There is a young man in Bongo, a district in Ghana’s Upper East region, who can design and manufacture real-life means of transportation from buses to aircrafts on his own.
He has been doing so from the time he was a little child to the present day, using the required materials available to him.
But the 24-year-old genius, Emmanuel Alenwiira, has been unable to continue his schooling to any tertiary institution since he completed his senior secondary education in 2019 because of extreme poverty.
He currently lives in a mud house with his three siblings and widowed mother in a remote corner of his native Vea, a village in the district.
So far, he has designed and made bicycles, vans fitted with air conditioners and television sets, ships, buses with USB outlets to charge mobile phones, remote-operated cars, refrigerators, customised loudspeakers with a built-in Bluetooth feature, airplanes and supersonic jets among other things all of which functioned exactly as their full-sized models do.
He gained admission to the Bawku Technical Institute (BTI) in 2016 but transferred from there in 2017 to the Bolgatanga Technical Institute (BOTECH) because his mother, Diana, at some point could no longer afford his transport fares from Bongo to Bawku.
“My father died in 2016, the same year I gained admission to the Bawku Technical Institute. Even when he was alive, things were hard for us. Things became harder because it was now only my mother who was taking care of the family.
“My mother told me that the transport fare alone to Bawku from Bongo could buy the garri I needed for a term at the school. So, she asked me to talk to the school authorities to kindly grant me a transfer to a nearer school where I could manage the little she could afford,” he told Media Without Borders.
He said he did not reveal to anyone all through the years he spent at the two senior secondary schools that he possessed a natural ability to assemble automobiles and aircrafts.
“I was so afraid. Whenever I [wanted] to show my talent out, I was always feeling afraid like if I did such a thing maybe something would happen to me. So, throughout my school I did not show anyone that I [could] do this.
“But I cannot lie to you, my community here, most people know about it. The assemblyman is aware of it. All the former assembly members know about it. The big men here— I cannot mention names— know about it,” he said.
He told the author of this report his desire was to become a pilot or an aeronautical engineer.
How the genius struggled and enrolled himself in school at age 4
Born on Wednesday, 15 March 2000, Alenwiira is the youngest of his parents’ four children and the only boy in the family.
Before he began schooling, he was already known to many people in the village for his special ability to draw fascinating images on the ground with a finger or a stick and mould captivating objects out of clay.
Another unusual quality people noticed in him was that, while his contemporaries frequently complained of hunger to their parents and troubled them with persistent requests for biscuits or sweets, he hardly asked his parents for anything.
There were occasions where he spent a whole day drawing or moulding an object without eating until his mother, stumbling on him after searching for him everywhere, had to take him home by force to eat.
Generally, children start their primary education in many African countries, Ghana included, at least at the age of 6 years. His case was different.
While he was still below four years, he often proposed to go to school with his two elder cousins who lived next door. He usually joined them as soon as he saw them prepared for school. But his mother always would hold him back and say he should wait until he turned 6. In righteous disobedience, the boy, who seemed to be following his inner voice, would struggle in vain to free himself from his mother’s hands, repeatedly kicking the air with both legs amid tears.
But one day, shortly after he turned 4, he overcame his mother. He was more determined than he had ever been to go to school that morning. So great was the degree of the crying and protest that his mother had no other choice than to allow him to go with his cousins to the school.
The two cousins were both in their first year at the Vea Primary School at the time. The boy wiped the tears on his face quickly with the back of his hands one at a time as he walked enthusiastically with the other two boys on a dusty, long road towards the public school.
The walk took about 40 minutes from that house.
When they arrived at the school, some teachers aired concerns about the boy’s presence on the premises. They questioned his cousins about his parents’ whereabouts and asked them who said they should bring him to the school. While waiting for answers, the teachers observed from the look on the boy’s face that he had cried a lot that morning.
His uneasy cousins replied that he had been crying every day at home to join them in the school and that his mother, considering that nothing could stop him that morning from coming to the school, released him.
The teachers decided that his cousins should take him back home, but they changed their minds as they felt the two boys would miss the morning assembly and their first lesson before their return. So, they asked that Alenwiira stay with his cousins in their classroom for that day only, with a very firm warning that he should not reappear in the school until he was 6.
