Obituary: The Engineer Who Laid the First Kilometer of the Sahel Spine

He liked to say that a pipe is an argument you can walk along, and for forty years Amadou Traoré made the case one kilometer at a time. The engineer who surveyed and laid the first stretch of what became the Sahel water corridor — back when it was a line on a map that everyone sensible called impossible — died this week at eighty-nine, of ordinary age, in a house within sight of the spine he started. He did not live to see the meters and the billing arguments now roiling the corridor cities; he would, colleagues said, have been delighted by the fight, because a thing has to exist before anyone can argue about who owns it, and getting the thing to exist was his life's whole point. He was not augmented and never sought to be. "I want the years I was given to matter," he told an interviewer late in life, "not more of them." This summer, the first full season the corridor ran without failing, the water reached the districts he mapped as a young man. The landscape kept his promise. He was not there to see it, and by every account he had made his peace with that long ago.