ABSTRACT
Upper Volta - as Burkina Faso was known in the early 1960s - became a republic on a very auspicious day, according to Paul Zoungrana, the Archbishop of Ouagadougou, the national capital. The Muslim groups of the Liptako Emirate in the north and of the Kingdom of Kong in the south had gradually established some ascendancy over the scattered animist populations in the west and south of future Burkina. Colonialism introduced in future Burkina not so much the politics of Islam as the politics of Islam and Christianity. Colonialism changed the position of Islam relative to traditional culture and also transformed the needs of societies in future Burkina in ways that stimulated Islamisation. Colonisation and the birth of the Voltaic nation brought with them elements of revolutionary change within Islam in the area. In the 20th century, the various peoples of Burkina have undergone cataclysmic levels of change through the process of colonisation, or colonial modernisation, within just four decades.
