Limbani.

One night three of them planted themselves on the flat ground by the kiln. They came from three villages downriver, they had walked the whole way and they asked if he was the one with the voice. They had never seen him in their lives. They knew him the moment he opened his mouth to say yes. They stayed until he ran out and then they went back the way they had come, on foot and at night. It happens to him every so often since: people turn up who know perfectly well who he is and whom he has never seen.

Liwonde sits in southern Malawi, in Machinga district, where the river Shire makes a bend. That is where Limbani has his stretch of riverbank, his kiln and the place where he sleeps, and he does not move from it: he has never once been to the far bank. When they tell him that from over there he comes through word for word, he puts it down to the shape the river makes at that bend and gives it no further thought. It is the whole of the explanation he has and he has not looked for another.