Wabinlé Nabié

Wabinlé Nabié was born in 1973 in Fafo, Burkina Faso, and belonged to the Bwaba people. At the age of six his face was scarified, a tradition that was dying out and was banned in Burkina Faso in the 1990s, which made him one of the few scarified members of his family. He told Lefaso.net in 2023 that at school other children gave him nicknames such as "the scarified one" or "the man with many cuts" instead of calling him by his name, though he said he did not regard this as suffering.

Nabié began his theatre training in 1999 at the Atelier Théâtre Burkinabè, where he worked as an actor and storyteller. In 2006 he joined the company of the Carrefour international de théâtre de Ouagadougou (CITO) and appeared in its productions L'Os de Mor Lam and Les Soleils des indépendances.

From around 2007 he turned increasingly to cinema. He took part in an Africadoc writing residency in Bobo-Dioulasso in 2007 and in the Tënk meeting in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 2008 with a documentary project called Les Fétiches se révoltent. In 2010 he trained in documentary direction at the Institut Imagine, and in 2011 and 2013 he worked on News réels, a filmed magazine produced during FESPACO.

As an actor he appeared in Le Petit Sergent by Adama Roamba, in the Burkinabè series Waga Love by Guy Désiré Yaméogo, in La Raison du plus fort by Missa Hébié, and in French cinema in Emmanuel Courcol's Cessez-le-feu, where he played Diofo, and Un triomphe, which was part of the Cannes selection, as well as Frédéric Farrucci's La Nuit venue, where he played Omar.

As a director he made Salle de ciné (2013), Le Messager (2015), co-directed with Delphine Yerbanga, and the short documentary An 27 (2015), made at an Ateliers Varan workshop in Ouagadougou, which won awards including at ECOFEST and Siciliambiente. His feature documentary Les Scarifiés (2020) traced the meaning of the Bwaba facial scars through interviews with elders and with the griot family responsible for the practice, filmed over three weeks in his own village. It won the Silure for best feature documentary at the Rencontres cinématographiques de Sya in December 2022, the Bantou d'argent at Bangui fait son Cinéma and a special jury mention at a festival in Côte d'Ivoire, and competed in the Perspectives section of the 28th FESPACO in 2023. He also wrote tales and worked with young people.

Nabié described Les Scarifiés as a personal story, the story of his family and of his country, and in it he also looked at the mark of a horse seal carried on his mother's back. He later lived in the Paris region. Few other details of his private life have been published.

Wabinlé Nabié died on Saturday 24 October 2026 in Malakoff, in the Paris region of France. He was about 53. The news was first shared by people close to him on social media and was reported on 26 October by Lefaso.net, which called his death a loss for his family, friends, collaborators and the Burkinabè community at home and abroad. The cause of death was not made public, and funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Nabié is remembered as one of a generation of Burkinabè performers who came out of the Ouagadougou theatre scene and found work on screens in Africa and Europe. Through Les Scarifiés he documented a disappearing tradition from the inside, using his own face as the starting point, and Lefaso.net credited his work with promoting stories that shed light on the social realities and cultural heritage of Burkina Faso.