The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (9 page)

“Well, the government keeps a surplus,” my father said. “If there’s nothing at Press, the government will take maize to ADMARC and people can buy it there.”

ADMARC is the Agriculture Development Marketing Corporation, a government company that sold maize on the market at discount—usually the same surplus grain from government farms. There were ADMARCS all around our district where one could go for a few kilos at a decent price.

“Don’t let those people worry you, son,” my father said. “Whatever the case may be, we’ve never gone hungry.”

But one afternoon in late September, my father came home, and I overheard him talking to my mother. He’d just returned from a rally in the trading center called by the opposition Malawi Congress Party, the party of President Banda, Farmer Number One. Hundreds had attended, and the opposition officials had stood on the stage and delivered a boiling speech over a PA system. Some of President Muluzi’s thugs—called the Young Democrats—had tried to stop the rally, but farmers from the villages stood guard around the stage and let the opposition speak.

These men delivered some terrible news: a few months before, President Muluzi’s people had sold all our surplus grain for profit. Much of it had gone by lorry over the border to Kenya. In addition, millions of kwacha were missing, and no one in the government was taking responsibility.

“They’re saying there’s nothing extra,” my father said. “This year will be a disaster for us all.”

“We can only trust in God,” my mother said.

What really happened was this: the floods and drought the previous year had given us a food deficit far greater than people realized. In addition, the international community—namely the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—had pressured the government to pay off some of its debt by selling off a portion of our grain reserve, since holding on to it was getting expensive. But some individuals in government sold all of it instead, without keeping any for emergencies. Where it all went, no one knew. Some said it went over the border to Kenya and Mozambique. Others said a large portion had been taken to ADMARC like usual, but the corrupt officials there hoarded it for too long, and it spoiled. Much of the good maize was sold to prominent traders with government connections—men who’d foreseen the food shortage and wanted to take advantage of this dire situation. They would wait until no man or woman had any food at all, and then increase the price by a hundred percent.

My father was right. We were headed for a disaster, but even he didn’t know how bad it would get.

J
UST AS EXPECTED, THE
price of maize started going up the first week of October from its normal seasonal price of one hundred fifty kwacha a pail to three hundred. And when this happened, people began searching for other food.

One afternoon before supper, my stomach was already growling, so I went to see if my neighbor Mister Mwale had any ripe mangoes in his trees. When I arrived, Mwale and his family were sitting down to eat.

“Eh, ndima lima,”
I said. “I’ve found food. Good timing,
eh?”

Just as I said that, I noticed they were eating stewed mangoes with their pumpkin leaves. The mangoes were still unripe, green in color, and probably very sour. They were not ready to be eaten.

“You say
ndima lima,”
Mwale said, laughing. “But as you can see, we’re eating the mangoes as
nsima.
You’ve found no food here.”

Later, I saw a line of men I didn’t recognize digging ridges in the Mwales’ fields. They were from other villages, the same people who were
gathering at Gilbert’s house. When they left a few hours later, each of them carried a handful of those green, unripe mangoes as payment.

Walking through the trading center a few days later, I noticed something else I’d never seen. Several market women had spread out plastic tarps on the road and were now selling
gaga. Gaga
are the clear-colored husks, or chaff, that are removed from the outside of each maize kernel. Normally these husks are separated at the mill, then thrown away or sold as animal food. For me they were the perfect bait for my bird traps.
Gaga
are also used to make the
kachaso
liquor that Grandpa loved so much, and many women even burn it as firewood. I’d heard of very poor people eating
gaga
when times were tough, but it has so few nutrients that it isn’t considered proper food. We feed
gaga
to our chickens, and to buy it, we have to scoop it off the floor of the mill ourselves.

But now with maize selling for three hundred kwacha a pail, I saw giant sacks of
gaga
being sold for one hundred—ten times what it had cost a month earlier. People were crowded around raising their metal pails, practically shoving one another to get it.

