Political Decentralization and Traditional Leadership in the Benkadi Hunters' Association in Western Burkina Faso

This paper is about the hunters' association Benkadi, which, since the mid-1990s, has mainly organized traditional hunters and "new" hunters (young male farmers) in western Burkina Faso. I focus on the links between the hunters' association and the politico-administrative reorganization of the Burkinabe state in the context of decentralization. Departing from the fact that the once-uncontested leadership of Benkadi's founder, Tiéfing Coulibaly, underwent important transformations until his death, I argue that, taken together, politico-administrative decentralization and traditional leadership have, in the case of Benkadi, opened up a public space for a politics of belonging based on supraethnic and regionalist collective identification.