The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba is a young man from Malawi who learned about windmills from a library book, then built his own and supplied his family with electricity for the first time. I saw him interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and picked up his book (written with journalist Bryan Mealer), thinking it would be a nice relief from some of the grimmer books on Africa that I’ve been reading lately.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind turned out to be one of the more interesting African memoirs I’ve read (and I’ve read quite a few). It also told me things I didn’t know about Malawi, where I spent a couple of weeks in 1993.
In one paragraph on page 77, Kamkwamba explains how deforestation led to poverty in his country (the thesis of Collapse by Jared Diamond). He also makes clear that although Hastings Banda, the former “president for life,” was a feared dictator, he was someone who understand the importance of agriculture. His successor, an urban businessman, did not, and the result was a devastating famine.
The reason to read the book, though, is to appreciate Kamkwamba’s determination and ingenuity. Forced to leave school because his family could not afford the fees (a common tragedy in Africa), he spent his days scouring his neighborhood and a local scrapyard for junk that could help him realize his dream.
Over the next few weeks, my scrap pieces kept revealing themselves like a magic puzzle. At one point, I realized I needed more PVC pipe, so without Gilbert’s father looking, we dug out the drainage pipe from his shower stall. Inside, it was covered witih several inches of slime that I had to scrape with my fingers. It smelled horrible.
Once it was clean and dry, I took the pipe home and cut it down the middle with a bow saw. Next I made a long grass fire behind the kitchen, then tossed the pipe atop the flames. When it began to bubble and curl, I rolled it off and pounded it flat. I then cut four blades at four feet each. I wanted to go ahead and connect them to the tractor fan rotor, but I had no nuts and bolts. So I spent two weeks in the scrapyard searching every piece of metal. But I had only one size wrench, which was too large for most of the nuts on the machines. To compensate, I wrapped a bicycle spoke inside the wrench hole and managed to loosen a few. However, most of them were so rusted they stripped against the tool or refused to even budge.
Gilbert then offered to help. He went to Daud’s shop with fifty kwacha and bought a big bag of nuts and bolts. I was so grateful. But I still had no money to hire a welder to connect my pieces. Then one day while in the trading center, I had an amazing stroke of luck....
