The False Start
The first rain of the year has fallen on a village whose seed bank holds exactly one sowing. A field adviser called Kafin says that in four years out of ten the first rain is followed by a dry spell that kills what it wakes. The seed-keeper, a sixty-seven-year-old widow, has to decide how much of the village's only seed to put in the ground tonight.
The first rain of 2044 came at ten past six on the evening of Thursday the ninth of June, and by seven o'clock the whole of Gidan Gawo was standing in the lanes with its face up.
It was twenty-two millimetres. Nobody in the village measured it that way. The children ran in it with their mouths open, the old men said Alhamdulillah in the doorways, and the smell came up off the sand, the smell of the year turning over, which Hadiza Mamane had smelled sixty-seven times and had never once been able to describe to her granddaughter. Only one person in the village was already doing arithmetic, and it was Hadiza, who stood in the doorway of the seed bank with her wrapper dark to the knees and her key in her fist, doing it without wanting to.
The seed bank was a mud-brick room behind the dispensary, with a tin roof the Sisters had paid for and a door the village had paid for, and in it, in forty-two sacks stacked on pallets off the floor, lay two thousand one hundred kilograms of pearl millet seed. Hadiza had counted them on Sunday. She had counted them again that morning. The village had a hundred and forty households, each of which sowed about four hectares, and a good household sowed three and a half kilograms of seed to the hectare. A hundred and forty times four times three and a half is one thousand nine hundred and sixty. The sacks held a hundred and forty kilograms more than that. It was enough for one sowing and a sneeze.
Behind her, Sister Bernadette came out of the dispensary with the tablet held against her chest to keep the rain off it.
"It wants to talk to you," said Sister Bernadette. "It has been wanting to for an hour. I told it you would not hear a word until the rain stopped."
"The rain has stopped," said Hadiza.
"So I see."
Kafin was what the agricultural extension service called a field adviser. It had come to the dispensary three seasons ago on a tablet and a small solar panel, and it spoke Hausa in a young man's careful voice, which Hadiza's granddaughter said was the voice of a boy from Katsina who had been to school too long. It read the radar images of the soil that passed over the Maradi region every few days. It read the weather service's forecasts, fifty of them at a time, each one a little different. It kept a record of every field in the village that the women had walked with it, and it knew which strips of the village held water into the dry season and which gave it up like a sieve. It had never been rained on.
"Hajiya Hadiza," it said. "Thank you for coming. I would like to say what I know and what I do not know, in that order, and I would ask you not to stop me until I have finished. May I?"
"You may," said Hadiza, "if you are quick. People are already asking Mallam Sani for his sowing cloth."
"I will be quick. Twenty-two millimetres have fallen at the dispensary gauge, and the satellite agrees within a few millimetres across the village lands. The sand is wet to a hand's depth. If you sow tonight or tomorrow, the seed will germinate in three days and the seedlings will be through in five. That is good, and everyone in the village knows it.
"This is what is not good. The first rain of the year in this region is not the start of the rains. In the thirty-eight years I have reconstructed from the satellite record, in fifteen the first twenty millimetres were followed, within the next four weeks, by a dry spell of ten days or more. Fifteen of thirty-eight is about four years in ten. A seedling of five days has roots a hand deep, in sand that is fifty degrees at noon. After about a week without rain, it is dead. I cannot make that kinder."
Hadiza said nothing. She had been a girl of seven in the hungry year of 1984, and she knew exactly what a field looked like after it.
"Now I will say what the forecasts say. I have fifty. Thirty-one of them bring another rain of ten millimetres or more within seven days. Nineteen do not. That is sixty-two in a hundred for a second rain, and thirty-eight for a dry spell. But I must tell you that these forecasts are known to be too confident at this time of year in this place, and that when I check them against the last ten years, the dry spells they miss are more than they should be. I would say the real chance of a dry spell is nearer four in ten than four in a hundred. I would not say it was more than that. I do not know."
The tablet gave a small click. It was, Hadiza had decided long ago, the sound it made when it chose a word.
"There is one more thing I know and the village already knows. There is one sowing of seed. If the whole village sows tonight and the dry spell comes, there is no seed for a second sowing, and the market at Maradi will sell seed at three times the price to anyone who still has money. I have looked at the records of the savings groups. Most households would not."
"So you say wait," said Hadiza.
"No. If I said wait, I would be asking you to give up something as well. Millet sown a fortnight late loses a part of its yield, not all of it. On the sandy plateau, about a tenth. That is real. You would be paying it for certain, to avoid a loss that comes four times in ten. I do not think that is a trade I can tell you to make. I think it is yours."
