Classroom sheets

Card A. The borrowed motor

With the bearing in Intake-04 smoking, Adam takes the motor out of Intake-08, part of the plant’s spare cooling, and fits it into Intake-04 while the plant keeps running. Talib warns that the manual forbids it, then helps him.

Chapter 5, p. 46. “The manual didn’t account for sabotage”

Card B. The grey paste

Aisha drops water on Madina’s dust and shows Adam that it turns into a salty paste that will block his fine filters. She offers a cheap three-layer pre-filter of sisal, charcoal and woven grass that anyone can replace.

Chapter 3, pp. 24–25. “They don’t get dirty, Mr Sterling. They choke” (p. 25)

Card C. Noise

Talib, helped by Aisha, shows Adam the portal’s records: a new approved firm that sells nothing the plant needs, weekly payments to Sahel Strategic Solutions marked as consulting, and the name Yusuf Dunia, who, Aisha says, is the Minister’s brother. Talib begs him to shut the plant down before it burns, but Adam calls the evidence noise and sends him to run the morning checks.

Chapter 6, pp. 50–51. “Complex systems have noise in them. This is noise” (p. 51)

Card D. The envelope

Nabil, Deputy Administrator of the National Energy Fund, visits Elder Mustapha and slides a thick envelope of notes across the mat, asking for his support when the Minister comes. Mustapha’s fingers shake, and he takes it.

Chapter 4, p. 36. “A token of appreciation from the Minister”

Card E. The blocked order

Adam tries to order a new motor and bearing set through the National Energy Fund portal. The portal refuses under clause 4.B of the amendment, and his urgent request is sent to a sub-committee that will not look at it for three weeks.

Chapter 5, pp. 43–44. “Expected review date: End of Month” (p. 44)

Card F. The trial ended

Aisha’s pre-filter on Intake-06 keeps that intake cooler and quieter all week. Adam tells Talib the result was inconclusive and ends the trial, and the next morning the box goes into the scrap store.

Chapter 3, p. 31. “I’ve ended the trial”

Card G. The bypass

On the hottest afternoon of the season, Adam orders Talib to shut off the west intake and push everything through the main cooling loop. Talib protests that the manual forbids it, then does as he is told, and within minutes Intake-04 cracks and the screens go black.

Chapter 6, p. 53. “It won’t overheat. Do it. Now.”

Card H. The portal says no

Adam sends Talib to order sisal, charcoal and grass matting through the National Energy Fund portal, which accepts only three approved firms. None of them sells these things, and Adam turns down Aisha’s offer to get them from the village.

Chapter 3, pp. 27–28. “They did not sell anything that grew” (p. 27)

Card I. The fake gaskets

After Nabil’s email points Adam to “approved local vendors” (p. 45), a box of gaskets for the coolant pumps arrives from the local firm instead of the maker. They are sticky, crude copies, bought cheaply while the plant’s budget was charged for the real thing.

Chapter 5, p. 45. “These are fake”

Card J. The amendment

Minister Dunia arrives with soldiers, cameras and an amendment that moves the plant’s money into the National Energy Fund. Adam signs it alone, using Proxima’s power of attorney, without sending it to Proxima’s lawyers and without reading it to the end.

Chapter 4, p. 40. “he did not read it to the end”

Blame-share table

Shares must add up to 100. Name everyone you think had a hand in each event.

Teacher’s key

Story order: B, H, F, D, J, E, I, A, C, G.

Points to raise: Aisha’s warning (B) and her offer to fetch the materials (H) both come before anything is stolen. Clause 4.B, signed on card J, is what blocks the order on card E. Noise is Adam’s word for the evidence of fraud and for Talib’s warning that the plant will burn (p. 51). Malik also says of the plant’s hum, “It is just noise” (ch. 3, p. 23), which students may want to compare. Later, from chapter 8: showTalib throws Adam’s word back at him in chapter 8: “I showed you, and you said noise” (p. 68).

The task

Your village has a common fund from its cotton. Write no more than eight rules for spending it.

Work in groups of four. Your rules must cover all four of these:

1. Who can take money out of the fund.
2. How much they can take, and whether larger sums need more people to agree.
3. Who checks the spending, and how often.
4. What happens if a village that has borrowed from the fund cannot pay it back.

Our rules

Self-check

Tick each one before you post your rules on the wall.

• Every rule says who does what.
• We have covered all four points above.
• No single person can take out money alone.
• A friend or relative of the person checking could not easily get round our rules.
• Each rule says what happens if it is broken.
• Someone who cannot read could understand each rule if it were read aloud.
• We have no more than eight rules.

Worked example: a school sports day

These are sample figures for this exercise, including the hourly rate of 10. Use your own local wage when you do your own list.

Our event: ______________________

Local hourly wage we are using: ________ Source: ______________________

Think about it

1. Isatou says, “I want it written down who fed them while they built it, and what it cost” (p. 113). If your event were described in a school newsletter, whose work would be mentioned and whose would be left out?
2. Fatou answers, “The common fund pays for the stone,” and adds, “It can pay for the millet” (p. 113). Should the people on your list be paid, thanked, or written down? What would change if they were paid?

