A musical adaptation of Malawian engineer William Kamkwamba’s celebrated memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind opened on London’s West End last month.
The play, produced by The Royal Shakespeare Company, tells the story of 13-year-old Kamkwamba’s plan to build a windmill during Malawi’s famine in 2001. Using scrap metal, old physics textbooks, and his own ingenuity, Kamkwamba brought electricity to his rural village at a time when it was available to only 2% of Malawians, allowing his family and neighbors to power a water pump and irrigate crops to grow food.
“Through the book, we were trying to share this story with the rest of the world,” Kamkwamba said, “but people get stories in different forms. Now having this story told through [a] musical — I’m very, very happy.”