Black Guernica on a small gold site in Burkina Faso

The purpose of this resolutely descriptive article is to give an account, using drawings collected in the Lobi region of Burkina Faso, of a particularly violent act at a small artisanal gold mine in southwest Burkina Faso. The confrontation took place on October 30, 2017. Several gold miners were killed, and the site’s market was set on fire by local people. What was the trigger? The incident that claimed the life of a Lobi woman only makes sense as part of a deadly chain of events bringing harm to a single family living in a village bordering this site. The Lobi community consider that the spilling of their blood demands a response: confrontation with the gold miners. The symbolic background to these events is the honorific nature of vengeance, considered “legitimate” when it seeks to redress a blood debt, even today in the context of the mining boom.