“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” sounds like a fable, but it is the actual title of a book based on an incredible real-life story: Malawian teenager, William Kamkwamba, had built a windmill in his village using a ratty old textbook and materials sourced from rubbish.
Kamkwamba dropped out of school when he was 14 — his family could no longer afford to send him.
Unfettered by poverty, he decided to continue his education by going to a local library. In his small village of Masitala, electricity or clean water was but a pipe dream. It was Kamkwamba’s goal to make that a reality. As fate would have it, he came a across a tattered book with a picture of a windmill.
“I was very interested when I saw the windmill could make electricity and pump water.
“I thought: ‘That could be a defence against hunger. Maybe I should build one for myself’.”
Helping his family farm maize in the day, and working on his project under the light of paraffin by night, he managed to scrape enough materials from discarded piles of junk to make a prototype:
A rickety, 16-foot tall, blue-gum-tree wood tower.
“I got a few electric shocks climbing that [windmill],” says Kamkwamba, but when he finally climbed up to the structure to test his work — by hooking a car light bulb to the turbine — all his painstaking effort finally paid off.
His neighbors, who thought very little of his frantic building and assumed he was smoking pot, were lining up to charge their cellular phones.
There, in a village where no one had even seen a windmill before, stood this great symbol of hope for a brighter future.
Not long afterwards, Kamkwamba’s family’s modest mud brick home saw their house in the light of a 12-watt bulb for the very first time.
It could have been easy for Kamkwamba’s story to be one similar to the thousands before him — of a person defeated by poverty beyond their control. But this is not one of those stories. In Kamkwamba’s book, he wins.