Free teaching pack

Lesson	Focus and chapters	Learning aim	Main activity	Homework
1	Madina and Bakoro. Ch. 1–2 (pp. 3–20)	Explain how the opening sets hands against systems, and village against ministry.	Read the first page and the Bakoro meeting aloud. Start the class “hands and systems” log that runs all term (Activity 6, stage 1).	Read ch. 3. In 150 words, explain what Malik means by “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours” (p. 16).
2	The lights and the dust. Ch. 3–4 (pp. 21–40)	Analyse how the plant’s design and its buying rules stop it learning from local knowledge.	Pairs re-enact Talib’s search of the approved vendor list (p. 27), then annotate clause 4.B (p. 40). Short discussion: why does Adam sign?	Read ch. 5–6. List every warning Adam receives, with page numbers.
3	The rot and the fire. Ch. 5–6 (pp. 41–54)	Weigh responsibility for a disaster that has many causes.	“Chain of hands”: groups put ten event cards in order (the dust warning, the portal refusing sisal, the trial ended, the envelope, the amendment, the blocked requisition, the fake gaskets, the motor swap, “noise”, the bypass) and give each a share of the blame, with a quotation.	Read ch. 7–8. Note what Dunia says about the eleven plaques (p. 61).
4	Ash, the hearing and the warp thread. Ch. 7–9 and “Ten years later” (pp. 55–84)	Evaluate competing explanations of the fire, and see how Part One closes.	Hot-seating Minister Dunia (Activity 9, round 1). Then read Aisha’s verdict on p. 74 aloud and compare.	Read ch. 10–11. Write Madina’s version of the fire in 200 words, as a villager would tell it.

Lesson	Focus and chapters	Learning aim	Main activity	Homework
5	“Words are wind”. Ch. 10–11 (pp. 85–101)	Compare how the Nafawol agreement is made with how the Madina Agreement was made.	Two signatures (Activity 5).	Read ch. 12–13. Find one moment where a villager corrects an expert.
6	The test field and the road. Ch. 12–13 (pp. 102–114)	Understand how a public challenge settles an argument with evidence.	The ñan-kale debate (Activity 2).	Read ch. 14–15. Begin a sketch map of the floodplain villages and the road.
7	Envy and the Guardians. Ch. 14–15 (pp. 115–124)	Explore how rules are made, and what happens when they are broken.	Write the charter, stage 1 (Activity 3). Groups draft rules for a shared fund before reading ch. 16.	Read ch. 16–17. Mark every rule in Nafawol’s charter that your group did not think of.
8	Three names and the review. Ch. 16–17 (pp. 125–139)	Explain how land restoration works, and how the Coffer Fund is protected.	Map the six hundred kilometres (Activity 8). Last 15 minutes: compare group charters with Nafawol’s.	Read ch. 18–20. Prepare three questions for Minister Sulayman.

Lesson	Focus and chapters	Learning aim	Main activity	Homework
9	The mill, the academy and the seal. Ch. 18–20 (pp. 140–165)	Assess how the women’s economy works alongside the Fund, and how the Union survives the state.	Starter: hot-seat Sulayman (Activity 9, round 2, 15 minutes). Main: Isatou’s list (Activity 4).	Read ch. 21. Copy one column of Fatou’s ledger figures from the activity sheet and check the total.
10	Lamin, six and four. Ch. 21–22 (pp. 166–184)	Test a set of rules against a real fraud.	Ledger on the wall (Activity 7), then Write the charter, stage 2: test the group charters against Lamin’s method.	Read ch. 23–24 only. Do not read ch. 25 yet.
11	The offer. Ch. 23–24 (pp. 185–197)	Weigh an offer that brings real gains and real losses, and decide.	The stone vote (Activity 1), with Evelyn Reed hot-seated in the debate stage (Activity 9, round 3).	Read ch. 25–26. Fill in the costs and gains table from Activity 1.
12	After the stones. Ch. 25–28 and Coda (pp. 198–233)	Judge what the novel shows about the vote’s costs, and how it ends.	Compare the class result with the book’s. Close the hands and systems log (Activity 6, stage 2). Launch the writing task (Activity 10).	Activity 10, or one essay question from the exam section.

Purpose. To make students weigh TransGlobal’s offer as the delegates did, before they know the result, and then to read the costs the novel sets out afterwards.

Chapters. Read ch. 23–24 before the lesson. Read ch. 25–26 afterwards.

Time. 60 minutes, plus 20 minutes of the next lesson.