The new wonder kid on the block
After the morning assembly, all the schoolchildren marched into their classrooms with a song. Alenwiira marched discordantly behind his cousins into their classroom.
The new boy physically looked different from everyone else in the room. He was the youngest. He was not wearing any uniform. And he had no book, no pencil, no bag.
The teacher in charge of that class, Olivia, gave him a chair and a table to sit but skipped him when she was sharing copies of a Creative Arts textbook among the pupils. The books were meant for only those who could do the exercise the teacher was about to give the class.
When the teacher bypassed him with the books, the boy burst into tears. And the explanation the teacher gave from where she stood for leaving him out did not suffice. To soothe him, she returned to him and placed a copy of the book and a pencil on his table.
A few minutes later, the newcomer justified his ‘premature’ inclusion when the teacher, who had not heard about him in the village prior to that time, gave the class the first exercise of the day— drawing.
The pupils were to draw a tree inside the book the teacher shared among them.
The boy took part in the exercise and, to the pleasant shock and admiration of the entire school, he outperformed everyone else in that assignment— at age 4. Subsequently, he also did very well in a Mathematics exercise— writing of numbers in digit figures— the teacher gave. He found that exercise very easy because it was similar to the drawing exercise he had been doing at home from birth.
From that day onwards, he became a regular member of the class, learning with his senior colleagues. But he was twice held back from moving to the next class with his older colleagues when promotions were due, not because he did not perform well, but for the reason that he had not turned 6.
A shining example
The boy became more popular in his community for his engineering gift after he completed his senior secondary education in 2019.
Through his participation in some programmes where some of his work samples were showcased, he came into contact with some key individuals who encouraged him.
One of such people was Ferdinand Sam, who taught Geography at the Bolgatanga Senior High School (Big Boss) between 2012 and 2021.
Sam, who is now the head of the Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (STEM) department of the Afua Kobi Ampem Girls Senior High School in Kumasi, visited Alenwiira at his family home in Vea in 2021 to see more of the automobiles and appliances he had made.
Subsequently, he invited the young man to the Big Boss campus to meet up and inspire the members of an engineering club he (Sam) founded. The visit to that school also gave Alenwiira an opportunity to see some of the projects the club had executed and stocked in its engineering laboratory. After that visit, Sam continued to encourage him, and he supported him with any available components he needed for his engineering activities.
“He (Alenwiira) is very talented, very skillful. He has raw skill. When he gets the basic logistics, he can do wonders. I’m in the aerospace sector. I also build drones. He is a very proficient and naturally born engineer.
“When I saw how he built his aircrafts, I knew that he had the raw talent. Given some advanced training, he can easily get into the aircraft construction industry and other electrical design projects,” Sam told Media Without Borders last week.
Alenwiira is not only gifted at constructing aircrafts; he also has a deep knowledge of how they take off, how they fly, how movements of air traffic are directed from the control tower and how aircrafts touch down.
Will he find help?
When the author of this story visited the family recently, his relatives recounted many astonishing things he did when he was a little child.
One of the stories told was about a local funeral his mother attended with him at Kodorogo, another village in the district. He was so young his mother had to carry him on her back throughout that long journey.
But soon after they returned home, the boy fetched some clay and moulded two cylinders out of it. Then, he crushed some cement papers in water, mixed them with some sticky fibres he extracted from some wild fruits and dried them into a thin sheet that looked like animal skin. Finally, he fastened the sheet to the top of each cylinder to produce replicas of the local drums he saw at the funeral ground.
“He was just something else during his childhood,” his mother told this writer in the locally spoken Gurune. “Anything he saw, he would return home to either draw it or mould it.”
“He kept doing amazing things, things beyond his age and things beyond the ordinary,” she added.
Ghana is endowed with top-quality mineral resources and extraordinary human talents like Alenwiira in abundance, but many of these natural assets often waste away owing to neglect, mismanagement or lack of help.
“For me, I have just two things in mind: to be either a pilot or an aircraft engineer. I just want to be working with aircrafts. I wish to further my education but financial hardship is dragging me back. Currently, I’m just like the father of the house.
“I’m doing a menial job to feed my mother and my siblings who are unemployed. So, if I even gather anything from the menial job I’m doing, it is not enough to feed us. So, how can I further my education? These are my challenges,” Alenwiira told Media Without Borders with a tone of distress in his calm voice.
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
