USAID/South Africa present Wilmah Munemera (Shaina), Tinodinawashe Chitma (Zo), Tadewanashe Tsitsi Marowa (Faro), Tarumbidzwa Chirume (Busi), FadzaiSimango (TK), Jesesi Jaboon-Mongoshi (Gogo), Edmore Sandifolo (simba), Charmaine Mujeri (Maifaro), Marian Kunonga (Mai Busi), Mothusi Ndlovu (Ba Busu). Director of Photography, Tom Marais; Executive Producers, Aric Noboa, Regan Alsup, Molly Hermann, Harriel Gavshon, JP Potgieter; Producer, Siphiwe Hlabangane; Screenplay, Wanisai Chigwendere; Director, Beautie Masvaure Alt. © 2020.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2013) and Shaina have similar characteristics. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a film by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a BBC-sponsored project, and a story set in Malawi. It is an in-depth and riveting story about a 13-year-old boy, William Kamkwamba, who builds a wind turbine to save his Malawian village from famine. Greed caused the farmers to sell their forested lands to private corporations, who deforested the land, causing drastic changes in the climate and arid farming lands due to lack of rain. That’s when the thirteen-year-old boy invented from scraps a windmill turban that brought water to the farms and rescued his father and the community.
Shaina (Wilmah Munemera) follows a similar path: Her parents are deceased, and her only living grandmother and caregiver, Gogo (Jesesi Jaboon-Mongoshi), has recently passed. Shaina is left alone in impoverished conditions while she eyes the only hope–examination fees. Based on her deplorable financial situation, the school granted her tuition-free status, but she must pay the exam fee. When we had seen Shaina in the junkyard at the beginning of the film, collecting scraps, as we do see William in The Boy…, and even to the point of scraping his father’s only form of transportation, the bicycle, that is her God-given gift with her hands and making things, and it turns out to be her saving grace. We saw Shaina invent an irrigation system in Grandmother Gogo’s Garden and see what she does with the two chickens she inherited from her grandmother.
Shaina’s ingenuity for electricity, using materials from a junkyard, as in The Boy…, led her to invent solar lighting and an incubator for her chicken eggs to hatch. You may wonder what these inventions did for her: incubator/electricity. She earned enough money through egg sales to pay for her exams and won her university scholarship, like The Boy…. harnessed the wind in his father’s farm and the village.
Besides the natural ingenuity of these teens, the one added value is education. Remember when William’s father in The Boy…laments that he failed his son. And William proudly says, “No, you didn’t; you put me in school.” Shaina burned the candles at both ends: She studied hard on her A-Level exam homework, tending to her chicks in the incubator, while her teen friends were having babies or caught in pregnancies. She, however, trudged on because, at the core of her brain, she still believed Gogo’s fable: the story of the farmer and the donkey: the donkey fell in a hole, and the farmer can’t get him out. He decides the merciful thing to do is bury the poor thing, to shorten the donkey’s suffering. He starts shoveling dust into the hole. But the donkey just shook it off and stood on it. He shovels, and the donkey stands on it until the donkey walks right out of the hole. “The future belongs to those who build on what comes before,” Gogo concludes her advice to Shaina. That is the mantra poor Shaina has followed since.
Amid her struggle to pay her exam fees by hawking eggs in the street and motor passenger parking lot, the strange man who had befriended her at the shopping line, Simba (Edmore Sandifolo), who purportedly attended Gogo’s funeral as a family member, gifted her a cell phone. He later grows closer to Shaina.
The issue of Simba shouldn’t be prominent in this story. It’s one of those impediments nature throws in one’s way when trudging towards success. Of course, I always take a quizzical look at the deportment of the newly found uncle of Shaina, Simba. I feel uncomfortable with the attitude he brings with him around the underage girl. I always look skeptically at the uncle who tries to shower her with money, which she always refuses. You can forgive me if I saw in his shifty eyes and nervousness, which as a window into his soul, are nothing but the demeanor of a certified pedophile and a criminal. And rightly so, he raped Shaina on her eighteenth birthday, for which he was jailed.
We all remember when Plato said in a proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” William sees the agony on his father’s face to make things work for them, but the crop was a letdown. He knows how to generate a climate conducive to farming but has been expelled from school for lack of fees. The good-hearted librarian snuck him in and showed him research books that gave him the idea of electricity. Finally, he successfully brings water to the arid land of the village community. Shaina is pushed to the wall to make a payment for her A-level exam, and only the eggs and the chicks could help her do so. That is why when she finds the eggs in the coop were being broken, she goes about rummaging through scraps in a junkyard to find a way to fix an incubator, and thereafter solar energy to provide electricity to warm the eggs to hatch. Quickly, she amassed enough money from the eggs to pay her exam fees. She later won a scholarship to study engineering at the university.
At a recent interview at a conference, on Nollywood films, Busola Tejumola, a personality on Nollywood films, addressed “the perceived decline in storytelling quality, attributing it to rushed productions, insufficient writer training and an overemphasized aesthetic [maybe I can vouch on her behalf] …greater investment to bolster content quality.” She urged. In the introduction pages of Nollywood Reviews Vol 1, I remarked on the hastiness of earlier Nollywood productions like the ‘California gold rush’ of old. Reckless, rushed, and nonexploitations of universal themes. Busola may be referring to and kicking against the hurried monotony of themes that come out of Nolly. There weren’t many challenges to the art. Little better today, though,
I find mostly ‘man-to-man’ themes in Nollywood movies, not ‘man against nature’ themes. There are many movies about love, marriages, and divorces, and men hating men out of jealousy and property. Or a poor woman or man becoming rich and powerful. Most of the time, these themes are watered down. Imagine, watching one-half of a feature movie, you suck your teeth, you get up, fold your chair and go home because you already guess the end of story. Nothing captivating! Or perhaps you anticipated an extraordinary tale, unlike typical Nollywood films. I admire The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Shaina because the two films have themes that challenge nature and overcome it. Two teenage kids fight against the odds to improve the lives of society and themselves.