Materials. One opaque pot or box. A covered basket or bag. For each voter, one white and one black counter (pebbles, buttons or card discs). Role cards. A copy of the offer’s main terms on the board.

Roles. - 24 delegates, two from each of twelve villages: “the one who usually spoke for the village, and the one its young people had chosen” (p. 197). In a smaller class, cut to six villages and twelve delegates and keep the two-per-village rule. - Kadiatou and Fatou, the founders, who speak but do not vote. - Alkalo Musa, who counts the stones. - Evelyn Reed, who presents the offer and answers questions. - Adam, who may answer only questions of fact.

Give each delegate a card with a stake drawn from the book. Examples: Demba’s father, for whom the money “is rest. It is medicine” (p. 190); the man in Sirawol whose daughter has cleaned hotel rooms in Spain for nine years; old Jankero, who wants to know how far away the hospital would be; Aminatu of Talawol, who needs trained fitters; Alkalo Yaya, who wants the money in channels and a seed store; a young wife who has already spent her fifty thousand on a roof and a sewing machine; Hassan, whose own name and a dollar salary are in the staff schedules.

Steps. 1. Put the terms on the board: up to two billion dollars across the region; fifty thousand dollars for each registered household; mills, a university, a hospital and pensions; TransGlobal’s first right to buy every bale and every litre; a veto over large investments; the revised licence on the Union’s inventions. Remind the class that the harvester runs at seventy per cent and that Proxima’s money ends in three years (pp. 186–187). 2. Reed presents for three minutes. Delegates question her and Adam for ten. 3. Kadiatou and Fatou each have two minutes. They must use the book’s own arguments: Kadiatou’s condition, “With whose hand on the key” (p. 187), and Fatou’s promise of “a granary we never have to open” (p. 189). 4. Explain the rules exactly as the book gives them: “White meant yes. Black meant no” (p. 198), and “A tie would mean no” (p. 198). Each delegate drops one stone in the pot and the other in the basket, in silence. 5. Musa counts the stones aloud, one by one, laying them in two rows. 6. Before anyone reads on, each student writes two sentences: what they voted, and what they think their vote will cost.

After reading ch. 25–26. Students fill in a two-column table, costs and gains, with page numbers. Costs the book shows include the price fall with no reserve to meet it, the Teranu family leaving for the coast, Mariam losing a year of study, rationed taps as the borehole drops, and Jankero’s sons and the hospital. Gains include the Union keeping its own decisions and its own ideas: Bintu’s K-Purifier is “finished, and still ours” (p. 212), and its design goes out free to any village. Ask whether the water returning to the old channel belongs in the gains column at all, since the stone lines were laid long before the vote. The verdict is never settled: Kadiatou tells Mariam “It cost you a year” (p. 204), and will not say whether it was wrong.

Discussion prompts. - Fatou says, “Tonight I am going to sit here and count what it cost” (p. 200). What is she counting? - The book tells us Hassan’s thoughts at the pot but not his stone. What does p. 199 let us infer, and why might the novel leave it unsaid? - Compare the stone vote with the Proxima board’s vote on owning “the model” (ch. 22). Who votes in each, and who is affected? - Did your class vote the same way as the Union? What swayed you?

Purpose. To practise arguing with evidence, and to see the difference between a test that is honoured and a test that is buried.

Chapters. Ch. 12 (pp. 102–109), with ch. 3 (pp. 25–31) for comparison.

Time. 60 minutes.

Materials. Copies of pp. 104–107 and pp. 26 and 31. A simple motion for debate.

Steps. 1. Explain the term. Nabari has “a word for such a thing: ñan-kale, a public challenge meant to be settled by results” (p. 104). Dr Arramata’s challenge is plain: “Give us one hectare of your worst ground” (p. 104), and “We let the harvest speak” (p. 104). 2. Read the comparison scene: Ousman holds the dead dust in one hand and the dark earth in the other (p. 107). 3. Now read Adam’s trial in ch. 3. He proposes it himself (“Let the numbers settle it.”, p. 26), Aisha’s pre-filter works, and he reports the result as “inconclusive” (p. 31) and has the box thrown in the scrap store. 4. Set a motion for debate. Example: This school should replace paper homework diaries with an app. Before any argument, each side must write down what evidence would prove it wrong, and who will judge it. 5. Hold the debate. The judges rule only on the evidence the sides agreed in advance.

