'The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope' by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

Kamkwamba, William and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of  Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009.  Print.

Cover Image:
HarperCollins.com

Go have a look in your trash or recycling bin.  Or maybe you drive by a junkyard or have a neighbor with a junky car they haven’t fixed in the last ten years. I’ll wait.  What did you see there?  Do you think you could make anything out those things?  Do you see trash or do you see potential?  While growing up in a remote Malawi village, William Kamkwamba saw the potential.  As a young teenager, he designed and built a windmill using materials he found in the trash and junkyard.  William’s windmill not only brought electricity to his family’s home, it also helped them access a supply of clean drinking water and water to irrigate their crops.  What was even more remarkable about this situation is that William was entirely self-taught.

Before we can understand what drove William to design and build a windmill for his family, we have to understand the environment in which he and his family lived.  The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind begins with a brief history of Malawi, and the area in which William lives in particular.  This also serves to explain how the people of Malawi ended up in a situation where their lives are dependent on the capriciousness of weather and the moods of their government.  Many people are undereducated, including William’s parents, neither of whom finished primary school and were barely literate (Kamkwamba and Mealer 105).  Attending secondary school, much less a university is a pipe dream to many in Malawi, as William and many of his friends are to discover.  Placement in secondary schools is determined by the scores a student earns in exams given at the end of primary school.  Students must be able to pay the tuition and fees for secondary school and obtain the proper uniform to attend secondary school.  For many students, these requirements place advanced schooling out of reach.  Just before William was to begin secondary school, drought hit Malawi hard and without corn and tobacco crops to sell, Williams’s father was unable to scrape together the twelve hundred kwacha (about eighty US dollars) to pay for William’s school fees. 

William’s father wasn’t always a farmer.  He worked as a trader in the village market, but a brother talked him into joining his tobacco farm when William was a year old.  From that moment onward, the family fortunes rested on the rainy season arriving at the right time and lasting for the proper amount of time.  And all was well for a while.  Things began to unravel when William was nine years old, and his uncle died, leaving the tobacco farm to his oldest son, who promptly mismanaged the farm into unproductivity.  Soon after that, drought and famine arrived in Malawi, which not only destroyed the tobacco crop the family sold for money, but also their maize crop they used as their primary food source.  Even though the next year brought the right weather needed to grow maize and tobacco once more, the damage was done.  William’s family was deeply in debt, and William was forced to repeatedly drop out of school when his family was unable to afford the fees.  William is unwilling to become just another undereducated young man with limited or no prospects, so he haunts the small library in his village in an attempt to keep up with his studies.  He felt “reading could help keep my brain from getting soft while being a dropout” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 161).  One day, he finds an American science textbook that explains windmills and a dream is born.

The region of Malawi where William’s family lives has one abundant natural resource: wind.  When William discovers that wind can create electricity, he begins to plan to build one in order to benefit his family.  It’s soon after the recent drought, and William is driven by a desire to make sure his family doesn’t lose their tobacco crop or go hungry.  With a windmill, his family can pump water from their well to irrigate their tobacco and maize crops and enable his mother to plant a garden to grow other vegetables for his family to eat, like potatoes, cabbages, and beans.

Seeing the windmill wasn’t William’s first exposure to the concept of moving creating energy.  He had seen bicycle lights that were powered by the rider’s pedaling, which sparked his interest in figuring out how to create that kind of power without needing a human or animal to be the source of the motion.  William, along with his cousin Geoffrey, was always a tinkerer.  Together, they learned how radios worked through much trial and error.  In the process “a great many radios were sacrificed for [their] knowledge” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 69).  Eventually they had a small business repairing radios for other people in their village.  This dedication to learning from failure would help William when it came to building his windmill.

William’s windmill was made from a collection of materials salvaged from around the village and an “abandoned garage and scrapyard” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  He describes his first trip to the scrapyard with a windmill design in mind this way: “Now that I had an actual purpose and a plan, I realized how much bounty lay before me.  There were so many things: old water pumps, tractor rims half the size of my body, filters, hoses, piles, and plows” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  What follows is a description of the junk he found in the scrapyard and how he repurposed it to construct his windmill. 

Much to William’s relief, the windmill works according to plan.  He’s able to wire the house for electricity and build a water pump for his family’s well.  The windmill gives his family a much more reliable source of electricity than people in the village, who rely on the government service, which is subject to frequent blackouts.  People can bring their mobile phones to his home and charge them using the windmill’s power.  His sisters can study for school after sundown, and his parents are able to work on tasks that need light after dark, making his family much more productive.  A couple of years later, when William and his windmill came to global attention, he was able to finally install a pump and spigot on his family’s well, and opened it for other women in the village to use.  His mother reports she “saved two hours each day” by not having to carry water from the public drinking water well back to their home (Kamkwamba and Mealer 275).  One can only surmise how much time other women were able to save by having a nearby source of clean drinking water. 

Government education officials later discovered William’s windmill, who in turn, brought journalists to see it.  They were so impressed that they managed to help William continue his interrupted education, reasoning the way to help Malawi was to help innovative young men and women like William continue with higher education.  He was then invited to a TED conference in 2007 in Tanzania where he presented the story of his windmill.  This led to additional publicity and funding, which helped William continue his education at a better school, help pay for his sisters’ school fees, and help make improvements to his village.  William also started a fund, the Moving Windmills Project, to help make improvements in rural Malawi.  After the terrible experience of the drought and famine, William wanted to make sure people never had to depend on the whims of government assistance, if they could avoid it.   