"You think a good many things are mine."
"Yes," said Kafin. "I am a tablet."
Sister Bernadette made a noise into her sleeve. Hadiza did not smile, but the corner of her mouth did something that her granddaughter would have recognised.
By eight o'clock the lane in front of the dispensary was full. They had come the way they came to everything in Gidan Gawo, in the order of who had the loudest voice, and the first of them was Mallam Sani, who was sixty and had a daughter in Niamey and a strong opinion about every matter in the world.
"The rain has come," he said. "Allah has opened the door and you are asking whether to walk through. The people at Dan Kasawa have already sown. I saw them from the road. They had the oxen out before the rain stopped."
"Dan Kasawa have a seed bank for a fortnight's sowing," said a woman at the back. "Ours is one."
"Then let us not waste it by waiting for a better rain than we were given."
It went on like that. Hadiza let it. She had learned from her husband, who had been the village's imam's brother and its worst farmer, that the only way to run a meeting was to let the first hour exhaust the people who most wanted to run it. She had the key in her hand. The key was not a power. It was a weight. Nobody in Gidan Gawo could open the seed bank door except Hadiza and the chief and Sister Bernadette together, and nobody had ever asked what would happen if the three of them disagreed.
At nine, with the lanterns lit, she held up her free hand, and the lane went quiet in the way a congregation goes quiet when the bell has been struck.
"I will tell you what we are going to do," she said. "Then you may tell me why I am wrong, and I will listen, and probably do it anyway."
There was a laugh. It was not unkind.
"Our land is two lands. There is the land by the bas-fond, the low ground where the water stands after rain. There is the plateau. Every household has strips on both. The Sister's machine, which I will not call a boy, tells me the low ground holds the wet for twelve days where the plateau holds it for six. It tells me that a seedling in the bas-fond has a better chance of seeing the next rain. It tells me that is about two-fifths of our land. I ask the machine."
"Forty per cent, Hajiya," said Kafin, from the Sister's hand. "Thirty-nine point six, by the strips we measured."
"Forty. We sow the bas-fond strips tonight and tomorrow. All of us, from the seed bank, by the household's share. That is seven hundred and eighty-four kilograms. Everyone has something in the ground and no one has to hang their head to their neighbour in the morning. The rest stays in the sacks. One thousand three hundred and sixteen kilograms, with what is left over. When the second rain comes we sow the plateau. If the second rain does not come and the first seedlings die, we sow the bas-fond again out of what is in the room, and then we sow the plateau with what remains, and God knows what that is."
"And if the second rain comes on Monday," said Mallam Sani, "and Dan Kasawa have a head start of ten days, and we sell our millet in the hungry season at the price of everyone who sold before us, and the plateau is a tenth short, it will be you who explains that to my daughter's husband."
"It will be me," said Hadiza.
It was very quiet. Someone at the back put a child down.
"I want it said that I know the price," she said. "A tenth of the plateau. It is not nothing. I am a widow. I would rather pay a tenth of a field than a whole one. I do not make this a rule for the village. I make it a rule for the seed bank, which is mine to keep. Any household that wishes to take its share home tonight and sow every strip it has may do so. I will open the door for you myself. But I will tell you what I have told you: I will not open it a second time."
She waited. Nobody came forward.
Sister Bernadette stood beside her, with the tablet dark against her side. She had said nothing the whole evening. A Sister from a congregation that was a day's drive away, in a village that was ninety-eight in a hundred Muslim, she knew what it was to be a guest at a decision, and she knew too that the best a guest could do was to carry the lantern. She did it now, lifting the key ring's light a little so that those at the back could see Hadiza's face. In her mind she said what she had said every night for six years in that room, which was nothing very elaborate: Give us this day. Then she thought that the line was in the wrong tense for millet, and said it again anyway.
They sowed the low ground on Friday and Saturday in the old way, a hole made with the hilaire, the short hoe, a pinch of seed, a foot to close the hole, one step on to the next, so that a field being sown looked like a very slow dance in which nobody had agreed on the tune. The ground was dark and soft. There were hundreds of trees on the fields. They were gawo, the acacia that the village had named itself after, thin grey trees with no leaves at all, because the gawo did everything backwards: it dropped its leaves when the rain came and grew them in the dry season, so that the millet grew in the sun while the tree slept, and in the hot months the cows came and ate the pods in the green shade. Hadiza's grandfather had left the trees standing when everyone else cut them. They were forty to the hectare in the best fields now. Kafin had told her once that the tree took nitrogen from the air and gave it to the ground, and she had said that her grandfather had known that without a tablet, and Kafin had said that was very likely true.