Discussion prompts. - Why does Arramata’s test change Ousman’s mind when Aisha’s test does not change Adam’s? - Ousman tells Arramata, “The water is yours. The soil is ours. Do not confuse them” (p. 107). What has he won, even though he lost? - What made the two-week dry spell in the middle of the trial important for the story?

Purpose. To design rules for shared money, then test them against the frauds and pressures the novel throws at Nafawol.

Chapters. Stage 1 after ch. 15, before ch. 16. Stage 2 after ch. 21.

Time. Stage 1, 40 minutes. Stage 2, 25 minutes.

Materials. Sugar paper. A one-page task sheet: Your village has a common fund from its cotton. Write no more than eight rules for spending it.

Stage 1 steps. 1. Groups of four draft their rules. They must cover who can take money out, how much, who checks, and what happens if the village cannot repay a loan. 2. Each group posts its rules on the wall. 3. Students read ch. 16–17 for homework and list what Nafawol’s charter has that theirs lacks: three names from three different households for any sum above the price of a young bull; the alkalo counted “Like any other” (p. 129); the ledger posted every Friday; Proxima’s own papers on the wall too.

Stage 2 steps (after ch. 20–21). 1. Read Mamadou’s reason for the three-names rule: “somebody I love will come to me with a good reason and a sad face. I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129). 2. Test each group’s rules against three cases from the book. (a) The inspector’s two errors, a payment entered twice and a payment with two signatures instead of three (ch. 17). (b) Sirawol’s loan, where the village “did not fail. It was stopped” (p. 163). (c) Lamin’s nine payments, each just under the three-signature line and each taken to a different signatory (ch. 21). 3. Would your rules have caught Lamin? Then read the clause Mamadou adds: “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” (p. 169).

Discussion prompts. - Why does Mamadou ask for his own name to be written under Lamin’s? - Is a rule that catches your own grandson a good rule or a cruel one? - The suspension clause pauses a loan when the state halts the work. Should it also cover a fall in world prices? (Compare ch. 26.)

Purpose. To make visible the unpaid work that keeps public projects running, and to see how the novel prices it.

Chapters. Ch. 13 (p. 113), ch. 16 and 18 (the osusu), ch. 22 (the cooking fires), ch. 24 (pp. 190–191).

Time. 60 minutes. In the six-week scheme, run steps 1 to 3 in Lesson 9, when the class has read as far as ch. 20, and save steps 4 and 5 to open the debate in Lesson 11.

Materials. Copies of p. 113, pp. 131–132 and 145 (the osusu) and pp. 181–182. Calculators. A local hourly wage figure.

Steps. 1. Read Isatou’s list aloud: measures of millet, oil, hours at the fires, “So many trips to the taps and back with water for the crews. So many women” (p. 113). Her demand is simple: “Write it in your ledger” (p. 113). 2. In groups, students list the unpaid work behind one real event they know: a school play, a family wedding, a sports day. They estimate hours and put a price on them at the local wage. 3. Compare totals. Then read Fatou’s answer: “The common fund pays for the stone,” she says. “It can pay for the millet” (p. 113). 4. Read the cooking-fires scene in ch. 22. The women do not cook, and the council goes hungry. The council settles on a fee paid into the osusu, and Isatou keeps funerals and naming ceremonies outside it: “Those are ours” (p. 182). 5. Finish with Isatou’s question about the fifty thousand dollars: “Into whose hand?” (p. 190).

Discussion prompts. - Why might Isatou want a fee paid to the osusu rather than a wage to each woman? - Why does she refuse to move the osusu into the Fund (ch. 18), even when Kadiatou agrees that Fatou is right about the risk of fire? - Who signs for a household in your own community? Does it matter?

Purpose. To compare how an agreement is made in each part of the novel, and to ask who truly agrees.

Chapters. Ch. 2 (pp. 16–19) and ch. 11 (pp. 100–101). Optional: ch. 4 (p. 40) and ch. 16 (p. 129).

Time. 50 minutes.

Materials. A comparison grid with these rows: who brings the paper; what language it is in; who reads it aloud; who is present; whose voice is set aside; who signs; who keeps the key or the pen.