Teacher’s notes

The exercise

1. Total the payments for each month, and then for the whole year.
2. Check your totals against a partner’s.
3. Look for anything odd. You have ten minutes.

Answer sheet

These figures were created for this exercise and do not come from the novel.

Column total for the year: 14,854 units.

Monthly totals:

The monthly totals add up to 14,854 units. May and August are high because of the two large payments (nos. 13 and 23). Both are above the line and both carry three signatures, as the rule requires.

The pattern. Nine payments to B. Sowe, carting, in seven months (March, April, June, July, August, October and November). Every one is just under the 500-unit line, and every one is signed by a different pair of signatories.

Together the nine payments come to 4,388 units, nearly nine times the line and more than either of the honest large payments. No pair of signatories saw more than one of them.

Which rule would catch it. After Lamin, Mamadou asks for a clause “that payments to the same name were to be added together across the year, and that no clerk was to keep the same book two years running” (ch. 21, p. 169). Under the first half, B. Sowe’s running total passes 500 units with the second payment (975 units by 5 April), so that payment would need three signatures. Under the second half, the clerk who entered all nine would have handed the book on.

For discussion. Added together, some honest payees also pass the line over a year, such as the teacher’s allowance (1,500 units) and Jatta Stone (1,359 units). So a total over the line is a reason to look closely, and three people then have to agree. They can ask what Mariam asks: “Why does the carter always stop just under the line?” (p. 168).

The figures in the book

• Nafawol is “two hundred households, about eighteen hundred people” (ch. 10, p. 89).
• Dr Arramata expects “Twenty thousand litres on a good night, and the borehole gives the rest” (ch. 12, p. 103).
• The harvester’s water is for “Drinking and cooking for every compound, and not a litre for the fields” (p. 103).
• By the second dry season it “had settled at a little under seventy per cent of its design yield” (ch. 16, p. 125).
• “In the hottest months the borehole pump ran longer to make up the difference” (p. 125).

Questions

1. At full output, how many litres of harvester water does each person get per day? Treat one good night’s output as one day’s supply.
2. At seventy per cent, how many litres per person per day?
3. How many extra litres a day must the borehole find when the harvester drops from full output to seventy per cent? About how much is that over a year?
4. Look up the World Health Organization’s guidance on how much water a person needs each day for drinking and cooking. Write down the figure and where you found it. Then work out how much water the borehole must supply each day for the whole village at seventy per cent.
5. List two things the novel does not tell us that would change your answers.
6. Why does Dr Arramata lower a tape into the borehole every Friday (p. 125)?

Teacher’s key

• Q1. 20,000 ÷ 1,800 = 11.1, so about 11 litres per person per day.
• Q2. Seventy per cent of 20,000 is 14,000 litres. 14,000 ÷ 1,800 = 7.8, so a little under 8 litres per person per day (the book says “a little under” seventy per cent, p. 125).
• Q3. 20,000 − 14,000 = 6,000 litres a day, or about 3 litres per person. Over a year that is about 2.2 million litres (6,000 × 365 = 2,190,000).
• Q4. Borehole share = (1,800 × the class’s figure) − 14,000 litres a day. For example only, if the figure were 12 litres a person: 21,600 − 14,000 = 7,600 litres a day. This 12 is not an official figure; use the one the class finds. If the answer comes out below zero, the harvester alone covers drinking and cooking at seventy per cent; ask the class what else a village needs water for.
• Q5. Possible answers: the novel does not say that twenty thousand litres is the design yield (this sheet assumes it); not every night is a good night, and in the dry months “the air gives up its water grudgingly” (p. 88); the population may have grown since the first year; we are not told how much the borehole pumps.
• Q6. To see whether the deep water is going down as the pump runs longer. Dr Arramata wants to take as little of it as she can.

Card 1: Minister Dunia (round 1, chapters 4 and 8)

Who you are. Minister of Energy in Awdagha. You run the National Energy Fund. You were born in the north, in a place smaller than Madina.

What you want. To keep Bakoro lit after half the capital went dark and two babies were born by torchlight. To bring the Madina plant’s money into the National Energy Fund, and build a grid that reaches the north. “I will not explain that to the President. I will fix it” (p. 35).

Your strongest argument, in your own words. - “every foreign project in this country is an island with its own flag” (p. 35). - “Before I was twenty I had counted eleven plaques in my district” (p. 61). None of them worked by the time you were twenty, and “Nobody was responsible” (p. 61). - “Your Mr Sterling is an island. So is every fund like his. I am trying to build a country” (p. 61). - “The difference is that my margin builds a grid, and the foreigner’s builds a plaque” (p. 61). - On Mustapha: “Who put the pen in his hand? Not me” (p. 61). “A minister, at least, can be removed” (p. 61).

