A consultant and a former fighter pilot want to provide the world’s poorest continent with a better future. At a school in Johannesburg, they are training some of the continent’s most talented children to become a new African elite.

Every morning, when the others are still sleeping, Joseph Munyambanza opens his eyes and thanks his God that he can be here in this beautiful, megalomaniacal place. He thinks about home, about the refugee camp and how far he had come to make it to this school in Johannesburg.
A few hours later, Joseph enters the courtyard propped up on crutches. He’s 19 years old, dark-skinned and thin. While playing soccer he twisted his right knee and tore his cruciate ligament. “It popped,” says Joseph, “but not like a gunshot.” Coming from the Congo as he does, that is not a sound he will ever mistake.

Joseph limps into the breakfast room, sits down at a table near the wall and tells his story with a gentle voice. He used to live near the Rwandan border. Rebels would roam through his village as they moved across into the Congo. If they came across a group of men, they would kill them quickly. If they came across a group of women, they would kill them slowly, sometimes with a dozen rebels after the other. Joseph’s family fled to Uganda when he was six years old.

Joseph, his parents and his five siblings received a tent in a United Nations camp. “I learned that I was now a refugee, not a human,” says Joseph.

Aid workers gave his family dried corn and oil, but they had no firewood to enable them to cook, so Joseph ate the raw kernels and drank the oil. Stomach pains were better than hunger. “There was no hope in the camp,” he says. “I never would have dreamt of a place like here.”

A worker with an aid organisation then told Joseph about the African Leadership Academy. Joseph filled out an application form. On one page he was supposed to write how much his parents earn in a year, and Joseph wrote “0” in this field. On the next page stood a table in which he is supposed to record what his family owns. Joseph thought for a moment, and then he wrote: a hoe.

Joseph sent his application to Johannesburg and addressed it to Christopher Khaemba, the headmaster. Joseph didn’t think that he would ever stand a chance. But as soon as Mr Khaemba was just a few lines into Joseph’s application, he knew that he had to get this boy for his school in South Africa.

A school for fixing Africa’s ills

Joseph has been living with 200 classmates at the boarding school on the outskirts of Johannesburg ever since. His classmates are aged 15 to 20 and come from 40 countries all over Africa, and every one of them is gifted, just like Joseph. They were chosen from 5,000 applicants: boys, girls, Muslims, Christians, blacks and whites. They were the best. When they are older, the hope is that they can help to solve the problems that have plagued the world in which they have grown up. The work ahead of them is no less than to free the continent of corruption, combat crime, establish universities, conquer HIV and bring about peace. “They are to save Africa,” says Khaemba.
A former fighter pilot for the Kenyan air force, the African Leadership Academy’s 55-year-old headmaster is an amicable man. Mr Khaemba reaches for a book on his desk. “Daily Motivation for African-American Success” reads the title. He was reading through the book this morning.

“This is how my students should turn out, boys like Joseph,” he says, “just like General Colin Powell.”

The same Colin Powell who led the United States into the Iraq war?

“Well, maybe not like that exactly,” Khaemba says. “Maybe more like a black Bill Gates.”

Stemming the brain drain

Student Joseph has even thought at times about how much simpler his life would be if he just left Africa. Those who are well-educated, he knows, can always find their way to the United States or Britain. Mr Khaemba explained to Joseph that 20,000 qualified Africans leave the continent each year. Engineers, lawyers and doctors move to countries where the food is strange, the winters are cold and the people as well. Joseph understands why many Africans prefer to live abroad rather than with the HIV infection rate of 40 per cent seen in Swaziland, the rape that occurs every 30 seconds in South Africa or the genocide that left 800,000 dead in Rwanda.

This is what experts mean when they refer to “brain drain,” the emigration of qualified citizens. Joseph learned this term at the academy, and he knows what the consequences of this exodus are: The people who leave are missing when streets are built, when laws are passed, when patients are treated.

It is precisely this brain drain that the African Leadership Academy is aimed at stopping. Mr Khaemba wants Joseph and the other students to return to their home countries after they graduate. “They are to serve the continent,” he says.

Joseph receives a stipend for his education at the academy like almost all the other students, so he doesn’t have to pay the $40,000 in tuition fees. After his education Joseph can study anywhere in the world, but the stipend obligates him to return to Africa within five years of concluding his studies and to work for at least 10 years on the continent. And if he would rather move to Manhattan? A serious expression suddenly forms on Mr Khaemba’s face, and in this instant it is easy to imagine he was once an excellent fighter pilot.

