise on the Bobo.
Please send questions, comments, and corrections to emuseum@mnsu.edu and include the URL.
If you are Bobo, your feedback is much appreciated.
Sources
Westbrook, Michael. Africa and Its People. Guilop Books. Chicago, IL. 1992.
Art & Life in Africa. http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/. November, 1998.
Written by, Nathan Schultz