The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Chapters 3–5

That day, when my father helped him to the clinic near the trading center, they diagnosed him with tuberculosis and told him to go immediately to Kasungu Hospital.

Then, heeding the advice of the chiefs, he handed the entire business over to John’s firstborn son, Jeremiah, who was twenty years old.

Uncle John had also owned and operated two maize mills in nearby villages that made a substantial profit.

He wanted to be different from Banda in every possible way, and this included stopping all subsidies and making the farmers fend for themselves.

He wanted to be different from Banda in every possible way, and this included stopping all subsidies and making the farmers fend for themselves.

He also chased the goats through the compound, causing them to bleat and cry and kick up the dirt.

Hunting with my cousins had taught me the ways of the land: how to find the best spots in the tall grass and along the shimmering dambo pools, how to outwit the birds with a strong, smart trap, and the virtues of patience and silence when lying in wait.

Hunting with my cousins had taught me the ways of the land: how to find the best spots in the tall grass and along the shimmering dambo pools, how to outwit the birds with a strong, smart trap, and the virtues of patience and silence when lying in wait.

The sack contained a long bicycle tube, a broken bicycle spoke, a short section of steel wire I’d clipped off my mother’s clothesline, a handful of maize chaff we called gaga, and four heavy bricks.

Using a nail and heavy wrench, I poked holes all along the lines, perforating the metal so it popped out with a good pounding.

Taking my knife, I sawed off two thick branches from the blue gum and stripped their bark, then whittled both to sharp points.

As soon as we got there, Khamba lay down beside me and stared keenly ahead.

Dirty clothes were strewn everywhere, along with mango peels and groundnut shells and other strange pieces of rubbish.

Once inside, the conversation was lurid and often confusing for my eleven-year-old mind.

I began cleaning my birds, plucking off the feathers and shaking them from my fingers into a pail. I popped the heads off and scooped out the entrails.

You’ll hear Malawian reggae or American rhythm and blues from Radio Two in Blantyre, or Chichewa gospel choirs and church sermons from Lilongwe.

These are transistors, and they control the power that moves through the radio into the speakers. Geoffrey and I learned this by disconnecting one transistor and hearing the volume greatly reduce.

We didn’t own a proper soldering iron, so to perform repairs on the circuit boards, we heated a thick wire over the kitchen fire until it became red hot, then used it to fuse the metal joints together.

Most Malawians were sustenance farmers who depended on their maize plots to survive.

Some farmers were lazy and left these lumps, and as a result, their yields were smaller.

Back at the house, I’d draw a bucket of water from the shallow well behind our house and wash my face. (It wasn’t potable.)

You’ll often see children with plastic sugar bags or newspapers wrapped around their feet with twine—some form of makeshift bandage—to keep away the flies and soil.

One morning while walking, a hyena cried from the bush—ooooo-we—practically causing me to jump out of my trousers.

The starter packs had been implemented back in 1998 and 1999 and given to every farmer in Malawi who needed one.

The stalks that survived were so stunted they only reached my father’s chest.

The maize leaves looked like onions, brown and brittle and ready to crumble to the touch.

But one evening, my father’s friend rode up to our house on a bicycle with a lamp powered by a dynamo. As soon as he hopped off the bike, the light switched off.

The soil—along with loads of garbage—runs into the Shire River, clogging up the dams with silt and trash and shutting down the turbine.

Then the power plant has to stop all operations and dredge the river, which in turn causes power cuts.

But no matter where I was assigned, classes would begin in January. When they did, it would be like passing over an important threshold in becoming a man.

It was true—the maize crops in the outer villages had fared more poorly than ours during the floods and drought, and after only four months, their storages had gone dry.

Each June after the harvests, Mister Banda visited several villages between here and Kasungu and bought many kilos of maize to sell during the hungry season, usually for a much higher price. But this year, the silos were empty.

What really happened was this: the floods and drought the previous year had given us a food deficit far greater than people realized.

Much of the good maize was sold to prominent traders with government connections—men who’d foreseen the food shortage and wanted to take advantage of this dire situation.

Much of the good maize was sold to prominent traders with government connections—men who’d foreseen the food shortage and wanted to take advantage of this dire situation.

The next time my mother returned from the mill, our flour was coarse and filled with gaga.

His mother already struggled to pay his student fees, but now she needed him and his brother Jeremiah to work and provide food. I didn’t want Geoffrey to know that I knew this, so I kept our usual banter going.

Despite a growing anger about the missing maize surplus, the government said nothing on the radio. And despite the looming hunger, it offered no solutions.

At the time, the president was also chairman of the Southern African Development Community, a kind of social and economic alliance between fifteen countries in southern Africa. During his tenure, there had been terrible wars in other parts of the continent, places like Angola, Burundi, and Sudan.

The genocide in Rwanda that killed more than eight hundred thousand Tutsi had then spilled into the Democratic Republic of Congo and started a war there.