“Then he has to pay back the entire stipend,” he says. “$40,000.”

After his studies Joseph wants to return to the refugee camp in Uganda, he says. He wants to continue what he started.

He is bent over a plate with a meagre portion of rice. After many years in the camp, a full stomach never sits well with him. Joseph chews and talks simultaneously, sometimes breaking off his sentences, he concentrates more on his food than on his story.

As a child Joseph played soccer, but his mother told him that the sport would never get him anywhere. The only way out of the refugee camp, she said, was by going to school.

Joseph had no books, pencils or paper. In the mornings he would dig holes for planting corn with his parents, walking to the school tent after his chores were done. If he came too late, the teachers would scold him, so Joseph dug faster — sometimes until his hands would bleed. His mother told him he had to be the best student, because perhaps the best would have a chance of receiving a scholarship. Joseph stopped playing soccer and borrowed books from other children, reading them at night by the firelight.

He wanted to be a human, not a refugee, and learnt himself into a new life. For Christmas his parents gave him paper.

A dreamer who persevered

In the seventh grade Joseph switched to a different school that was miles away. The journey was difficult, says Joseph, but the school was more challenging. He woke up early, watered the corn, and then ran barefoot to school. At the end of the school year, Joseph was awarded a scholarship, allowing him to move to the city.

Joseph had made it. He had made his mother proud and learnt his way out of the camp. But soon he realised that good grades alone do not make someone human, so he returned home during weekends and holidays to teach the other refugee children in his old school tent.

When the school year was over, many of Joseph’s students had performed so well that they were allowed to attend a secondary school. But the facility was located 80 kilometres away, and none of the camp children had enough money for room and board.

Joseph, then 16-years-old, managed to collect enough donations from camp residents that he was able to rent a house in the city. There he made room for 16 children, though there were no beds and hardly any food. By the end of the first quarter four of the children were tied for the title of best in their class.

At 14, Joseph had come up with a plan to start a boarding school so he could save children from his refugee camp. Many called him a dreamer, but he persevered.

When Fred Swaniker was 27, he decided to save Africa with a boarding school. Others called him crazy, and they may have been correct. But he, too, persevered.

Now 33, Swaniker sits in a conference room, BlackBerry on the table, laughing merrily. Originally from Ghana, he studied in Minnesota, and later worked with the business consulting firm McKinsey.

The company sent him to Stanford Business School to earn his master’s degree, during that time he did an internship at a bank in Nigeria, getting to know people who sent their children to boarding schools in England. Such an education costs up to $40,000 per year.

“I could do the same thing better and cheaper,” he thought. Six years later, he has his own school in Johannesburg, funded by some €14 million ($20 million) he collected in donations.

The man with the headlamp shows people the way

When Joseph received an invitation for an interview with the academy, he was instructed to bring an object that fit him as a person. He laid a headlamp in front of the committee, a light he had used to study at night. “The man with the headlamp shows people the way,” he told them. “I am the man with the headlamp.”

In September 2008 the African Leadership Academy received its first students, Joseph among them. There were cheeseburgers in the cafeteria, Joseph held his burger vertically, looking happy.

Today is the graduation party. Joseph has been granted a university scholarship, but he still has to pay a small portion himself. He doesn’t yet know where he will get the money; first he is flying back to his parents’ tent in Uganda.

He stands at the podium, holding three tightly folded pages. He has never liked to tell his classmates where he came from, he asked for no sympathy. Every Saturday he fasted so that the hunger would remind him where he came from. Now he wants to give a speech.

“I am Joseph Munyambanza,” he begins to read, his voice wavering a bit in front of the students, teachers and relatives dressed in their Sunday best. His parents couldn’t afford the flight and stayed in Uganda.

The graduate tells the story of how his pregnant sister contracted malaria, but the doctor refused to treat her because she couldn’t pay and she died before giving birth. Joseph says he wants to study medicine.

Joseph thanks the headmaster and the teachers.

“It is my dream to go to university and become a doctor. It is a difficult dream, but my life has often been difficult, and I will never give up hope,” he says.

Laying his papers on the lectern, he takes a deep breath, “I am Joseph Munyambanza,” he says with a steady voice. “You call me a refugee.” Looks across the audience he pauses, clenching his teeth, his jawbone pressing against his cheek.

He hesitates a moment longer, simply standing there, and then says: “But I am a human.”