The movie ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ is a true-life story following the life of a young boy named William. The life of a young man in Malawi, growing up at the time when poverty struck in the country. At the time William was growing up in his village, people were still very conservative of their culture and didn’t have any room for innovation. This film is about a boy who used education to save his family and his village from poverty. Therefore, the thesis statement of this paper will be: having big dreams and doing something people have not seen before brings a lot of criticism, but people will eventually come around when the result is visible.
The opening scene is a group of men and boys harvesting in a field full of grain, two minutes into the movie we see a man walking in the field, falling down and dying on the spot. The next scene is of a funeral of the man that just died, at the funeral it is revealed that the man that died is Williams’s uncle named John, an elder brother of his father named Trywell. The priest at the funeral also reveals that the late John leaves his land and other possessions to his eldest son, not William’s father Trywell. After the funeral, William’s entire family is revealed to us, including his father, mother, sister, and baby sibling. It seemed William fixed radios for most of the people in his village. William is then enrolled in school and starts attending class. He is best friends with the chief’s son and has a dog called Kamba. Williams’s school demanded that he paid at least a down payment for his school fees or risked not being allowed to attend class. The situation with Williams’s family did not allow his parents to pay his school fees, hence William was told to stop attending class by the school. After he was told to stop attending lessons, William sneaked into the school library to teach himself and attend the science class taught by a teacher who was secretly dating his sister. This act in the movie marked Williams’s first disobedience, this was disobedience of school rules. This led him to discover the windmill and then decided to build one to put a light in his family house so that he is able to study at night, as well as use the windmill to power a water pump to supply water to the fields for the plants to grow. To make his dream of creating a windmill come true, William needs to gather the practical materials needed to make the windmill work properly. He goes to a nearby junkyard to find the necessary parts for the windmill. An essential part of the windmill that he needed was a bicycle and the closest and only person he would get the bicycle from was from his father. One day William with the assistance of his friends created a small windmill that generated power to switch on a radio. He took that and went to show his father to demonstrate his vision and ask for the bike to use for the bigger windmill. William found his father plowing the dry field, he showed him what he had made and how the wind was able to generate electricity to supply to the radio. At first, his father was amazed at what William had made. William went on to explain how building a bigger one would power a water pump, he “explained the entire process, how using his father’s bike frame would be sturdy enough to handle strong winds” (Kamkwamba and Mealer, 266). Trywell did not take this very well, he told William to take the ‘toy’ away from him. William bluntly tells his dad that there are things that he knows that his father doesn’t know because he didn’t go to school. This makes Trywell feel disrespected and makes him very angry, he throws away the mini windmill and the radio and tells William to stop making toys. William is then told to wake up early every day with his father and assist him in building ridges on the dry land, he is told to forget about school and the library. This did not stop William, he and his friends approached his father to get the bicycle forcefully, this was another disobedient act that William did. After a heated moment with his father, William, and his friends did not manage to get the bike. His friends tried to convince him to leave the village with them, but William believed in his dream and stood by it. His father narrates the bike incident to his wife, who convinces him to give William the bicycle. Trywell decides to give William’s dream a chance, he helps William gather materials and the necessary equipment for the turbine. Some village men also help in making the turbine work. The end result is amazing: with the help of everyone else, William manages to bring to life the windmill he had read about in books. The windmill that William created brought change to his life as well as the people in his village.
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Growing up in an African family, we are raised to have the utmost respect for our parents and elders in the community, this means we can’t speak up to them or go against what they perceive as right. To them what they think is best for us is what is right. Our society raises us to yield to the notion that disobedience is bad and that obedience is good. We are taught that we should all follow what we are told to do and that being disobedient simply implies that one is a bad person. Society makes us believe this, but that is not true.
William was a boy who grew up in a conservative cultural environment but used the knowledge that he gathered by disobeying the school authorities, breaking the school rules, and disobeying his father. William did not disregard his father simply because his father did not go to school, all he wanted was to be able to use the knowledge he had gained from school to bring an end to hunger in his village.
Williams’s disobedience yielded both positive and negative consequences. The negative consequence noted in the movie was Williams’s expulsion from the school. On one occasion that William sneaked into the school to attend the science class, as usual, he sat at the back, waiting for the usual science teacher to come for the lesson. Surprisingly, the headmaster walked in and announced that he would be taking them to their science class that day. After making the announcement, the headmaster noticed William in the back, he told him that he was stealing from the school and every member of the faculty. The headmaster told William that he was expelled from the school and he would not be allowed to study at that school or any other school in the district. On the other hand, his disobedience yielded positive consequences: Williams sneaking into the school to use the library and attend science classes helped him gather knowledge. The knowledge he acquired assisted him in creating a windmill that restored the land after flooding and drought ruined their grain fields. This windmill saved his people from the poverty that had stricken them.
In conclusion, the movie ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ has been analyzed. We have seen how William disobeyed his father and how he broke the school rules and attained knowledge to create a windmill that saved his life and the people in his village from poverty. William challenges the audience to use what we have at our disposal to get what we need, and the need to always pay attention to our environment, as that is where innovation is.
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