On Sunday, which was the nineteenth, it did not rain.
It had not rained on Friday. It did not rain on Saturday, when Kafin said that the sky was clear to the horizon, and the wind turned to the east, the dry wind, and the heat came up by eleven. It did not rain on Sunday, when Sister Bernadette went to her Mass at the mission, ninety minutes away on a motorbike, and came back to find the fields on the low ground going slowly from green to the colour of old straw at the edges.
"It is day ten," said Kafin that evening. Its voice was exactly as it had been before. "I told you that I would give you the numbers as they come. The forecasts now give a second rain on Monday or Tuesday, in thirty-six of fifty. The satellite says the soil in the bas-fond has fallen from twenty-two per cent water to nine. The plateau is at four, which is as dry as a sand can be. I am sorry, Hajiya. Nineteen forecasts of fifty were the ones that did not bring rain. This is one of the nineteen."
"It is a thirty-eight in a hundred," said Hadiza. She was sitting on the step of the seed bank with her feet in the dust and her granddaughter's head against her knee. "And it came. That is what thirty-eight in a hundred is. It is not a promise to anyone."
"No."
"You said four in ten."
"I said nearer four in ten than four in a hundred. I am glad I said it. I would have preferred to be wrong."
She watched a goat cross the lane. She did not ask the question she wanted to ask, which was how many of the seedlings on the low ground would still be alive, because she knew that Kafin would tell her, and she knew too that it would give her the number and the doubt, and she did not want the doubt tonight.
The second rain came on Monday at four in the afternoon, thirty-one millimetres, with thunder, and it came on the eleventh day. Hadiza was on the low ground when it started, in the middle of the field that had been her husband's, on her knees, counting.
She had been counting since Sunday. In a row of a hundred holes she found eighty-five with a seedling alive in them, thin and bent, the colour of lettuce. Fifteen were dead and grey. She walked the rest of the bas-fond with the women, strip after strip, and at the end of it they stood in the rain with the numbers in their heads, and the number was close to fifteen in a hundred. The village had lost fifteen per cent of its low-ground sowing, or a hundred and eighteen kilograms, to the ten days of dry sun.
It was not good. It was not the end of the world either. The gap was exactly the sort that a seed bank was for, and it filled it.
They resowed the dead holes on Tuesday, and on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday they sowed the plateau, all of it, in one long wet week that smelled of hot iron. The seed bank had one thousand three hundred and sixteen kilograms. They used a hundred and eighteen for the low ground. That left one thousand one hundred and ninety-eight. The plateau, at the proper rate of three and a half kilograms to the hectare, wanted one thousand one hundred and seventy-six.
"Twenty-two kilograms," said Sister Bernadette, looking at the ledger in the light of the dispensary window. "We have twenty-two kilograms left in the world."
"Then we have twenty-two kilograms," said Hadiza.
That was on Wednesday night. It was on Thursday morning that the men from Dan Kasawa came, five of them on two motorbikes, with the long dust of the road on their robes and Mallam Sani's cousin at the head of them, to sit on the mat in front of the seed bank with their caps in their hands.
They had sown everything on the tenth. The whole of their village had sown every strip, low ground and plateau, before the rain had stopped dripping from the thatch. On the low ground, the seedlings that were left were thin. On the plateau, on the sand, there was nothing. They had waited for the second rain, as everyone had, and walked their fields on Monday evening in the thunder, and there had been a field of bare sand with a few dead stalks in it, and under the sand, a thousand kilograms of seed that was now only a thousand kilograms of nothing. They had been to Maradi. A sack of seed there cost what a good cow cost.
"How much do you need?" said Hadiza.
"For the plateau," said the cousin, and he named it, and she wrote it on her hand with her finger, because she did not need a ledger to know the number was beyond them both. It was a thousand and a hundred kilograms. The village had twenty-two.
Nobody spoke. Sister Bernadette had her eyes down on the ledger. She did not offer a number, because it was not hers.
"Kafin," said Hadiza.
"Hajiya."
"The plateau. The sowing rate. If we sowed it at three kilograms to the hectare instead of three and a half. What would it cost us?"
The tablet clicked. "Pearl millet on that sand tillers well when the plants are further apart, if the rains are fair. I have the trials from the research station at Sadoré. At three kilograms the yield falls by between two and five per cent in a fair year, and more in a bad one. In a dry year I would not want to promise. It is a real cost. It is not a large one. It would free a hundred and sixty-eight kilograms, and with the twenty-two, one hundred and ninety."
