The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind is a picture book about teen inventor, William Kamkwamba whose determination to help his starving family made a huge difference to his village in Africa.

William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi on August 5, 1987. He lived near the village of Wimbe with his parents and six sisters. William was curious about how things worked and dreamed about taking apart things and figuring out how they worked.

William worked in the fields with his family. His father was a farmer who grew maize. Then one year the rains did not come and drought spread across Malawi. People began to starve, including William's family.  His father rationed their food with the family eating only one meal per day. Without crops, Williams family began to run out of money and he was no longer able to attend school. This upset William because he enjoyed learning.

Then he remembered the library that had been started by the Americans. William began visiting the library and reading books about science. These books explained to him how engines worked. Because he could not read English, William had to use a dictionary to read the books. It was a picture of a windmill which was described as a means to produce electricity and pump water that intrigued William the most. He knew immediately that he wanted to build a windmill for his family's farm so they could have electricity to light their homes at night and pump water from the ground for his father's crops.

William set out to build a windmill, searching for the materials he needed at a local junk yard. His determination and efforts, which were successful, would change not only his family's life, but his own and that of his village forever.

Discussion

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind is a picture book that tells the basic story of William Kamkwamba's life and his astonishing feat of building a windmill for his father's farm. His story is so remarkable that readers will also want to learn more in by reading the adult version of his autobiography with the same title.

In the adult version, William writes that before he discovered science, the belief in magic dominated the world he lived in. William's parents started out their married life in Dowa, a small town southeast of Masitala. In Dowa his father Trywell worked as a traveling trader. When William was a year old, his Uncle John came to Dowa to convince his father to move to his village of Misitala to farm. He felt his brother could make more money and better support his family. Trywell agreed and the family moved to the village, first living in a one room house near Uncle John. Eventually, William's uncle gave the family a one acre plot to grow tobacco to sell and maize and vegetables to eat.

William's father and his Uncle John built up a good business farming tobacco as well as operating maize mills in nearby villages. When John tied from tuberculosis, the business was taken over by his son Jeremiah. However, poor management resulted in the business collapsing, meaning William's family was on its own.

When William was thirteen, he and his friend Geoffrey began taking apart radios to learn how they worked. At this time William's father was farming mostly maize, a food eaten at every meal in Malawi, in the form of a porridge calls nsima. William stresses that maize was the most important fod staple in Malawi. Anything that might interfere with the production of maize in the country would be catastrophic.

In December of 2000, the rains were late and then too heavy, causing serious flooding. This was followed by drought, resulting in very small yields of maize. William's father's farm yielded only five sacks of maize. It was during this time that a friend of his father visited their farm, riding a bicycle with a lamp powered by a dynamo. William was determined to understand how it worked. His experiments with the bike soon helped him to learn about electricity. In Malawi, only two percent of the population had electricity meaning that life and work stopped when it became dark. Eventually William would return to the idea of electricity and how it might help his family.

Famine, cholera and malaria followed the drought in 2001 in which William's family and his country starved. The descriptions of how the famine affected William and his family are distressing and heartbreaking. William also explains how the drought was enhanced by the deforestation of Malawi due to the tobacco farms. Because of the crop failure William had been unable to return to school. When the country recovered, he never returned. At first he tried to occupy his mind playing chess and bawo but this didn't work. He remembered that the Malawi Teacher Training Activity had opened a small library in Wimbe Primary School, stocked with books donated by the American government. William began taking out books from the library and borrowing the notes of his friend, Gilbert who was attending school. With the help of a teacher Mrs. Edith Sikelo from Wimbe Primary School who was also the librarian, William began to understand many basic concepts in physics such as magnetism, electromagnetic induction.

William writes in his adult version of his autobiography, "I can't tell you how exciting I though this was. Even if the words sometimes confused me, the concepts that were illustrated in the drawing were clear and real in my mind." It is important to remember that these books were written in English and that William had to use an English-Chichewa dictionary. But it was an American textbook, Using Energy that was to change William's life forever. It was pictures of windmills and the explanation of how energy can be converted from one form to another that made William realize a windmill was what his father's farm needed to generate electricity.

William's remarkable story, well told in the simple and less detailed picture book version captures all of the tenacity, ingenuity, determination and intelligence William exhibited to overcome many obstacles. The story is also well told  by the oil paint and cut paper artwork of illustrator Elizabeth Zunon, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design. This picture book lends itself well to homeschoolers and students wishing to study about sustainable development in the developing world, the role of education in Africa and the power of libraries. Older readers who wish to learn more about the backstory to William's success are encouraged to read his autobiography by the same title.It too is well written and well worth reading.

You can learn more about William at his website, www.williamkamkwamba.com


Book Details:

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
New York: Dial Books For Young Readers         2012