The class will challenge you on: 1. Your brother’s bank. You told Ebou, “Nabil will see to the procurement. The usual firms” (p. 35), and Ebou “knew which of the usual firms her brother’s bank held the accounts for” (p. 35), and Talib’s records show the name Yusuf Dunia (p. 51). 2. Nabil’s envelope to Mustapha, “A token of appreciation from the Minister” (p. 36), and a hearing that blamed Adam alone.

Stay true to the text. The book never shows you ordering the fire or the fake parts. When Nabil offers to take you through the procurement folder, “She told him there was no need” (p. 35). You offered Aisha a real post with a real budget. Do not admit to more than the book shows, and do not deny what it does show. Later, from chapter 9: showAisha later says, “She didn’t need it to burn” (p. 74).

The founders and officers

Kadiatou, the Yaara-Jaxo. You called the Union together. You speak for two minutes but do not vote. Your condition is “With whose hand on the key” (p. 187). Your picture: “A family compound built with borrowed money” with “the gate key in another man’s hand” (p. 189). Your story: “When I was too small to draw a full bucket, my grandmother let me draw half of one” (p. 187). What you told Fatou: “I will not have our grandchildren’s cup in another man’s hand” (p. 193).

Fatou, the treasurer. You speak for two minutes but do not vote. You want the offer, and you still corrected loose talk about it: “the two billion was a ceiling for a whole region, not a cheque for twelve villages” (p. 188). Your case: “We’re also one drought from eating our reserves” (p. 189), and “This is a granary we never have to open” (p. 189). You also noticed that disputes would go to courts in a Republic “that knew of no place called Senebia” (p. 197).

Alkalo Musa of Sirawol. You count the stones. Lay them out one by one in two rows, black and white, and say each colour aloud. Say nothing else until the count is done.

Evelyn Reed. Present the offer for three minutes, then answer questions. Use the terms on the board and the briefing card from Activity 9.

Adam. Answer questions of fact only. Facts you can confirm: the harvester runs at seventy per cent and “It will not do better” (p. 187); “the money ends in three years” (p. 187); after the revision, “They have taken out the part that frightened people,” and “They have left in the part that matters” (p. 197). If asked what you think, say you may answer only questions of fact.

Delegate stakes

Each village sends “the one who usually spoke for the village, and the one its young people had chosen” (p. 197). The book names only a few of the delegates, so not everyone below is a delegate in the novel. Their stakes stand for the arguments delegates carried into the hall.

Demba’s father, Nafawol. For sixty years the land has taken “my back, my knees, my sleep, my strength” (p. 190). To you the money “is rest. It is medicine” (p. 190). “A hungry man does not eat sovereignty” (p. 190). Your son Demba asks, “Whose road is it then?” (p. 190)

A father in Sirawol. “His daughter had cleaned hotel rooms in Spain for nine years” (p. 189). In a voice message she says the fifty thousand is more than everything she has sent home: “Take it, she said, and I can come home” (p. 189).

Old Jankero, Kumbawol. You complain that in your day women did not sit on the bantaba. But you are the one who asks Kadiatou “how far away the hospital would be” (p. 189). She does not know.

Aminatu, Talawol. Your mill’s bearing failed and “nobody in Talawol could fit a new one” (p. 176). “Nine days the press stood still and the groundnuts sat in the yard” (p. 176). You need trained fitters: “Rice mud will not fit a bearing” (p. 176). Your stake comes from the council in chapter 22.

Alkalo Yaya, Kumbawol. In chapter 22 you said, “Put this money into water first” (p. 176): more channels, and “a seed store with a lock on it” (p. 176). Under the revised offer TransGlobal would still hold a veto over “Yaya’s channels, the next mill, the next school” (p. 197).

A young wife, Nafawol. No money has been paid. But at the cooking fires the book says that one of the young wives “had already spent hers twice, on a roof and on a sewing machine, and was starting on a third” (p. 190). That is you. Then Isatou asks, “Into whose hand?” (p. 190). The payment goes to each registered household, and you are not the head of yours.

Hassan, Nafawol. You read the staff schedules. “On a page headed Key local personnel to be retained he found his own name” (p. 195), “with a post beside it and a salary in dollars” (p. 195). “It was more than the lorry driver had said the port would pay” (p. 195). You rubbed the figure out and read on.

Blank delegate card

Use this for the other delegates. Build the stake only from what the book says about your village. If the book says nothing about it, keep to what it says about the floodplain villages in general, and do not invent events.

Places to look: at the charter meeting, an alkalo from “a smaller, poorer village” asks, “Then what are we? Brothers, or borrowers at your door?” (p. 171); “an old alkalo from one of the river villages” speaks in a whisper (p. 172); and another asks, “Where did the first money come from?” (p. 172).

Tally sheet

Rules from the book: “White meant yes. Black meant no” (p. 198). “A tie would mean no” (p. 198). Each delegate drops one stone in the pot and the other in the covered basket, in silence.

The count, as Musa lays out each stone:

Black: ______ White: ______ Result: ______________

Before anyone reads on, write two sentences: how you voted, and what you think your vote will cost.