The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (8 page)

We spend much of August through November digging new dirt rows, or ridges. Taking a hoe, I’d hack apart the two existing ridges and form a new one in the center. This was our way of rotating the soil. Since this was our dry season, the soil was hard and required my full strength to break it apart, leaving large blisters on my hands. Not only that, but the hard soil left lumps that had to be crushed using the handle of the hoe, which added to the time this took. Soft soil allowed the seeds to pass through with no problem. Some farmers were lazy and left these lumps, and as a result, their yields were smaller.

Making ridges was always done while the sun was boiling in the sky. It was so hot I’d work in the mornings before school, then return in the evenings before dark. If the moon was full and bright, I’d wake up at 4:00
A.M.
before the cock even crowed. In the still-dark of morning, I stumbled into the latrine with my torch, trying not to notice the spiders on the ceiling with their black-and-white legs and giant hairy bodies, or the cockroaches flickering their antennae in the light, as if telling me,
This is our time to play, you should be in bed!
In that quiet time of morning, you could even hear the termites eating the walls, which always sounded like someone walking outside in the grass. 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.) By then, my mother would be up preparing a bowl of maize porridge—known as
phala.
After quickly devouring this, I headed down the trail with my hoe dragging behind.

“Make sure you watch where you throw that hoe in the dark,” my father would call out. “I don’t want you cutting off your foot!”

“For sure.”

Chopping your foot is a common accident during the clearing and planting season. 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. This doesn’t work, however,
since you’re back out in the fields the next morning. Cuts don’t always heal properly during this time, and every Malawian who ever grew up in a village has his own trail of scars to prove it.

Even with the moon, the road was dark and filled with shadows. I walked quickly and focused on each step, trying not to imagine the Gule Wamkulu watching from the trees, or bald men on witch planes flying overhead. No matter where I am or how old I get, these things will always scare me at 4:00
A.M.
One morning while walking, a hyena cried from the bush—
ooooo-we
—practically causing me to jump out of my trousers. I’ve never run so fast in all my life.

Normally the rains arrive by the first week of December and continue through March. The first sign of rain is our signal to begin planting. It’s like the starting pistol in the great race against God—the moment he says “GO!” When the first rains fall, you must be ready.

One person will take the hoe and move quickly down the ridges, making small gashes in the soil for planting stations while another follows and drops three seeds inside, then covers them with soil and a lot of good wishes. The fields in December are thick and muddy and stick like cakes against your feet.

After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it’s going to grow up strong.

Making planting stations was my favorite job because I didn’t have to wait on anyone in front, allowing me to knock off early and go fry maize—which in December is a rare pleasure.

From May through September, you’re still benefiting from the harvest. The maize is abundant, and every meal is grand. That is our winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and on those cold evenings, we’ll all gather round a fire and roast maize in a flat pan, laughing, telling stories, and humming good songs. But come the December planting season, most families are beginning to run low on maize, so any opportunity to sit with cousins and friends and fry maize is a treat. The smell of it roasting is heavenly and
makes us all very happy. Also during this time of scarcity, every meal of
nsima
is eaten with a heavy heart.

December is when people must buy fertilizer and seed, which is expensive and exhausts their savings. Most people will save enough to buy a chicken and some rice on Christmas and New Year’s, but afterward, there’s nothing. Come January, most people are forced to tighten their belts and wait until harvest. Outside, it’s always raining morning and night, and even the birds have nothing to eat because everything’s too busy growing. It’s a time of heat and mud and waiting. We call this period “the hungry season.” In the countryside, people are working the hardest they work all year to prepare their fields, but doing so with the least amount of food. Understandably, they grow thin, slow, and weak. Children sometimes die. The hungry season has always been with us, as predictable as the cock and the morning sun.

But if all goes well, the steady rains of December and January will have allowed the seedlings to grow, and by now they should reach my father’s knees. The small ears of maize then begin to form, and after some weeks, they reveal their blossoms—a cluster of silky hair and a tall tassel flower. By February, the stalk is thick and strong and as high as my father’s chest. By harvest time in May, especially with fertilizer, the stalks can be well over his head. The maize is then left to dry on the vine, then pulled and plucked. The grain is stored in fifty-kilogram bags in a small storage room next to where my parents sleep. In a good year, the bags will rise to the ceiling and spill into the corridor.

