The author examines `higher level' (i.e. higher level than the sentence level) discourse structures in procedural texts from Godié, a West-African language spoken in Southwest Ivory Coast. It is observed that in this genre, an universally high number ofconditional clauses occur. It is then claimed that these have an important text-organizing function, breaking the discourse into significant units, and that their high frequency is related to the particular goal of the discourse type.