ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of circular migration from Burkina Faso to the West African coast and back since 1900. The National Migration Survey serves to document the social history of Burkinabe migration. Results from the survey suggest that Cote d'Ivoire surpassed Ghana as the major destination only after the end of World War II—ironically, after the repeal of the forced labor laws whose aim had been to recruit Burkinabe for work in Cote d'Ivoire. Hoe and Wage underscores the importance of at least three facets of migration—gender, space, and ethnicity—which combine to produce different but interrelated patterns of mobility. Massive female migration would have disrupted the reproductive regime, particularly, the control of male elders over the labor of women and their children. Ethnicity had an important influence on internal migration in Burkina, where differences in social organization and power relations from one ethnic group to another shaped mobility in different ways.