Steps. 1. Read the ch. 2 signing aloud in parts. Note that “Adam had no Nabari” (p. 17), and that Samba speaks in English so his words do not pass through Mustapha. Samba’s challenge: “A signature tells you who held the pen” (p. 18). “It does not tell you who agreed” (p. 18). 2. Read the ch. 11 signing. Fatou takes the pages from Dr Arramata and reads them aloud in Nabari, because “Every one of them skipped a line” (p. 100). Mamadou asks for clauses again. Then “Alkalo Sankung signed for Nafawol, alone, as alkalos did” (p. 101). 3. Pairs fill in the grid for both scenes. 4. Add a third signature: Adam signing clause 4.B in ch. 4, where “he did not read it to the end” (p. 40). Then show how ch. 16 changes even the alkalo’s power to sign alone.

Discussion prompts. - What has changed between the two signings, and what has stayed the same? - In ch. 11 the alkalo still signs alone. Is the Nafawol agreement fully the village’s? - Mustapha is paid; Fatou is not. Does the money explain the difference between them?

Purpose. A close-reading thread across the whole novel, following how the book values hands, tools and skill against screens and systems.

Chapters. Ch. 1, 3, 9, 26 (the causeway), 27 and 28.

Time. Stage 1, 30 minutes in Lesson 1. Stage 2, 40 minutes in Lesson 12. Students add to a class log in between.

Materials. A large two-column log on the classroom wall: “hands” and “systems”.

Steps. 1. Stage 1. Read the opening. Ibrahim tells his son, “Your hands are not here, Talib” (p. 3), and “A weaver’s craft is in his hands” (p. 3). Students note Talib’s notebook, his radio schematic and his ironwood birds. 2. Through the term, students add moments to the log with page numbers. Strong candidates: Malik’s mended bracket (ch. 2); Adam’s lesson, “You don’t fix things by feel or by hand” (p. 30); Talib re-tying the warp thread, “Then you must re-tie it. That is the work” (p. 76); Bakary’s wet jute (ch. 11); Hawa holding the torch steady (ch. 4). 3. Stage 2. Read the causeway scene in ch. 26, where a young woman from a road crew, in a mechanic’s coat too big for her, fixes Adam’s vehicle and tells him to hold the lamp. “He held the lamp” (p. 215). Compare it with Hawa and the torch in ch. 4. 4. Read ch. 27 (Talib fitting leathers Malik cut, finishing his father’s cloth) and the visitor at the fountain in ch. 28, who listens to the pump before he drinks. Asked later whether the man gave his name, Hassan answers, “Only that it meant student” (p. 231).

Discussion prompts. - Why does the novel never name the two visitors from Madina in ch. 28? - Is the book against technology? Use Bintu’s purifier and the harvester in your answer. - What does Talib keep from Adam’s teaching, and what does he drop?

Purpose. To use simple data skills to find a pattern of fraud, and then to debate what openness costs as well as what it protects.

Chapters. Ch. 21 (pp. 168–169), with ch. 17 and ch. 23 (p. 186).

Time. 50 minutes. In the six-week scheme, step 5 needs ch. 23, so hold it over to the start of Lesson 11.

Materials. A teacher-made ledger sheet of about forty payments over a year, with nine payments to one name, each just under a set threshold. (This sheet is an exercise, not a page from the book.) Chalk or mini whiteboards.

Steps. 1. Explain how Bintu teaches sums: every Friday her class copies a column from the wall and adds it in chalk on the foundation stones. 2. Give out the ledger. Students total each column and look for anything odd. Allow ten minutes. 3. Read Mariam’s discovery: “Nine payments in seven months, none of them large” (p. 168). “All nine stopped a little under it” (p. 168). Her question: “Why does the carter always stop just under the line?” (p. 168). 4. Discuss how the rule failed and how it was mended (see Activity 3, stage 2). 5. Turn the argument round. Read ch. 23: the Union had made itself impossible to rob quietly, and “They had also made themselves very easy to study” (p. 186). A company had already bought copies of every paper the Union had lodged (ch. 22).

Discussion prompts. - Who benefits from a public ledger? Who else can read it? - Lamin says, “Nobody went without because of any of them” (p. 169). Is that a defence? - Would you post your school’s spending on a wall? What would you leave off, and why?

Purpose. To place the novel in the real geography of the Sahel and to understand the water and soil techniques it uses. Awdagha, Tekuru and their towns are fictional; the Sahel and its farming methods are real.

Chapters. “Ten years later” (p. 81), ch. 10, 12, 16 and 26.

Time. 60 minutes.

Materials. A blank map of West Africa with the Sahel band and rainfall lines. Atlases or a web map. Plain paper for a sketch map.

