Rediscovering Africa through a Boy and His Windmill

One of the chief pleasures in writing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with William Kamkwamba was knowing that such an inspiring story was coming from a most unlikely place. With the daily news from Africa so traditionally grim, it’s no wonder most people have given up on the place. As one of those reporters who delivered that news, I was close to doing the same. Until I met William.

For five years I’d covered Africa’s cycle of misery and horror, both as a writer for Harper’s and a correspondent for the Associated Press. Mostly I worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reporting an insane war that’s killed over five million people in the past decade — more than any other conflict since the Second World War. I’d filled dozens of notebooks with accounts of rape, murder, and mutilation, and over the years, heard the same stories repeated in Somalia, Togo, Kenya, and Uganda. After a while they became part of my fabric, so commonplace I could practically finish their sentences for them. I’d grown numb without even knowing. And whenever I did realize this, it bothered me.

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