T
HIS IS HOW WE
normally planted and harvested each year, but in December 2000, everything went wrong. The rains were late, and didn’t begin until the last week of December. The first showers gave the seedlings confidence to finally push through the soil, so farmers applied their fertilizer and hoped for the best. But the rains that followed were much too heavy, falling day and night for a whole week. Great floods swept across the country, carrying away homes and livestock, along with the seedlings that had
just begun to grow. Fortunately there was no flooding in our district, but the rains still washed away the fertilizer and any hopes of high yields.

But like us, many farmers hadn’t been able to purchase fertilizer anyway. As a result of the new president’s policies, a bag of NPK fertilizer (consisting of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) now costs three thousand kwacha. It was far too expensive to buy once, let alone twice if the rains washed away the first round. After the floods, the president went on Radio One and vowed to assist every farmer with “starter packs” that contained two kilos of maize seed and five kilos of fertilizer. The starter packs had been implemented back in 1998 and 1999 and given to every farmer in Malawi who needed one. Those years the rains had been good, and with the additional seed and fertilizer from the packs, the yields had been high. But due to pressure from international donors, the program had been slashed to about one million farmers. So it was nice to hear the president promising to broaden this assistance.

But a month passed and nothing happened. A government list then appeared in the trading center of those who’d receive packs. My father’s name was missing, along with that of many others. But this hardly mattered. By then, it had stopped raining altogether.

After the floods, the rains simply vanished and a period of drought cursed the land. Each day the sun rose hot in the sky and showed no mercy on the young seedlings that had survived. By February, the stalks were wilted and hunched toward the ground like an old woman sweeping the dirt. A bit of rain in March saved us from total disaster and allowed the stalks to mature, but just barely. By May, the sun had burned half the crop. The stalks that survived were so stunted they only reached my father’s chest.

One afternoon I walked out into the fields with my father and we looked out across this destruction. The maize leaves looked like onions, brown and brittle and ready to crumble to the touch. We were thinking the same thing, but I said it first.

“What will happen to us next year, Papa?”

He let out a sigh. “I don’t know. But at least we’re not alone. It’s happening to everyone.”

My father was right. In many parts of the country, the yields were far smaller. Droughts hurt the smaller villages the most since the tiny farms had to feed large families year-round. The slightest problem in weather, fertilizer, or seed productivity could tip these families off the edge into hunger. That year, the drought would be felt for several more seasons.

As for our own farm, we managed to fill only five sacks with grain that barely filled one corner of the storage room. One night before bed, I saw a lamp flickering inside and found my father there alone, staring at the sacks as if he’d just asked them a question. Whatever they told him, I’d find out soon enough.

D
URING THIS TIME OF
trouble, I discovered the bicycle dynamo.

I’d always seen them on bicycles, the way they were attached to the wheel like a tiny metal bottle, but I’d never paid them much attention. 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.

“What made the lamp go off?” I asked. I hadn’t seen him turn a switch.

“The dynamo,” he said. “I stopped pedaling.”

Once he went inside to see my father, I jumped on his bike to try it myself, to see if I could make the lamp work. Sure enough, after a few meters of pedaling, the light came on. I got off, flipped the bike over, and traced the wires from the lamp all the way down to the rear tire, where the dynamo was attached. The dynamo had its own metal wheel that pressed against the rubber. Turning the pedal with my hand, the tire spun round and also spun the wheel of the dynamo. Then the light came on.

I couldn’t get this out of my head. How did spinning a wheel create light? Soon I was stopping everyone with a dynamo and asking them how it worked.

“Why does the light come on when you pedal?” I’d ask.

“The dynamo is rotating, that’s why.”

“I know it’s rotating, but why does it work? What is the secret?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I play with it?”

“Help yourself.”

I spun the wheel and watched the light. One day while playing with my father’s friend’s bike, I noticed the wires had come loose from the bulb. With the wheel spinning, I accidentally touched the ends to the metal handlebar and saw a spark. This gave me my next idea.

