Reading-group guide

Spoilers up to the end of chapter 9.

A foreign engineer, Adam Sterling, builds a solar and water plant in Madina, and a weaver’s son, Talib, leaves his father’s loom to work for him. Ministers in the capital, an engineer sent to watch, a blacksmith and the village elders all have their own views of who the plant belongs to.

1. The novel opens with Ibrahim telling his son, “A weaver’s craft is in his hands” (p. 3), and Talib slipping away to his notebook of circuit diagrams. What do the loom and the notebook each stand for at the start? Had that changed for you by the end of chapter 9?

2. Minister Khresay signs Adam’s letter of intent while doubting him. Alone with Balla afterwards, he explains why: “When your own well is dry, you do not refuse the bucket because you dislike the man holding the rope” (p. 9). What else could he have done? Would you have signed?

3. Adam promises the Minister, “Nobody in Madina will ever need to touch it” (p. 8). A few days later Malik tells his apprentice, “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours” (p. 16). Adam’s refusal of the mended bracket rests on warranties and certification. How do you weigh his caution against Malik’s point?

4. At the signing under the meeting tree, Samba says, “A signature tells you who held the pen” (p. 18). Why does Adam turn his shoulder to Samba and hand his pen to Mustapha? Where in your own life or work does a signature stand in for agreement?

5. We learn about Mustapha’s eldest son’s debts, his daughter’s wedding and his leaking roof just as he takes Nabil’s envelope. How did that change the way you judged him?

6. Aisha’s “box of charcoal and leaves”, as Adam calls it, runs cooler and quieter all week, and Adam calls the result “inconclusive” and has it thrown in the scrap store. Why does a man who trusts data set this data aside?

7. Chapter 4 moves to Hawa’s ward during the blackout, then to Minister Dunia’s office. Later Dunia tells Aisha, “Your Mr Sterling is an island” (p. 61), and talks about the eleven plaques of her childhood. Which part of her case, if any, did you find hard to dismiss?

8. Talib brings Adam the money trail from the portal, and Adam calls it “noise”. What do you think was going on in Adam at that moment? What would you have done in his place?

9. Aisha says of Dunia, “Wanting it to burn would at least have been a decision” (p. 74). How did that line affect your sense of who is to blame for the fire?

10. Khresay tells Adam, “Evidence is a goat” (p. 66), and Balla follows with the story of Wagadu lost four times. Yet a few chapters earlier Khresay told Aisha to write everything down. How do spoken history and written record work against each other, or together, in Part One?

11. Aisha turns down Dunia’s offer to run the north and asks instead for the district water office, where there is a borehole whose water is good and “Nobody is responsible for it” (p. 70). What does she gain, and what does she give up?

12. Part One ends with Talib re-tying the broken warp thread, a street lamp coming on that neither he nor his father notices, and Adam keeping a piece of blackened glass in a drawer. How did you read this ending when you first reached it?

Spoilers up to the end of chapter 19.

Ten years after the fire, Adam returns to the region as the man who carries a fund’s money, this time to Nafawol, where the well has turned bitter and Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, wants to see results before promises. Over four years the village tests a water harvester, restores its soil, builds its own road and sets up a common fund with its accounts on the wall.

1. In the bridge, Mark reads out Adam’s one page to Proxima’s board: “I signed an amendment I did not read to the end” (p. 82). Asked what the village paid, Mark answers, “We didn’t ask them” (p. 82). Why do you think we hear Adam’s account read aloud by someone else, and never in his own voice?

2. Dr Arramata goes to see the man who keeps rejecting her proposal, and he tells her, “Write it so it doesn’t need you. Then it won’t need me either” (p. 84). How did you react to their two meetings? What would it mean for something you have built to stop needing you?

3. At the well Kadiatou thinks, “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87). How does her role as Water-Keeper shape the way she meets the strangers?

4. The demonstrator overheats, and Bakary saves it with wet jute and water from the old well. Set this beside Aisha’s pre-filter box in Part One. What is different this time, and who decides?

5. When the agreement is read under the baobab, Fatou takes the pages and reads them herself. Kadiatou asks who keeps the padlock, Adam answers “The committee”, and then “He said nothing else that afternoon” (p. 101). What did you make of this scene next to the signing in Madina?

6. After the ñan-kale, Ousman asks to be taught, then says to Dr Arramata alone, “The water is yours. The soil is ours. Do not confuse them” (p. 107). What do you think he means, and is he being fair to her?

7. Isatou reads out the women’s list of millet, oil and hours, and says, “Write it in your ledger” (p. 113). Whose work goes uncounted in your own family, workplace or town? What would change if it were written down?

8. A Guardian chase leaves a herd boy from Sirawol with a broken arm. Demba admits to no one what he felt in the seconds before the cry. How does the novel handle the gap between a good rule and what people actually feel in the dark?

9. Mamadou insists the three-signature rule should cover him: “I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129). The chapter then follows him home to his grandson Lamin, who is counting Tobaskis until he can afford a motorbike. Why do you think the novel places those two scenes side by side?

10. Isatou’s question “Hidden from whom?” (p. 132) leads Adam to admit what he did in Madina, and for once there is no contempt in Ousman’s face. Why might this, and not the harvester or the cotton, be the moment some of the village begins to accept him?

11. The regulator’s inspector finds two errors and tells the committee, “If you let it be two when it is convenient, it will be two when it is not” (p. 138). Fatou sits up with the ledger, signs her own correction with her full name and carries it to the wall by lantern-light, though it is not yet Friday. Later, after the mill invoice, she says, “I didn’t think it would be me who needed it” (p. 143). Have you seen open books work, or fail, in an organisation you know?

