Running a Business
Senior 3 · English
Running a Business
Lesson 5 of 5
25 min
Let's begin
A story about a market is not only about a market. The events of the plot (who does what, what goes wrong and how it ends) carry a bigger idea about life, which we call the theme. Read this story about two traders, trace its plot, and then work out what it is really saying.
A short story written for this lesson.
For twenty years, Mama Nshuti had sold beans at the corner of the market under a faded umbrella. Her scale was old and her hands were slow, but nobody had ever asked her to weigh a kilo twice.
Then Gakuba arrived. He was young and quick, with a loud voice and a shiny new scale, and he set up his stall right beside hers. "Beans! The best beans at the lowest price!" he shouted, and his price was fifty francs lower than hers. By the end of the month, the queue in front of his stall was long, and Mama Nshuti sat alone, shelling beans to keep her hands busy.
Her grandson Keza, who was in S2, could not understand it. "His beans aren't better than yours," he said. "How can he sell them so cheaply?"
"Perhaps he is cleverer than me," said his grandmother.
Keza was not satisfied. One Saturday he bought a kilo of beans from Gakuba and carried it to school. On Monday, in the science laboratory, he weighed it on the electronic balance. It weighed 850 grams. He weighed it again: 850 grams. That afternoon, from behind a pile of sacks, he watched Gakuba carefully, and he saw it: a flat grey stone stuck under the pan of the shiny scale.
Keza ran to his grandmother. "We must tell everyone! He's a thief!"
Mama Nshuti was quiet for a long time. "If we shout, we shame him in front of everyone, and shame makes people fight instead of change. Let the scale speak."
The next morning she walked to Gakuba's stall with a sealed bag of sugar, the kind with "1 kg" printed on the side. "My scale is old," she said, loudly enough for the queue to hear. "Will you check this bag for me on your fine new one?"
Gakuba smiled and put the bag on his scale. The needle stopped at one kilo and a hundred and fifty grams. The queue went silent. A woman picked up the sugar, read the label, and looked at Gakuba. Then, one by one, the customers walked away.
That evening, when the market was empty, Mama Nshuti found Gakuba sitting behind his stall with his head in his hands. She sat down beside him. "You are clever," she said. "But cleverness that cheats is like a stone under a scale. It makes you heavy for a day, and then it drags you down."
For a week, Gakuba's stall stayed closed. When it opened again, there was a new sign above the scale: WEIGHED HONESTLY. CHECK IT YOURSELF. Beside the scale stood a sealed kilo of sugar for any customer to test, and his prices were now the same as Mama Nshuti's.
The customers came back slowly. Some never came back at all. But one morning Keza noticed something that made him smile: Gakuba was buying his lunch of beans from Mama Nshuti.
Definition
conflict: the struggle or problem at the centre of a plot, between characters, or within one character. Here: honest trade against cheating.
climax: the turning point of the plot, the moment of greatest tension, after which the conflict begins to be settled.
resolution: the end of the plot, where the conflict is settled and we see the result.
theme: the central idea about life or people that a story expresses, stated as a full sentence. Dishonesty may bring quick profit, but it destroys the trust a business depends on.
subject (or topic): what the story is about, in a word or phrase. Cheating at a market.
The theme is not usually stated by the writer. You build it from the plot by asking five questions.
| Question | In "The Stone under the Scale" |
|---|---|
| 1. What is the conflict? | Honest trading (Mama Nshuti) against cheating (Gakuba). |
| 2. What changes in the main character? | Gakuba moves from cheating and pride to shame, then to honesty. |
| 3. How does it end: who gains, who loses? | Cheating wins customers for a month and loses them in a minute; honesty wins them back slowly, and not all of them. |
| 4. What do the title and the symbols suggest? | The stone stands for dishonesty: it adds false weight and then "drags you down". The sealed kilo of sugar stands for truth anyone can check. |
| 5. What does a wise character say? | "Cleverness that cheats is like a stone under a scale." |
Themes: (1) Dishonesty may bring quick profit, but it destroys the trust that a business depends on. (2) Showing someone their wrong calmly, without public shame, can help them change. A story often has more than one theme; each must be supported by events in the plot.
Worked example
Writing a theme statement: from weak to strong
Worked example
Supporting a theme in an examination answer
Question: "What is one theme of the story? Support your answer."
Tip
Subject + "what about it?" = theme. Start with the subject (cheating), ask "what does the story say about it?", and write the answer as a sentence that could be true of many people, not only these characters.
Warning
Mining literature for deeper meanings, a TED-Ed lesson by Amy E. Harter (about 4 minutes). Note how the lesson moves from details in a text to a bigger meaning, and use the same steps on the stone and the sealed bag of sugar.
Practice
Further reading
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa.