One afternoon Geoffrey and I borrowed that same bike, flipped it upside down, and connected the wires to the positive and negative heads on a radio, where the batteries would normally go. When we cranked the pedal, nothing happened. I then attached the wires directly to the base of the dynamo’s bulb. This time when I pedaled, the light flickered on. Taking the batteries I’d removed from the radio, I stacked them together and ran a separate wire from the batteries to the bulb. Again, the light worked.

“Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly,” I said. “So why won’t the radio play?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Try connecting them there.”

He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled “AC,” and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance.

“Keep pedaling,” he said. “That’s it, just keep pedaling”

“Hey, I want to dance, too.”

“You’ll have to wait your turn.”

Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later.

After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking,
What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?

The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that made
me want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00
P.M.
, or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.

Like most people, my family used kerosene lamps to find our way at night. These lamps were nothing more than a Nido powdered milk can with a cloth wick, filled with fuel and bent closed at the top. The fuel was very expensive, and the only place to buy it for a good price was at the petrol station in Mtunthama seven kilometers away. The lamps produced thick black smoke that burned your eyes and made you cough. Of course, you can buy hurricane lamps made with glass and a top that prevents the smoke from coming out, but most people can’t afford these.

Our country’s power is supplied by the government through the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM), which produces electricity using turbines on the Shire River in the south—another object of my fascination that I’ll describe later.

If you have money and a lot of patience, you can ask ESCOM to bring electricity to your home by wire. You have to catch a pickup to Kasungu, then a minibus one hundred kilometers to the capital Lilongwe, where you’ll find the ESCOM office in Magetsi House. There you pay someone thousands of kwacha, submit an application, and draw them a map of your home so they can find it. And if you’re lucky, maybe your application will get approved and the workers will find your home and install a pole and wires—all of which you must pay for. When this power is finally on, you’re happy staying up until ten o’clock dancing to your radio, but only until the government issues power cuts, and those happen every week, usually at night, just after dark. All that money and trouble—it was almost easier just going to bed at seven.

Another thing that contributes to our energy problem is deforestation. As my grandpa told me, the country was once covered in forests, with so many trees the trail grew dark at noon. But over the years, the big tobacco estates had taken much of the wood, using it to flue-cure the leaves before bringing them to auction. Local tobacco farmers used more wood to build shelters for drying the leaves, but these structures never lasted more than a season because of the termites. The rest of the wood got used by everyone else for cooking since we had no electricity. The problem got so bad near Wimbe that it’s not uncommon for someone to travel fifteen kilometers by bike just to find a handful of wood. And how long does a handful of wood last?

Few people realize this, but cutting down the trees is one of the things that keeps us Malawians poor. Without the trees, the rains turn to floods and wash away the soil and its minerals. 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. And because this process is so expensive, the power company has to charge extra for electricity, making it even more difficult to afford. So with no crops to sell because of drought and floods, and with no electricity because of clogged rivers and high prices, many people feed their families by cutting down trees for firewood or selling it as charcoal. It’s like that.

One of these government power lines that serviced the nearby tobacco estates also connected to Gilbert’s house. Since his father was Chief Wimbe, they could afford the poles and wires. When I was young and first visited Gilbert, I watched him walk inside his house and touch the wall, and when he did, the bulb came on. Just by touching the wall! Of course, now I know he just simply flipped a light switch. But after that day, each time I visited Gilbert and watched him touch the wall, I thought,
Why can’t I touch the wall and get lights? Why am I always the one stuck in the dark, searching for a match?

But bringing electricity to my home would take more than a simple bicycle dynamo, and my family couldn’t even afford one of those. After a
while I kind of stopped thinking about it altogether and focused on more important things. One of them, for instance, was graduating from primary school.

I
N MID-
S
EPTEMBER, OUR TEACHERS
at Wimbe Primary finally passed out our final exams and wished us luck. For the past several months, I’d studied very hard. I stayed up late with the kerosene lamp reviewing exercise books dating back several years because the Standard Eight exam covered everything. I pored over my lessons in agriculture, remembering the proper land preparation techniques for groundnuts, the various types of farm records, and how to tell if your chickens had been stricken with Newcastle disease or fowl pox. In social and environmental science, I reviewed the roles of civil servants, politicians, and traditional authorities in the district administrative structure. Chichewa lessons were simple, so I spent much of that energy studying English, writing sentences and going over stories from my readers. One of my favorite stories was “Journey to Malwkwete,” about a boy named Yembe Dodo, who’s out hunting birds one morning when he’s abducted by space aliens. The creatures are taller than the highest trees and wider than an elephant. Each has three eyes. Anyway, they take him aboard their spaceship and then eat his birds. I couldn’t imagine such a thing.

