Black and White Curbs

For all your international travelers, a quick quiz today. What country was the following picture taken? The clue is the black and white curbs.

Invisible Assumptions talked about my love of breaking assumptions. I have a whole category dedicated to assumptions on my personal website. I’ve noticed this design of alternating black and white paint on curbs in my own travels and wanted to know the history. I’m not terribly surprised the internet doesn’t seem to know that, nor do the Reddit crowd nor Quora crowd.

The one commonality I’ve found is that this pattern is found in the former British empire except for the US and Canada. Perhaps it dates back 100-125 years to paved roads or automobiles.

No matter, I recently pointed out this color pattern to someone in Mauritius, which is a former British colony and which has quite a few black and white curbs/kerbs. This person attended university in Europe and has traveled quite a bit, but never even noticed the black and white pattern until I pointed it out.

I personally first noticed this pattern in Singapore years before I ever traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, before I travelled to India, before I traveled to Mauritius. All have this painting pattern.

None of those is the answer to the question of where that above image is from. The answer is not a former British colony, but a country that nonetheless joined the Commonwealth. A country that wants to be the “Singapore of Africa”, and is sweating the details to the degree that is has imported the design of black and white curbs.

The answer is Rwanda. But that doesn’t matter, as the bigger question is who came up with this design, and how did it spread so far and wide?

Does anyone here know?