“Move away, I was first here!”

“We’re all hungry, sister, there are no firsts in that!”

Down the road, it was the same story. When I returned an hour later, all the
gaga
was gone. Right then a kind of shock went through me, like someone shaking me awake in the middle of the night, and I began running home.

For months, my mother had been cooking our meals as if things were normal. My sisters and I got our bowl of maize porridge each morning before doing our chores. Lunch and supper was
nsima
with mustards or beans, and of course, at age thirteen, I had the appetite of a fat politician and always stacked my plate with as much as possible. Sure, I’d been aware of the drought and poor harvest and news from the opposition, but it was as if the troubles were happening to someone else.

“A little more,” I’d say at supper. “That’s right, keep it coming.”

But after seeing people fighting for
gaga,
it was like my eyes had been opened wide and a great fear had made its way in. As I ran down the trail
toward my house, I felt it grow inside me like a fist around my stomach. Once I stopped at the storage room door, it tightened its grip: out of the five bags we’d filled with grain, only two were still there. In my mind, they were already gone.

Staring at the sacks, I tried to imagine how much flour we’d get before all the grain was gone: two bags equaled six pails. One pail equaled twelve meals for my family, meaning six pails equaled seventy-two meals for twenty-four days. I then counted how many days before the next harvest: more than two hundred and ten, and at least one hundred twenty before the green
dowe
cobs would be mature enough to eat without making us sick.

Two hundred and ten days until food—and we hadn’t even planted one seed. When we did, there was no guarantee it would even rain or that we’d get fertilizer. As of now, we were going to run out of food in less than a month, and I had no idea how we’d survive after that. The next time my mother returned from the mill, our flour was coarse and filled with
gaga.
Everyone began milling their grain this way, just to get a little extra.

A few days later, I saw my father rounding up our goats to sell in the market. Like many people in Malawi, our livestock was our only wealth and stature on this earth, and now we were selling it for a few pails of maize. The men who ran the
kanyenya
barbecue stands were very powerful now, and that meant they could reduce the prices however low they wanted. One of the goats was Mankhalala, a small male with long horns who’d been a favorite of mine. He’d let me grab his horns and wrestle, and sometimes even gave Khamba a good chase just to humor him.

“Papa, why are you selling our goats? I like these goats.”

“A week ago the price was five hundred, now it’s four hundred. I’m sorry, but we can’t wait for it to go any lower.”

Mankhalala and the others were tied by their front legs with a long rope. When my father started down the trail, they stumbled and began to cry. They knew their future. Mankhalala looked back, as if telling me to
help him. Even Khamba whined and barked a few times, pleading their case. But I had to let them down. What could I do? My family had to eat.

I
N EARLY
N
OVEMBER
, I started waking up as usual at 4:00
A.M.
to go make ridges in the fields. One morning, as I waited in the yard for my mother to prepare my porridge, my father stepped out into the darkness.

“No
phala
today,” he said.

“Huh?”

“It’s time to start cutting back. We need to stretch out what we have.”

We had less than two bags of grain in the storage now, so I knew there’d be no porridge tomorrow, or the day after that. Breakfast was first to go, and I wondered what was next. Instead of complaining or asking pointless questions, I took my hoe and headed to the fields to meet Geoffrey. When I arrived, I told him about skipping breakfast.

“Can you believe it?” I said.

“You’re just starting that today?” he asked. “It’s been two weeks for us. I’m getting used to it.”

At 4:00
A.M.
the weather was cool, and I could dig my ridges with great energy. My stomach must have also been fooled from last night’s
nsima,
because it had yet to wake up and grumble. But by 7:00
A.M.
it was clawing and screaming to be filled, and the blazing sun was sucking all my strength. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head, but the extra weight of it made me more tired. The only thing keeping me from falling over was my father stomping past.

“Make those ridges better!”

“I’m hungry, out of strength.”

“Think about next year, son. Try your best.”