The test lasted three days, with social studies and English on the first day, Chichewa and mathematics on the second, and primary science on the third. The three days swept by in a blur of black-and-white pages, broken pencils, and strange test-question scenarios.

I bit my nails over percentages and equilateral triangles, circumferences, and whether to apply iodine or Amprol if I found bloody layers in the henhouse. By the end I was a total mess of nerves, but felt confident nonetheless. Our grades would be posted in December, three long months away.

If I passed my exam, I’d finally be allowed to enroll in a secondary school chosen by the government. Out of six possible schools in the area,
only three were boarding types. Everyone knew the government gave its best funding to the boarding schools so naturally every serious student wanted to go there. I thought it would be incredible to live on my own at a school.

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. Secondary school wasn’t free, so very few Malawians even bothered attending. My older sister Annie had not only gone to secondary school in Mtunthama, but was halfway finished. I was terribly jealous of her, but now my time would come. And to me, this would usher in another important milestone: for once, I could finally ditch the schoolboy short pants of primary school and walk tall in trousers.

After I finished the exam, I waited outside for Gilbert.

“No more short pants for us, my man,” I said.

“For sure, and our mornings are now free until we start school again. What shall we do?”

“Let’s go hunting. It’s been too long.”

“Yah, for sure.”

A
S MUCH AS
I enjoyed my break from school, holidays weren’t as much fun the older I became. There was always lots of work to be done on the farm, and my father needed my help. In addition to clearing the land and the ridges for the maize seeds, September was also when we prepared our tobacco for planting. Even more than maize, the tobacco seedlings require extra love and care to help them grow strong.

As I mentioned, the tobacco seedlings are first grown in nursery beds down at the
dambo
where the soil is extra fertile. Now that I was out of school, it was my job to return there each day and water the young plants from the stream, taking care to give each one the same amount of drink so it could defend itself against the sun. I would do this until December, when we uprooted the plants and transferred them to our fields.

One day in late September, after knocking off work at the nursery
beds, Gilbert and I had gone to the trading center for a few games of
bawo.
Walking back to his house, I noticed something odd. About a dozen people were gathered in his yard under the grove of blue gums, talking in low voices and looking quite serious. Some men were mixed in the crowd, but mostly they were women, their heads wrapped in bright-colored
mpango
s. Each carried empty baskets. Gilbert didn’t seem surprised to see them, and I asked him who they were.

“Villagers,” he said. “They’re running out of food in the bush. They’ve come to ask my father for handouts or
ganyu.
Some of them have walked for days to get here.”

Ganyu
was piecework, or day labor, and this was how many of the men in Malawi survived the hungry seasons when their food supply was low. Even my father had done
ganyu
in the tobacco estates, digging ridges in exchange for a few kilos of maize flour. You could usually depend on the estates in the area for
ganyu
to get you through, which is why it confused me to see people here.

I asked Gilbert, “Why can’t they just work over there?”

“They’ve tried,” he said, “but this year even the estates have nothing extra.”

“So what’s your father going to do?”

“He’s going to feed them,” he said. “He has no choice—he’s their chief.”

I
T 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. Soon the chatter at the trading center was that all of us were running out of food.

One day while buying salt for my mother at Mister Banda’s shop, I overheard him talk about the scarcity. 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.

“I went to Masaka and couldn’t buy a thing,” he said. “I even found nothing at Chimbia, and they usually have plenty. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

I told my father what was happening at Gilbert’s house, and what Mister Banda had said. He said he was already aware of this and that we shouldn’t worry. Usually during the hungry season, people could go to the big Press Agriculture estate nearby and buy some maize. They grew their own food and made money each year by selling off their surplus. I told him I’d heard people in the trading center saying even Press was empty.