All human life is here
A rollercoaster week in theatre, and other cultural treats
After last week’s despair about the shitness of the world, it’s been lovely to be reminded of a story that gives you a modicum of faith in humanity. William Kamkwamba was 13 years old when he was booted out of his Malawian village school because his parents, their farm hit hard by the appalling 2002 famine, couldn’t afford to pay the fees. But by secretly camping out at the school library every day, he managed to maintain some semblance of his education and became fascinated by electronics.
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After reading Mary Atwater’s book Using Energy, he decided to build a wind turbine out of bits of scrap and a bicycle wheel, to bring electricity to the rural village and power a water pump. Nobody believed he could do it, but he bloody did it. It was incredible.
Kamkwamba now runs the non-profit Moving Windmills Project, which supports communities across Malawi by sending children and underprivileged people to school, renovating schools building wells, and installing solar-powered pumps to provide basic needs such as clean water, proper learning materials and facilities, sustainable farming, nutrition and community programmes. He was at the opening night last week of the new musical The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, at @sohoplace, and he looked dazed, as well he might.
What I’ve seen
It’s a raucous, big-hearted production, which premiered earlier this year at the RSC in Stratford, but they’ve done a huge amount of work on it since, and according to those who have seen both versions, it’s now quite a lot better.
