The painted royal court
Tiébélé
Earthen houses of the Kassena people, covered by women with geometric patterns in red, black and white.
Why Tiébélé is laterite red
Tiébélé is a town in southern Burkina Faso, near the border with Ghana. It is home to the royal court of the Kassena people, a compound of windowless earthen houses, some round, some rectangular, some shaped like a figure of eight. The walls are painted by the women of the community, working together before the rainy season. They use three colours taken from the land: red from laterite soil, white from chalk or soft stone, and black from crushed dark rock. Patterns are geometric, with triangles, bands and nets, and each has a meaning. The surface is polished with stones and sealed with a varnish boiled from the pods of the néré tree. UNESCO listed the court in 2024.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Tiébélé
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Tiébélé Department" on Wikipedia. If you know Tiébélé and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Delhi In: A.Savin, FAL, source