"One hundred and ninety kilograms."
"Of the one thousand one hundred that they need. About seventeen in a hundred."
She sat looking at the dust between her feet. A hundred and ninety kilograms was not enough. It would not save Dan Kasawa's plateau. It would sow a sixth of it, three or four households' worth, and the rest of them would go to Maradi for the price of a cow, or to their relatives in Nigeria, or to the hungry season with their hands empty, and nothing that Gidan Gawo could do about that tonight would change it.
She also knew what it would cost the women of Gidan Gawo, who had been asked to sow thinner on land they had sown at three and a half kilograms for forty years, in a year when they had already paid a tenth for waiting. She thought of her husband, who had said, when she married him, that a person had to be willing to be a little poorer than was prudent, or she would never be anything else.
"Tell them to ask at the mosque," she said to the men from Dan Kasawa. "Tell them to ask at the mission, too. Sister Bernadette will write to the Sisters at Zinder, and to the bishop's office, and to the people who have the seed that the service keeps. It is not a promise. I do not know what they have. Tell them it is not enough." She looked at the key in her hand. "And tell them we will bring one hundred and ninety kilograms on Saturday, on the oxcart, and not to thank us. We are the people who are late to sow."
The women of Gidan Gawo sowed the plateau thin that week. Nobody asked them to like it. In the lanes in the evenings they said it was a poor sowing and that Hadiza had been touched in the head by the Sisters' machine, and then they went back in the morning and did it, a pinch at a time, a little further apart, one step on to the next.
On Saturday the oxcart went to Dan Kasawa. Hadiza went with it, though she had not been outside the village for a year, sitting on a sack of seed with her wrapper over her head. Nineteen sacks of ten kilograms. The cousin was on the road at the village's edge to meet it. He did not thank her. He took the sacks down one at a time, as if they had been eggs, and he put them in a row in the shade of a tree.
It was the gawo tree at the edge of their fields, which had no leaves and which, in six weeks, would be bare and grey against the green of a ripening field. Behind it, in the low ground, a line of women was sowing. A pinch, a step, a foot on the hole. She watched until she could hear them. They were singing, as the women sang at the sowing, a song with no words that Hadiza had known in her mother's mouth, and the sound of it came across the field, small and unhurried, in time with the steps.
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Notes for the curious. Gidan Gawo, Dan Kasawa, Hadiza Mamane, Mallam Sani, Sister Bernadette, the mission, the dispensary and the field adviser Kafin are invented, as are the rains of June 2044. The Maradi region of Niger, pearl millet (gero) grown on sandy soils in a short rainy season, and village seed banks and savings groups are real. The gawo is Faidherbia albida, an acacia that, unusually, loses its leaves in the rainy season and carries them in the dry season; it fixes nitrogen and is kept standing in farmers' fields in Niger and elsewhere in the Sahel. That farmers and their trees did this long before extension agents arrived is also true. A false start to the rains, in which an early storm is followed by a dry spell that kills young seedlings, is a well-known risk of Sahelian farming; the numbers here are invented to make a decision: fifteen years in thirty-eight (about four in ten), thirty-one forecasts of fifty (62 per cent) bringing a second rain, and a forecast ensemble that is too confident, which real seasonal-to-weekly forecasts often are. Whether a satellite radar record can really give the soil moisture figures Kafin quotes at village scale is optimistic for 2044 and not a claim about today. The sums are worked, not measured: 140 households times 4 hectares times 3.5 kilograms is 1,960 kilograms; the 2,100 kilograms in the store leave 140; 40 per cent of 1,960 is 784 kilograms for the low ground and 1,176 for the plateau, which leaves 1,316 in reserve; a loss of 15 per cent of the 784 kilograms is 117.6, rounded to 118; 1,316 minus 118 is 1,198; against the 1,176 the plateau needs, 22 kilograms remain; sowing the plateau at 3 kilograms instead of 3.5 kilograms to the hectare saves 168 kilograms (1,176 times 1/7), and with the 22 gives 190. The yield penalty for sowing late, and for sowing thin, are plausible figures for pearl millet and not taken from a particular trial; the reference to Sadoré (the ICRISAT research station near Niamey, which does work on pearl millet) is a pointer, not a quotation. Niger is overwhelmingly Muslim, and the Catholic Church there is very small; the Sister is a guest of the village and the story says so. Calling for a harvest or a good rain by prayer is real in both traditions. The traditional hand sowing of millet with a short hoe is real. The 1984 drought and famine in the Sahel are real. The line the Sister says, Give us this day, is from the Lord's Prayer. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.