Steps. 1. Students draw a sketch map from the text: Madina in the dry north of Awdagha, Bakoro to the south, then “Six hundred kilometres south, across a border” (p. 81) to Nafawol on an abandoned floodplain, with Sirawol, Talawol and Kumbawol, the Road of Hands to the tarmac, and Port Walada on the coast. 2. On the real map, students mark where a 600-kilometre route from north to south across the Sahel might run, and how rainfall changes along it. 3. Read the restoration passage in ch. 16. The crews build low stone lines across the dead channels, “so that when the rains came the water would slow and sit and sink instead of running off across the crust” (p. 126), and dig “half-moon pits four paces across” (p. 126). Both techniques are used by farmers across the Sahel today. Students research one real example and draw a labelled cross-section. 4. Water budget. Arramata expects “Twenty thousand litres on a good night” (p. 103) for about 1,800 people. The harvester settles at “a little under seventy per cent of its design yield” (p. 125). Students work out litres per person per day at full and at seventy per cent, remembering that the borehole makes up the rest, and compare the figures with what a person needs to drink and cook (the World Health Organization publishes guidance students can look up). 5. Explain why Arramata rejects desalination: “We have no sea” (p. 89).

Discussion prompts. - Why does the harvester work best at night and least in the dry season? - Why does Mamadou have to take kola to the herders’ camp three times before the stone lines go in? - In Year 10 water returns to the old channel. “Nobody under thirty had ever seen water in that channel” (p. 210). How does a channel that holds water for twelve days help a well?

Purpose. To take the officials and the investor seriously. Each has a real argument, and students should meet it at full strength before they judge it.

Chapters. Dunia: ch. 4 and 8. Sulayman: ch. 17 and 20. Reed: ch. 23–24.

Time. 20–30 minutes per round. Run the rounds in Lessons 4, 9 and 11.

Materials. A chair at the front. A briefing card for the student in role.

Steps. 1. Choose a confident student, or take the role yourself first. Give them a briefing card built from the text. - Dunia. Half the capital went dark and two babies were born by torchlight. She has counted aid plaques that stopped working: “Your Mr Sterling is an island. So is every fund like his. I am trying to build a country” (p. 61). On her own power: “A minister, at least, can be removed” (p. 61). Her brother’s bank holds the accounts of the “approved” firms. - Sulayman. Nine years a minister. He has watched community funds fail: “Two were emptied by the men who ran them” (p. 136). “You will forgive me if a ledger on a wall does not settle the matter for me” (p. 136). - Evelyn Reed. She removes the clause on inventions within two days: “I would rather lose this agreement than win it with an appendix” (p. 197). Her hardest point is for the villages still waiting: “They’ll wait ten years for your method to reach them. Some of their children won’t be there when it does” (p. 194). 2. The class prepares questions in pairs: one fair question and one hard question each. 3. The student in role answers for ten to fifteen minutes and must stay true to the text. 4. Out of role, the class votes on two separate questions: was the character’s argument strong, and was the character’s conduct right?

Discussion prompts. - Aisha says Dunia “didn’t need it to burn. She needed the money, and the money was what held it up, and she took it anyway” (p. 74). Is that worse, or better, than sabotage? - Fatou says the boiler seal is Sulayman’s doing. Does the novel prove it? - What does Adam’s reply to Reed, “Madina didn’t get to vote” (p. 194), leave unanswered?

Purpose. Transformative writing that fills a gap the novel leaves open, in a voice that fits the book.

Chapters. Hawa’s letters in ch. 1, 3 and 9; Hawa’s ward in ch. 4 and 27. Gaps in ch. 16, 27 and 28.

Time. 30 minutes to plan in class; writing at home.

Steps. 1. Read Hawa’s letters closely. They are short, practical and unsentimental: “The city eats money” (p. 5). And later: “I do not ask you. I know how things are. I only tell you so you know” (p. 75). 2. Students choose one task. - A letter from Hawa to Talib, set in a year the novel skips, about her work on the ward. - The letter Talib sent Hawa after the fire. We only see her reply, which begins “Your letter came” (ch. 9). - Adam’s letter to Proxima’s board asking for its papers to go on the wall in Nafawol (ch. 16). The novel says he showed it to no one. - What Talib asks the Madina committee in ch. 27. The book shows him ask but not his words. - Hassan’s letter to Adam at the end of ch. 28. 3. Rules for the writing: keep to what the novel has established; use the characters’ own way of speaking; no new events that would change the plot; under 500 words.

Discussion prompts. - Why might the novel leave these documents out? - What did you have to know about a character’s voice before you could write in it?