The social and built infrastructure of cultural policy: between selective popular memory and future plans

The rise of digital music distribution has caused decreasing returns from CD and cassette sales in Burkina Faso and Ghana. In response to this decline in revenues, artists and their management have been trying to find ways to find other sources of income. One major way of doing this has been through focusing on (live) music performance. Yet this requires built and social infrastructures that are not always present, functional, or put to full use. This paper explores how musicians and music workers make sense of the cultural policies that have shaped and will shape the built infrastructure (concert venues, clubs, etc.) they need. Because the complex links between the built and social infrastructures mean that history weighs significantly on future plans, this paper argues that calls for new venues cannot be the solution to the range of existing issues without engaging more thoroughly with the past.     

Cattle in the West African savanna: evidence from 1st millennium CE Kirikongo, Burkina Faso

The West African sahel and savanna are today home to diverse cattle breeds derived from complex social, political and environmental processes over at least the past four thousand years. Current evidence from the sahel and its floodplains indicates multiple sizes of cattle over time that may correspond to modern breeds. However, little is known about the cattle further south in the savanna, such as the West African Shorthorn. These humpless cattle are well adapted to the environmental conditions of more humid zones, including their significant resistance to trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness. In this paper I present new archaeozoological data from the Iron Age village of Kirikongo, Burkina Faso (100-1700 CE) that indicate the presence of small cattle in the 1st millennium CE similar in size to West African Shorthorn. These results are contextualized through comparisons with other archaeological sites and environmental data in Central West Africa, suggesting that small cattle are generally associated with the savanna environment over time, and their distributions may have oscillated with climatic changes. Lastly, interregional processes are assessed given Kirikongo’s evidence for small savanna cattle in western Burkina Faso and their subsequent adoption in the Inland Niger Delta of Mali.