Baule love poem

Baule love poem (Baoule, Bawule, Baule-Ando), a kwa language, bia of the Central Tano group. Kwa a word that means "human being" in many languages. This West African language is spoken on around Bouaké and Yamoussoukro in Ivory Coast.

The Kwa languages are generally tonal languages, this is the case of Baoulé which uses variations in tone to express distinctions.

If Baoulé has some dialectal variants, mutual understanding remains perfect between the different dialects.

Agni, Abron, Nzéma and Tchokossi are four languages more than 65% close to Baoulé.

The Baule country, is an area more than 32,000 square kilometers in the center of the Ivory Coast. The Baules counting the diaspora are 1.5 million. In Côte d'Ivoire, they represent 20% of the population.

Baule migrated from Ghana 3 centuries ago, looking for gold deposits, and trafficking routes to the coast. Their tradition explains that in the mid-18th century, the Asabu with Queen Abla Pokou who fled the Ashanti country, arrived in Ivory Coast.

Their name Baoulé which means "dead child" refers to an episode of this fled when the queen sacrificed her child to be able to cross a river.

Once there, the Baules gradually established an economic, linguistic and political hegemony even a "baulisation" of ethnic groups present before them (Agba).

This Akan people does not practice art for art, but the objects that it manufactures are for ritual purposes. They are demographically speaking, the largest population of Ivory Coast.

As for the other Akan groups, their society was matrilineal, and there was no political authority above the village level. Among the Baule, the captives were quickly integrated into the matrilineages.

Today, their economy relies heavily on the industrial exploitation of coffee and cocoa.