Ouagadougou. Few names evoke for me as much an exotic end-of-the-world feeling as the name of the capital of Burkina Faso. In 2005 my dream came true and I reached Ouaga’s city limits where a dirt road made of red soil was heading north to the dusty Sahel. I stood in front of the town sign, marked in red, the name of Burkina’a capital crossed out. My passion for road signs (which began with an abandoned „South Kensington“ tube sign I took home from a school outing to London) was coming alive. Suddenly I saw the Ouaga sign as my ultimate travel souvenir, as a symbol for all my travel desires. At the end, of course, I left it where it belonged, at my favorite end of the world. As substitute I got a miniature „Ouaga“ road sign, produced by a local craftsman, which still reigns high among my many travel treasures.

Instead of probably landing in prison I followed the dirt road into the Sahel and came across a magical little marketplace in the middle of nowhere: Under the shadow of a majestic mango tree, locals came together to chat, eat, buy and sell goods, before heading back with their bicycles to their respective village. The place felt to me like an intersection of utopia and pragmatism.

 It could have been this enchanting place which inspired Christoph Schlingensief, theatre director, performance artist and filmmaker, to his visionary Opera Village Africa to be built 30 kilometers outside of Ouagadougou. Despite its name it was not meant as a place where aria would be sung. Rather it was meant as a multi-functional place where locals and foreigners from all walks of life and all orgin come together to exchange ideas, to learn from each other, to understand each other and to be creative in many ways. As a partner Schlingensief found German-Burkinabé architect and first black Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré who is famous for his innovative works that are deeply rooted in sustainability principles. Coincidentally. this website has been created at the Startup Lions Campus, another sustainable building project designed by the team of Francis Kéré, located on the banks of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. 

As the Startup Lions Campus in the middle of the Kenyan desert, Opera Village Africa is today no longer a dream but a reality. Two of the three pillars envisaged by Schlingensief, the school and the clinic have been built, all by local workers. But Schlingensief had envisaged with his project even more: Overcoming the stereotype image of Africa as a mere place of starving children and suffering. But how much farer would we be without the way too early death of the great Christoph Schlingensief in 2010, controversial, outspoken and heard as he was?

Later I read a biography about Thomas Sankara, first a anti-imperialist revolutionary, became, just aged 33, the President of the Republic of Upper Volta and launched social, ecological and economic programmes and renamed the country from the French colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, meaning !“land of incorruptible people“. Among intellectuals in Africa Sankara, always a panafricanist, had been widely regarded as one of Africa’s great statesmen. He tried to reduce reliance on aid by boosting domestic revenues and rejected as far as he could aid from international aid organizations. But I am quite sure that Sankara would have liked the Opera Village Africa.