Limbani.

He was fourteen and somebody had carried a radio out onto the flat ground in front of the kiln. Halfway through the night its batteries ran out and a gap opened up. Limbani carried on by himself, rapping with no music, until he ran out. Nobody told him to stop. Nobody said anything to him when he finished. He tells it the way you'd talk about plugging a leaking roof with whatever came to hand. He raps in Chichewa, the same as what he carries on a flash drive with two hundred songs that he bought as a boy at the minibus stop. Since that night he starts up every time the kiln comes out fired and the flat ground fills, and he has never been paid for it.

This year the sweatshirt that did up last year doesn't do up, and it is the same sweatshirt. He said so once, in a what-a-nuisance sort of voice, and that was the end of it: nobody commented and he has not brought it up again. He leaves it the way it sits on him, goes on working nights exactly as always and has said nothing about buying another. In the portrait he has it on, with the hood down over his shoulders, the white shirt at the neck and the heavy gold-link chain on top.