I looked down and saw my ridges were small and uneven, as if they’d been dug by a slithering snake. Across the field, my cousin swung his hoe, covered with sweat and breathing heavily.

“Mister Geoffrey,” I said. “You dig my ridges today, and I’ll dig yours tomorrow. Can we make this deal?”

He didn’t look up. “I’ll think about it,” he said, gasping. “But it sounds like the same deal as yesterday.”

I was trying to joke and raise his spirits, because lately I was feeling bad for him. Ever since his father died Geoffrey hadn’t been the same. Sometimes Geoffrey forgot things, or he would drift off into space when I was telling him something—something of great importance, no doubt. Other times he just stayed in his room for a couple of days and didn’t talk to anyone. He hadn’t been feeling well, and on a trip to the clinic recently, he’d been diagnosed with anemia. I later discovered that
phala
wasn’t the only thing they weren’t getting at home. Food was running low all around.

“I’m joking,” I shouted. “Seriously, you don’t look good, man. Maybe you should take a break. Don’t work so hard, and get some rest.”

“I have no choice,” he said, swinging his hoe. “You know my deal.”

Even worse, with the recent troubles, I was pretty sure Geoffrey wouldn’t be returning to school in the upcoming term, now just over a month away. His mother already struggled to pay his student fees, but now she needed him and his brother Jeremiah to work and provide food. I didn’t want Geoffrey to know that I knew this, so I kept our usual banter going.

“Soon your man Kamkwamba will be in secondary school where he belongs,” I said, “wearing trousers and walking tall.”

“He’ll find us there,” Geoffrey said, smiling. “The older boys have big plans for Kamkwamba.”

“What if he goes far away, to a fine boarding school such as Kasungu or Chayamba?”

“We’ll find him. We have our ways.”

“You can’t touch him!”

“Oh, you wait and see.”

Geoffrey wasn’t the only one who was changing. Ever since the bad harvest, Khamba had gotten a bit slower. I hadn’t realized it, but he was already an old dog when he’d first arrived with Socrates, having lived out his better years on the tobacco estate where life was good. Life in the village was much tougher, and despite the food I was feeding him each night after supper, I’m sure it wasn’t enough.

As Khamba got slower, the mice began to outwit him in the fields, and the younger, faster dogs snatched up the better scraps from the rubbish piles. His thin frame got a little thinner, and I noticed he was sleeping more. He no longer chased the chickens, choosing instead to doze in the shade behind my room.

One night when I tossed up a ball of
nsima
for him to catch, he misjudged the fall and the food landed on his head.

“What’s the problem, old man?” I teased. He leaned over and sucked up the food in one second flat. Some things didn’t change.

E
VERY MORNING AS
G
EOFFREY
and I returned from the fields, we passed more strangers wandering the roads looking for
ganyu.
They came from Ntchisi, Mtunthama, and from the villages deep in the hills. Many carried their hoes over their shoulders with
mpango
bundles that held a cooking pot and some extra clothes.

In normal times, my mother would take our grain to the maize mill and grind it herself. She kept baskets upon baskets of flour at home so we always had what we needed. But as maize ran out all across the region, people started buying flour in one kilo or half-kilo measurements. The small portions came in small blue plastic bags and were known as
walkman,
named after the portable cassette players, because they contained only enough food for one person. Walkman was for city people, not farmers and their families.

By now, mangoes were out of season and gone, so many men also worked in exchange for a few leaves of cassava, or manioc. This plant is a root vegetable whose leaves can be stewed like spinach or rape, and whose tubers can be dried and pounded to flour. Cassava is quite popular in other parts of Africa, especially Congo. But in Malawi, cassava was like
gaga
—rejected in better times when there was plenty of
nsima.

“Ganyu
for walkman?
Ganyu
for cassava?” the travelers now cried.

Many people were headed to our district to find work on the estates. But little did they know, most of the estate employees were hanging around in the market, out of jobs and hoping for miracles.