12. Chapter 18 ends with a short glimpse of Madina: a man in Ibrahim’s doorway mending radios for the price of a cup of tea. Chapter 19 ends with Dawda’s water tester glowing red in the old well. What did these two small endings add for you?

Spoilers for the rest of the novel, including the result of the vote and the ending.

Neighbouring villages join Nafawol, a union is formed, and an international company offers money on a scale nobody in the region has seen. The final chapters follow the vote, the hard years after it, and a visit from Madina that brings the two halves of the book together.

1. Musa confesses that the men who broke the culvert came from Sirawol. Hassan then spends two days listening before he places Sirawol’s harvester, and an old woman tells him, “Nobody tells a machine,” and then, “That is why they sent a boy with ears” (p. 157). Compare Hassan in Sirawol with Adam under the meeting tree in Madina.

2. An inspector seals Sirawol’s boiler for want of a certificate that cannot be had for eleven months, while Nafawol’s identical boiler is left alone. Kadiatou says, “He has taken the year” (p. 160). How does the novel show power working through rules and paperwork? Does it remind you of anything in Part One?

3. When Lamin’s thefts come to light, Mamadou says, “Then write mine under it, as the one who asked for the rule” (p. 169). At Tobaski, Mariam keeps the bowl Lamin’s mother brought, still on the shelf at the end of the rains. What did you make of that bowl?

4. Hassan wants a formula, and Fatou gives him a number: six parts to the fields and four to the workshops. When he calls it haggling, she asks, “What did you think a council was?” (p. 178). Is haggling a fair way for a group to decide? How does your own group make decisions?

5. Isatou’s question about the cooking fires is held over twice, and then the food stops coming. Why does she ask for a fee paid to the osusu, and not daily wages? And why does she say funerals and naming ceremonies are “ours”?

6. When Evelyn Reed offers to shorten the years it took, Kadiatou answers with the story of her grandmother letting her draw half a bucket. Later, over dinner, Reed puts her hardest point to Adam: if the Union says no, the next village along will wait ten years, and “Some of their children won’t be there when it does” (p. 194). Whose argument weighed more with you, and did that change as you read?

7. At the cooking fires Isatou asks of the fifty thousand dollars, “Into whose hand?” (p. 190). Kadiatou calls it the best argument anyone has made, yet Isatou will not carry it to Talawol. Why not?

8. After Bintu finds the perpetuity clause, Reed removes it within two days. Adam tells Kadiatou, “They have taken out the part that frightened people,” and then, “They have left in the part that matters” (p. 197). Was the revised offer a fair one? How would you have voted?

9. The morning after the vote, Fatou walks to the well to tell Kadiatou which stone she would have cast. Later the Teranu family leave for the coast, Jankero’s sons let the water cup pass Kadiatou by at the funeral, and Mariam loses a year of study. Does the novel take a side on the vote? What makes you think so?

10. Leaving Nafawol for the last time, Adam’s vehicle dies on the causeway. A young woman from a road crew camped nearby, in a mechanic’s coat too big for her, finds the loose connector in less than a minute and has him hold the lamp while she fixes it, and she never asks his name. What other scenes in the book does this moment call back to? Why might it be the last time we see him?

11. In Bakoro, Hawa wraps a newborn in her brother’s narrow length of cloth and pays for it herself. In Madina, Talib finishes his father’s last length on the old man’s loom. When the man with the notebook visits Nafawol, his question is “Who is poor here now?” (p. 229). Why do you think he asks that, of all things? What do you make of Hassan’s answer?

12. The final chapter ends at the old well, with Kadiatou and Halima drawing the bucket together: “The well was kept now by a girl who did not yet know it was hers” (p. 232). How did you feel about this as an ending, and about Kadiatou having told nobody what she had been tasting?

These questions assume everyone has finished the novel.

1. The novel is built in two parts, in two countries, with ten years and six hundred kilometres between them, and Madina keeps reappearing in Part Two. What would be lost if Part One were cut down to a few pages of backstory?

2. Think about the title. Which songs did you notice: Ibrahim’s second song, the griots who sing names back through the generations, the road songs, the singing that stops after the culvert is broken? Where do dust and water meet in the story?

3. Read the Coda aloud. It ends, “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (p. 233). How does it sit after the last scene at the well? Whose hands did you think of?

4. In Part Two we never hear Adam’s thoughts about what is happening around him; we see him only through others. What did you learn about him from what he does, such as carrying a cup of water down the hall, paying for his half of a dinner, or holding a lamp still? Why might the novel keep his inner life closed to us?

5. Asked whether she trusted Adam, Kadiatou answers, “Some days” (p. 230). Is trust the right question to ask of someone like Adam? What would you ask instead?

6. The novel keeps many kinds of record: a signed amendment, Aisha’s exercise book, the ledger on the wall, the stones in the pot, the griot’s songs. Which of these does the book seem to trust most? Does it trust any of them completely?

7. Pick one object and follow it through the book: the mended bracket, the charcoal box and the purifier, the blackened glass, the ironwood birds, the cloth, the rope. What does it gather on the way?

8. Who do you think this novel is written for? People in West Africa, people who fund or run development projects, readers who know neither, or someone else? How do the opening “Note on People and Places” and the glossary shape your answer?

9. Readers in different countries may see different things here. A reader in Banjul or Dakar, Lagos or Nairobi, London or Minneapolis might recognise the ministries, the funds, the boards, the osusu or the joking cousins in different ways. Which characters or institutions felt familiar to you, and where did you place yourself in the story?

10. Kadiatou, Fatou, Isatou, Hawa, Aisha, Dunia and Dr Arramata each hold a different kind of power. Which of them did you find yourself arguing with, and why?