Summary
Chapter 1 of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind paints a broad picture of Malawi for an audience that presumably knows little about the country. William describes the widespread belief in magic, including several folktales and personal anecdotes related to the saving or destructive power of magic in the lives of the Malawian people. As a child, William first encountered magic in the form of a supposed curse by a witch doctor. After being given candy that was, unbeknownst to him, taken from an angry trader who vowed to curse those that ate the candy, William, stricken with fear, confessed all to his father. Subsequently, his father spent a large sum of money to simply buy the bag, comforting his son to no small degree. His father approached all magic with the same air, confronting the problem at its root and taking a no-nonsense approach to it.
The village, however, had many folktales that detailed magical incidents of the past. For example, a mountain close to their home is named "Nguru ya Nawambe," or "The Deadly Defeat of Nawambe." This is because of Nawambe's defeat on the mountain at the hands of Mwase, a magic man. After being called to defeat a rhino, Mwase was gifted the land by the Chewa family, who were indebted to him because one of their daughters was killed by the rhino. Later, when Mwase was attacked by the Ngoni people, headed by Nawambe, his magic made victory swift and they renamed the mountain. This story demonstrates the local attitudes towards magic men.
These stories were passed down from generation to generation, and William heard many of them from his grandfather, who himself experienced supernatural events. As a child, he saw a witch doctor revive a dead body, which had succumbed to snake venom. After reviving him, the witch doctor sent the rest of the snakes into a trance and found the snake that had killed the man, eventually letting it go. William's grandfather ended up becoming a great warrior, leading many hunts in his time.
When William was a child, he did not fear the same supernatural beasts that his grandfather had faced. Instead, he and many others were afraid of the Gule Wamkulu, a secret group of dancers that showed up at funerals, but were generally avoided in all other aspects of life. Among the children, there were rumors that the Gule Wamkulu stole vulnerable children to join their ranks, so whenever they were spotted, people would run.
This chapter also introduces Kamkwamba's inventiveness as a child, when he would play with Geoffrey, his cousin, and Gilbert, the son of the chief of his district. The three boys developed their own code, role-played scenarios together, and made their own toys. They were particularly interested in making their own trucks out of cartons, and would race one another when they could with their own creations. However, these boys faced challenges to their fun, such as when frequent power shortages in Malawi forced them to get half-haircuts or to go to bed earlier than they would like.
The boys, in addition to making their own toys, watched movies and recreated them with their own means. They role-played the Vietnam War, attempted to imitate their heroes, and used their imaginations to make their life more playful. These toys demonstrate the way in which Malawians were influenced by international media and politics, even going so far as to influence the games of children.
However, at the end of the day, when all of the children and adults came home and ate, William's grandfather often told stories. For example, the tale of Leopard and the Lion follows two young girls that stayed overnight at the house of an old man, who intended on feeding them to the Lion and the Leopard. However, after realizing this, the girls ran away, and the old man instead succumbed to their hunger. The moral of that story was to always wish others well, because planning harm onto others might backfire.
Analysis
The first chapter of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind functions as an introduction not only to William's life, but also to Malawian society. This text assumes that the reader does not know about Malawian culture and history, and so uses William's personal history to establish its foundation. For example, the first story, the description of bubble gum, establishes that gum is not a common occurrence in Malawi. We can infer that there is a lack of little luxuries that a Western reader might be accustomed to. The description of the bubblegum as "sweet juice rolling down my chin and soaking my shirt" paints a visceral picture of William's delight in this small treat (3). However, this decadence quickly turns sour with the threat of magic, indicating the cultural perceptions of magic in Malawi. For William, the thought of a sing'anga, or witch doctor, terrifies him, and the sweet treat "sours into poison on my tongue." (4) This transformation highlights the danger involved in using magic, quickly turning something good and happy to something more sinister and threatening.
However, these tales also serve to characterize William's father, Trywell, and his grandfather, who both serve as guides for the development of William's own attitude towards magic. When Trywell eases William's fears of being cursed for eating the bubblegum, he does so in a clear, concise, and non-magical manner. Trywell could have just as easily hired another magic doctor to protect their family from any sort of magical ill will, but his decision to, "without a question," sacrifice some actual currency, and a not insubstantial amount of it, demonstrates his no-nonsense approach to problems, and also his willingness to protect William whatever the cost (5). The message he tries to convey with William can be summed up with this quote, "Respect the wizards, my son, but always remember, with God on your side, they have no power" (15).
William's grandfather, on the other hand, is a member of the older generation, and serves to explain the reasons that belief in magic was so widespread. As he details stories of witch doctors bringing men back from the dead and sorting poisonous snakes as if they were schoolchildren, he illustrates the power and sway that magicians had over the natural world and their fellow humans. What these stories seem to argue is that magic and believing in magic was useful for people of old, people that lived in thick forests and were terrorized by large animals. These stories were part of tradition, but since the modernization of many aspects of Malawian life, William no longer had to "worry so much about cobras and lions, since most of them had vanished" (11). The threats of old were no longer pertinent parts of William's life, although he was affected by other fears.
Other members of the younger generation included Geoffrey and Gilbert, who feature heavily in the rest of the book. These boys often model their games after the video shows they frequented, absorbing media from abroad with their own imaginative role-play. When the three boys distill the war in Vietnam and make their own guns to mimic real firepower, they are adapting international innovation to their own means. This gestures to Malawi's position on the world stage, constantly under foreign media influence and generally seen as a third-world country. However, the speaker actively writes against that idea, encouraging the audience to think of these boys in the same way that they might think of American or European children. "Children everywhere have similar ways of entertaining themselves. If you look at it this way, the world isn't so big" (19). This quote speaks directly to the reader and asks them to consider how the boys, who apparently play with trash, are the same in so many ways to boys of more fortunate circumstances.
This argument is continued when you consider the relative lack of technology that Malawi has compared to the first world. The description of the barber shop that must abruptly stop service when the electricity goes out is a good example of how Malawians often have to make do with the means that they are given. While there is an inherent humor in having to leave with half of a haircut, the deeper truth is that Malawian utility infrastructure is unreliable at best. This foreshadows the truly remarkable nature of William's later invention, already hinted at by the prologue.
