What does an African schoolboy do if his family is reduced to abject poverty by a severe drought and he is kicked out of school because his parents cannot afford to pay school fees? In his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba describes how he went to the library to study books to try to keep up with his classmates, and in those books he found some ideas that could be used to improve his family’s situation.
A school textbook called “Explaining Physics” showed how a rotating power source could be used to generate electricity to power a light globe, and another called “Using Energy” contained pictures of windmills. William decided to build a windmill to provide electrical power to his house and eventually hopefully to power a pump that would enable his family to irrigate their crops even if there was a drought. Using parts gathered from a scrapyard and some remarkable ingenuity, he made a windmill which worked, much to the surprise of the people in his village.
I found the book to be very moving in the way it described the privations and gradual starvation brought on by the drought and the government’s failure to respond, and then the resourcefulness of William in understanding and building advanced technology that no-one in his village had ever seen, merely on the basis of photographs and drawings in school text books. It is a great story, well told and intriguing to the very end. I highly recommend it.