By the time I arrived in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the news hook had gone: the curfew was over, the military had stopped firing guns in the street and mobs had burnt all the houses and buildings they thought necessary, for the moment.

While eating breakfast on my first morning in the city, I heard pounding car horns and ran out onto the street to see soldiers hanging out the windows of a Mercedes-Benz only to find out that the noise was celebratory; a couple had just been married. When I asked the boys whether they were sure whether a demonstration had not just passed, they laughed a little and said: “Non. C’est fini.”

In Burkina Faso, a small west African country of which few know and even fewer care to think about, protests have been held every other day and violent demonstrations have become commonplace. In recent months there have been protests over issues ranging from the salaries and benefits of soldiers, the living and working conditions of university students and democracy in this authoritarian country that has been ruled by President Blaise Compaoré for the past 24 years.

While in the Western media news cycle Burkina Faso is deemed irrelevant, editors have been watching the country closely in the hope that the bounty of the Arab Spring story will spread south, regardless of the scepticism of many analysts.

But despite the lack of media interest in Burkina, things move quickly these days and it is easy to find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time — and difficult to predict the outcome of the events that roll over and around you. As I searched for another way into this story, in a matter of days soldiers and the gendarmerie were firing gunshots into the night and thousands of public high school students poured onto the streets and demonstrated after their teachers went on strike the previous week demanding higher wages.

The demonstration, held in support of the teachers, quickly became violent, with students calling for the resignation of the education minister as pro-democracy protesters had called for Compaoré to step down a month earlier. At the scene I took photographs until I was surrounded by a bunch of pubescent boys dressed in austere khaki uniforms who tried to wrestle my camera off me. “No photo!” they grunted.

I got the message and observed from a distance. A few kids stood on the sidelines with uncertain postures and faces. They were the only ones I managed to interview.

A protester completing her final year of high school watched as students threw rocks at the building. She said she came to the demonstration to support the teachers, but added: “I don’t agree with the violence. It is good to protest peacefully.”

Another student in his final year said despondently: “The education system is bad here. Everything is bad here. Even the military, they [the government officials] don’t pay them. The price of the food is high and if you go to university the quality of life is not good. Life is hard in Burkina Faso, our government is not good and we need change.”

But others became caught up in a frenzy of vandalism: intoxicated underlings, dancing with leaves in their hair around burning tyres and desks, shouting out cathartic “f-ck yous” in French directed toward a blank indifferent building, its windows now broken and framing the concerned forms of staff.

Each act of rebellion emboldened: throwing rocks through windows, breaking into vans carrying sachets of water, the demonstration reaching a crescendo when some students attempted to set the building ablaze. A fire truck later put out the fire before it did any real damage, according to a report by the Associated Press.

As I looked around I noticed that there were no security forces on the scene, which was unusual in a country that has been ruled by military force throughout most of its history. The demonstration had been going on for hours; the police and military must have known. Only spectators and people from other government offices watched with curiosity and disbelief, maybe wondering what grievances and accusations against their ministries and departments were formenting among other groups.

When it became clear what some of the kids were trying to do, a friend who had been helping me move around the city said that it was time to leave. “You are the only foreign reporter here,” they pleaded. “You are too visible.”

We darted off on the scooter and through the suburbs of Ouagadougou, as he was concerned that someone might have followed us back to the hotel. Things are hot now, he said.

Like many Burkinabés he had left his studies in Côte d’Ivoire because of the post-election violence and the growing animosity towards people from Burkina Faso among some of former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo’s supporters. A flight from Côte d’Ivoire, only to return to the growing instability in his homeland, a common narrative in a region where conflicts and their consequences bleed through borders.

Back on the road, as we dusted the edges of the city, students driving around stolen buses were shouting and heading towards the demonstrations. I laughed because it seemed so surreal.

At night we passed the Ministry of Education, the holes from the rocks looked like smalls gaping mouths. I wondered whether the students who trashed the interior and tried to burn the down the building really wanted to hurt the people inside. How deep was their anger and disappointment at the education and future their government was providing them with? Later I was told by a couple of academics from the Ouaga-based policy think tank, the Centre for Democratic Governance, that they thought the kids were being manipulated by the university students, the Marxists and trade unions. But the reality was the anger was there, it had just been given an outlet.

The next evening on the news, students dressed in khaki flashed across the screen, their small forms poised in gold-gilt chairs. They had met with government officials and agreed to call an end to the rioting on the condition that their teachers’ demands were addressed.

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world. The small nation has a median life expectancy of 53 years and most adults have not received over 1.3 years of formal education, according to the 2010 United Nations Human Development Report.  Demonstrations have been motivated in part by the rising cost of food and living, as has been the case in other African countries such as Uganda, Tunisia and Egypt. But analysts say that unlike in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, this widespread discontent is unlikely to forment a revolution because of the weakness of the opposition.

“The root causes are the same,” said Saidou Karim of the CGD, referring to rising food prices and the authoritarian nature of Compaoré’s government that has largely controlled the military, public administration, traditional rules and the business community during its rule. Citizens have little faith in the opposition parties and they lack the strength to foster a revolution, he said. They only hold a few seats in the National Assembly and a demonstration organised last month was attended by just a few hundred people.

Yet rather than a revolution, Karim says there is a concern the military, also rioting in the streets in recent months and looting shops in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulassou, could stage a coup if Compaoré fails to fulfill his agreement to improve their salaries and living conditions. But the military have also turned on civilians and gone around looting and destroying shops, something that Karim says is unique to this situation.

“The main problem with this that the military have no vision, they are just demonstrating for their own private interests,” he said.

A week after my departure I would speak with my friend on the phone after hearing reports of another military mutiny in Bobo-Dioulasso. “Bobo is really hot now,” they said.

The city was under a curfew, and military and gendarmes loyal to the president had swarmed the city to quell a mutiny at the local military base. The soldiers were protesting over delayed salary payments that had been negotiated after prior demonstrations, but again shops and houses had been robbed by rebel soldiers. According to news reports six mutinous soldiers were shot dead and a girl who was hit by a stray bullet, with soldiers arrested and 25 civilians injured.

On my final day, I bumped back over Burkina’s broken roads, past the spare mud-brick houses that stood in an unforgiving landscape and rolled on past mirage-like green pastures dotted with cows and trees that turned back into dust. I thought about all the people I had spoken with: the student activists, the opposition party leaders, traders, and a slightly paranoid school principal and wondered what form this collective anger would take.

I recalled a conversation I had with a young student who was studying English at the University of Ouagadougou who said that only force would lead to change in Burkina Faso. He proudly showed me a photograph on his mobile phone of the nation’s former revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara, a man who was lauded as the Che Guevara of Africa, who changed the name of his country formerly known as the Upper Volta, to Burkina Faso meaning “land of upright people” or “honest men”. Sankara was killed during the coup in 1987 through which his comrade Compaoré seized power.

Many Burkinabés still suspect Compaoré was involved in his assassination, but the current president still has his supporters. “We want another person like Thomas Sankara to change Burkina Faso,” said the young man who was born only a few years after the leader’s death.

But with the growing frustration and power of the military and the disparate nature of protest groups, it remains unclear whether the upright people will stand tall and compel the government to meet their demands, or whether Compaoré will hold onto power or another dictator be born.

Clair MacDougall is an Australian journalist who currently lives in Accra, Ghana, blogging about West Africa at North of Nowhere