On the Margins of Emancipation: the Ambivalence of the Struggles of Evictees from the ZACA Project in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)

Abstract In Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the ZACA project, an urban renewal project, involved the destruction of inner-city neighbourhoods, and the displacement of their 12,000 inhabitants, mostly to outlying areas. Similar to other instances of forced evictions and displacements in metropolitan areas, this project has been widely used as an indicator of urban inequality, demonstrating the seizure of city centres by the upper classes and the prioritization of exchange value in neoliberal urbanism. It has also generated impulses for change through the promotion of new lifestyles, notably through the unprecedented communication campaign entrusted to the Synergie agency. In the face of this strategy, which emphasised the “modernity” of the project, tradition seemed to be an issue of struggle for the inhabitants, strongly emphasised in some speeches, and the customary authorities appeared as key actors whose support was sought by the various sides. While these injunctions may have seemed violent to a large part of the inhabitants of the zone and may partly explain the violent mobilisations that took place against the project, they may have constituted desirable horizons for others, especially the youth, making the social consequences of the ZACA project more ambivalent. By examining the testimonies of a father and his son evicted from the ZACA more than ten years after the event, and other field data, we will see that the reading of these events differs according to generation, revealing the importance of age-related inequalities in Burkinabè society. A radical change such as the expulsion from the neighbourhood of origin, if it consisted in an undeniable spatial marginalisation, could also have allowed the son to reshuffle the cards of social determinism, which he saw as a means of emancipation. In the end, this article argues for a complex reading of the accumulation of inequalities in urban societies, out of univocal logic.