Flag of Burkina Faso
national flag of Burkina Faso
The national flag of Burkina Faso (French: drapeau du Burkina Faso) is formed by two equal horizontal bands of red (top) and green, with a yellow five-pointed star resting in the center. The flag was adopted on 4 August 1984. The flag uses the Pan-African colours of Ethiopia, reflecting both a break with the country's colonial past and its unity with other African ex-colonies. The red is also said to symbolize the revolution and the green the abundance of agricultural and natural riches. The yellow star placed over the red and green stripes represents the guiding light of the revolution. The flag was adopted following the coup of 1983 which brought Thomas Sankara to power.
History
The original flag of Upper Volta, adopted at independence, contained three horizontal stripes of black, white, and red. These colours represented the three major tributaries of the Volta River, which flows south through the country: the Black Volta, the White Volta and the Red Volta. It is virtually identical to the tricolor flag used by the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. The flag was changed when Upper Volta became Burkina Faso on 4 August 1984.
“Flag of Burkina Faso” enters the record as national flag of Burkina Faso. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Flag, Burkina and Faso can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134252. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1983, 1871 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flag of Burkina Faso” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.