Bricks are usually made from clay and fired, but in Karaba, a small African village in southwestern Burkina Faso, bricks are mined from the hillside. This hill is composed of laterite, a reddish stone rich in iron and aluminum.
The laterite can be easily cut with a shovel into regular sized blocks. Then the resulting blocks are dried, they harden and become solid like ordinary bricks. It is believed that the art of mining laterite brick was first developed in the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, laterite was first described and named by Scottish geographer Francis Buchanan-Hamilton when he discovered laterite in southern India in 1807.
The laterite brick quarry in Karaba has been operating for almost thirty years. Using only picks and shovels, workers cut bricks from solid rock and sell them to nearby villages, where they are used as building blocks for houses and walls that surround communities.
These amazing photos were taken by American photographer David Pace. “In a quarry, people work in teams of three to five people, but each person sells their own bricks. Although it is incredibly stressful, the people who mine laterite bricks can make money that is decent by local standards.”
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