The Volta-Bani War was an anti-colonial rebellion which took place in French West Africa (specifically, the areas of modern Burkina Faso and Mali) between 1915 and 1917.

[2] The war started after the 1915 rainy season when a group of representatives from around a dozen villages gathered at Bona where they resolved to take up arms against the French occupiers.

It went through various phases as the colonial army organised two suppression campaigns but initially failed in its purpose, in the face of fierce opposition and superior tactics.

The book is an anthropological analysis and detailed description of these confrontations, on the basis of military archives documents and an elaborate understanding of the region based on ethnographic fieldwork and oral history.

[4] A fictional account of the revolt was the subject of one of the important literary works of West Africa, Nazi Boni's Crépuscule des temps anciens (1962).