The Colonial Tree: Encountering the Vegetal Legacy of French Colonialism in the Mouhoun Region, Burkina Faso
New Article Published by Laurence Douny and Salif Sawadogo
Remaining African mahogany trees at a plant nursery in Safané that was established around 1936 and photographed before the trees were cut down in April 2024. Photo: Salif Sawadogo, 2023
Remains of colonial administrations, rules and policies subtly manifest themselves in the particular configurations of natural and urban landscapes and the distribution of vegetation, such as in the case of Khaya senegalensis or African mahogany. In the Mouhoun region of western Burkina Faso, this vegetal legacy of the French colonies bears witness to a complex and hybrid natural, cultural and local heritage known by the Marka-Dafing as laada, a ›more-than-colonial‹ heritage.
This paper by Laurence Douny and Salif Sawadogo sheds light on aspects of a shared colonisers’/colonised heritage through an examination of people’s recollections, fragments of colonial history and their views of the tree as the embodiment of forced labour or arboreal ornamentation that thus remind people of the past need to align with the rules set by the former colonial administration. By looking at a double process of colonial appropriation and indigenous reappropriation of the tree’s materiality, the paper examines a series of material practices from cutting down the tree for its wood to removing its bark for medicines or sculpting its dead trunk to make sacrifices. The authors provide some reflection on how, through these material practices, aspects of memory work are carried out daily and ritually in a community where socio-political cracks created or deepened by colonial powers are still intensely felt.
The full paper can be accessed here:
https://doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2025.2510761