William fits the definition of an innovator.  He didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, or in this case, the windmill.  He saw a situation that could be better and found a way to make it so.  Even as an adolescent, he saw that his village needed someone to quickly repair radios, their entertainment and news source.  William brings to his community what what J.P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight would term a “unique combination of assets” (4).  Even more importantly, he “represents an image of Africa and Africans that rejects the pity and guilt commonly invoked by most news stories out of the continent.  In fact he represents the opposite -- and may simultaneously be offering solutions to poverty, degradations, starvation, aid dependency, and corruption” (Gallis “Sustainable Entrepreneurship”).  Instead of aid groups swooping into Malawi and other countries and imposing their “help”, William represents what happens when local talents are identified and cultivated for the betterment of their community.

As a writer, William has an engaging voice.  It’s the memoir’s greatest strength.  He’s funny, friendly, and has a conversational style.  When describing the importance of a doughy bread made from maize -- nsima -- that’s a staple in Malawian diets he confides, “Everyone from the fat politicians to the dogs and cats depend on nsima to live.  Each night after our supper, Khamba (his dog) would be waiting by his food bowl to get his delicious helping.  Most of the time he didn’t even chew his portion, just inhaled it whole.  ‘How can you even enjoy it?’ I’d ask” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 72).  Anecdotes such as this present a moment of commonality to readers in the Western world.  We’ve all fed our dog or cat a yummy treat only to see them swallow it without even a cursory chew and ask the exact same thing.  In Robin Vidimos’ review of the book, she describes his voice as “without guile, laying out the realities of a farming life” (E-12).  He doesn’t make farming romantic, nor does he make his poverty noble.  It’s backbreaking work, and William often mentions the capriciousness of nature that makes their situation as subsistence farmers so precarious.  He often treats the reader as a confidante, confessing things he hadn’t revealed until he wrote the memoir, like leaving his beloved dog Khamba to die out in a grove of blue gum trees at the height of the famine when everyone was starving.  William says, with evident sadness, “We filled the hole with soil and left no marker, even concealed the patch with grass and branches.  When Charity and I got home, we told no one about what we’d done.  Even after all these years, it’s remained a secret, until now” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 148).  William even has a self-deprecating sense of humor, especially when he describes his first brushes with modern technology.  At the TED conference in Tanzania, William sees the Internet for the first time.  He remarks how “funny to me now -- at this conference in East Africa, with some of the world’s greatest minds in science and technology just outside the door, there I was in this room seeing the Internet for the first time.  They could have put a blinking sign over my head and charged admission” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 266).  It’s a testament to his sense of humor that he can gently poke fun at himself in such a situation. He also evokes such strong emotion in the reader, that you become invested in his story. The memoir is also an inspiring tale of a young man who overcame adversity and misfortune by his sheer will and determination.  Who doesn’t like a story like that?

The book moves a nicely meandering pace, much as a storyteller would use to draw in their audience.  There is a section, especially when William starts describing how he made his windmill that honestly made my eyes glaze over.  It’s a bit tedious and technical and is a place where a little editing to tighten up the prose or make it less technical could have helped.  On the other hand, my boredom could also rested on my ignorance of more than basic physics and lack of interest in the subject overall.  It’s understandably meant to convey William’s persistence, but it moves the focus of the narrative from perseverance to technical details that perhaps aren’t completely necessary in the overall arc of the narrative.  William has also provided line drawings of his windmill and a few of the other things that are meant to offer a visual aid to the narrative.  The drawings are almost too simplistic to accomplish the task.  They lack a level of detail to make them comprehensible to a non-science person and are often more puzzling than enlightening.  They’re a bit distracting. 

One of the lessons that I’m afraid will get lost under the clarion call of perseverance is that failure is indeed a great teacher.  I spent many years teaching underprivileged children and this is exactly the kind of book that an administrator would suggest we read in order to inspire us for the coming school year.  Like I said, who can resist such an inspiring story?  It is important to remember that this is one person’s experience.  Before we turn to underprivileged schools with this book and say, “See?  If this kid could succeed, so should yours!”, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: 1) What about William’s family structure made it possible for him to succeed?; 2) How much of his success was motivated by an internal desire to succeed?; and 3) What about William’s personal story is specific to his circumstances and upbringing?  What can we take from this memoir and make it scalable?  For me, it’s the much smaller message about failure.  William mentions the times he tried to do something, failed the first time, then analyzed what went wrong, and then tried it again, applying what he’d learned.  That is the message I’d want my students to take away from this memoir.  Sometimes in order to learn something, we have to learn from the mistakes we make along the way.  The other thing that I think gets lost in the rest of the memoir is that William didn’t operate alone.  He had help from other members of his family -- his father who left him alone to build the windmill and his cousin Geoffrey who helped him acquire tools and hardware William was unable to salvage or make.  No man is an island and no innovator works in a vacuum. 

William has a blog where you can find photos and videos of William and his windmill.  There are also links to his TED presentations in 2007 and 2009.  The blog also has a link where you can donate to his NGO Moving Windmills. 

For younger readers, there is a picture book version of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. 

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Works Cited

Gallis, Helene. "Sustainable Entrepeneuship in Africa." World Watch 23.4 (2010): 12-7. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 July 2014.

Kamkwamba, William, and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009. Print.

Kretzmann, John P., and John L. McKnight. "Introduction." Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Evanston: Institute for Policy Research, 1993. 1-6. Web. <http://www.abcdinstitute.org/docs/abcd/GreenBookIntro.pdf>

Vidimos, Robin. "African Boy's Triumph, Stunningly Told." The Denver Post, sec. E: 12. 15 November 2009. Business Insights: Essentials. Web. 18 July 2014.