Who is allowed to mend it?

Most of us own something we are not allowed to fix. A phone with the battery sealed in. A tractor that takes its parts from one dealer, a long way off. The warranty says the maker will look after it, and the maker has a form for that.

A few pages into Songs of Dust and Water, a village finds it has no say in the matter. On the second day after the machines arrive in Madina, a steel bracket snaps as it is tightened into place. The steel is certified for twice the load. A replacement will take at least a week to come up from Bakoro, and the contractor flings his hard hat on the ground.

Malik, the village blacksmith, walks over without a word. He has kept Madina’s one tractor going through two civil wars, forging parts that other men would have thrown on the scrapheap. He carries the two halves to his forge, joins them in an open fire and holds up the result: blackened, a little misshapen, whole.

The engineer in charge, Adam Sterling, looks at it too. He sees a repair that no specification covers, and he tells the contractor to log the delay and wait for the proper bracket. The contractor, taking his lead from Adam, tells Malik and his apprentice to take shovels and dig. Malik does not take the shovel. The contractor lets go of it, and it falls in the dust, and Malik turns his back on it. Then he says one sentence to his apprentice, in Nabari, without lowering his voice: “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours.”

Ten years later, six hundred kilometres to the south, the well at Nafawol is failing. Kadiatou has drawn water from it every morning for sixty years, and the title of Water-Keeper has passed down the women of her family. This morning the bucket comes up with a few litres of cloudy brown water, and too many children have been ill from it. A woman born four hundred paces from that well comes home with a plan to draw water out of the air, and a fund stands behind her. It will release money only where the people who live with the result own what is built and govern it themselves.

Kadiatou asks to see what the machine does now. She also says that a machine like that is kept behind a fence, and somebody holds the key.

The book follows both villages. It begins in Madina, with a young man at his father’s loom and a letter in his pocket. Those first pages are here to read, and so is Kadiatou’s morning at the well.