Water at the Well: Who Is to Blame?
Read this short Setswana passage: 'Kgalalelo o ne a tsoga ka 5:00 phakela. Mme wa gagwe a re: "Tsamaya o ye go tshola metsi kwa sedibeng." Kgalalelo a tsamaya ka 6:30. Fa a fitlha kwa sedibeng, a bona metsi a se kae. A boela gae a se na metsi. Mme a re: "Ke ne ke go raetse go ya ka 5:00. Ka 6:30, batho ba bangwe ba setse ba tshotse metsi." Kgalalelo a re: "Ke ne ke solofetse gore metsi a tla nna mantsi."' (Kgalalelo woke at 5:00. Her mother said, 'Go and draw water at the well.' Kgalalelo left at 6:30. When she arrived, she saw there was little water. She returned home without water. Mother said, 'I advised you to go at 5:00. By 6:30, other people had already drawn water.' Kgalalelo said, 'I had hoped the water would be plentiful.')
1. What is the mother's main criticism, and which words carry it?
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She is criticising timing, not effort. The evidence is in 'Ke ne ke go raetse go ya ka 5:00' ('I advised you to go at 5:00') and 'Ka 6:30, batho ba bangwe ba setse ba tshotse metsi' ('by 6:30 others had already drawn water'). The repeated time expressions are the signal.
She does not accuse Kgalalelo of refusing to go - Kgalalelo did go. So an answer such as 'the mother is angry because Kgalalelo was lazy' misreads the passage: the complaint is about a late start, and the word raetse frames it as advice that was not followed, not as disobedience.
2. In 'A boela gae a se na metsi', who is referred to by 'a', and what clue settles it?
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It is Kgalalelo. The form a is a class 1 subject concord used in the narrative past, and both Kgalalelo and her mother are class 1, so grammar alone cannot decide.
The clue is the chain of events plus plausibility: the person who went to the well is the one who returns without water, and the mother is at home and speaks only after the return.
This is a useful reminder that pronoun resolution in a narrative sometimes depends on sequence and sense, not only on the shape of the concord. A reader who says 'the nearest noun' without checking the action can still go wrong.
3. Kgalalelo blames the water level; her mother blames timing. Which explanation does the passage actually support?
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The passage supports the mother only conditionally. It states that there was little water when Kgalalelo arrived, and that others had drawn water by 6:30 - both consistent with timing.
But it never states how much water there was at 5:00. If the well was already low at 5:00, Kgalalelo's explanation holds; if it was full at 5:00, the mother's does. The decisive missing detail is the water level at 5:00.
A careful answer should therefore say the evidence is incomplete rather than pick a side. This is the kind of judgement the passage rewards: noticing what is stated, what is inferred, and what is simply absent.