The Laterite Road

The Laterite Road is a poetic appreciation of Africa's historical journey, its triumphs and troubles set against its borderless geographical highpoints. It glorifies the tenacity of Africa's peoples, ignoring political parasites. The Laterite Road, the ubiquitous red dusty or muddy road leading from and to almost every African home, is a metaphor for community and unity, suffering and survival. The Laterite Road is the highway linking, the thread binding, Africa and Africans in play and poverty, hunger and hope. On The Laterite Road, criss-cross Africa, from the Pyramids to Kilimanjaro to Tabletop Mountain to Gorée Isle to Djibouti. Drink from the Limpopo, shower in the Victoria Falls and navigate the Nile. The Laterite Road is timeless, ancient and modern, stretching from ancestral Turkana Boy to Apartheid to today's Arab Spring. The Laterite Road clocks up 20,000Km marked by 100Km kilometre stones doubling as headstones with a name or event honouring living and dead great and unknown Africans and Africanophils. In The Laterite Road learn of 'foolball's' power and Chelsea and Arsenal football fans dying on the same losing side to the applause of coup bullets. The kilometre stones also help readers recognise, return to and recommend a favourite kilometre stone stanza.

This publication provides a classification scheme for laterites, gives guidance on effective field prospecting and discusses specifications used in tropical countries.

Developing countries in the tropics have different natural conditions and different institutional and financial situations to industrialized countries. However, most textbooks on highway engineering are based on experience from industrialized countries with temperate climates, and deal only with specific problems. Road Engineering for Development (published as Highway and Traffic Engineering in Developing Countries in its first edition) provides a comprehensive description of the planning, design, construction and maintenance of roads in developing countries. It covers a wide range of technical and non-technical problems that may confront road engineers working in this area. The technical content of the book has been fully updated and current development issues are focused on. Designed as a fundamental text for civil engineering students this book also offers a broad, practical view of the subject for practising engineers. It has been written with the assistance of a number of world-renowned specialist professional engineers with many years experience in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Central America.

Laterite Soil Engineering is one of a few books about solving engineering problems with the help of engineering pedology. This book presents the latest information on the laterite soils’ geotechnical characteristics and engineering behavior. It shows that laterite soils are different from natural soils and that most laterite soils can be evaluated for engineering purposes using accepted theories and well-known test procedures for temperate-zone soils. This book also shows that modern concepts based on pedological considerations are very useful and take a logical approach to the identification and evaluation of laterite soils for engineering purposes. The first four chapters focus on reviewing information about the processes of tropical weathering and laterization. Chapter five summarizes information about the location, morphology and composition of laterite soils. Chapter six highlights the geotechnical implications of the pedogenic processes of tropical weathering, and it emphasizes the contribution of the results of these pedogenic processes to the deviations of engineering behavior of the problem of laterite soils. In addition, chapter seven discusses the influence of laterite soil genesis on the physic-chemical characteristics based on comparing the properties of three genetic soil groups formed under three different weathering conditions. Chapters eight through nineteen discuss the geotechnical characteristics and evaluation of laterite soils, and the effects of pedogenesis and soil-forming factors on the geotechnical and stabilization characteristics of laterite soils. The last chapter discusses the little information that exists on the application of laterite soils in engineering problems.

In comparison with engineering, geology is a relatively new domain of know ledge. Man has been building almost from the moment he came down out of the trees or emerged from the caves. All of his structures were founded in or upon rock or soil. Before the end of what we call ancient history, he had learned a great deal about materials, mechanics, and structures. This empirical information had become an organized field of practical knowledge by the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Although both foundations and ma terials of construction were largely earthy, codified knowledge of neither one nor the other existed at that time. During the last two centuries, geology has emerged and has recently begun to take on a more quantitative aspect. A generation ago, it joined hands with civil engineering to create soil mechanics. Engineers began to apply the science of geology to foundations and materials with astoundingly successful results, and geologists began to acquire an understanding of engineering methods, applying what they could to their problems. Geologi cal engineering was born of this union. People of an older time employed stone and brick in construction, although cut brick and sawed stone were used more sparingly because of a scarcity in both suitable raw materials and techniques. They were used in Cambodia, for example. A material able to meet requirements was found nearby, known as itica culla. In India it was called vettu culla, but F. A.