Mug
White ceramic outside and black inside: this hippopotamus mug carries the portrait of Limbani, who makes bricks by hand and sells them stacked. It belongs to Animal Kinhood, where I portray animals that dress and work like people.
Foto: Jonathan Göhner (@jochieng1) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Hippopotamus amphibius
Don't come looking for me at two in the afternoon, I'll be in the water.
Rivers, lakes and freshwater marshes across sub-Saharan Africa, always with enough depth to submerge completely and with grazing close to the bank. In Malawi its main strongholds are the river Shire where it runs through Liwonde National Park, where more than two thousand individuals are concentrated, and the shallow shores of Lake Malawi.
Bricks are sold in stacks, and a stack is counted from the outside. The buyer walks round the pile, counts the four faces, works it out and gives a price. What gets paid comes off that. Limbani builds the four faces with whole brick, properly lined up, and puts the ones that came out cracked into the middle of the stack, where nobody sees them. He does it with every batch. Along the bank this doesn't get discussed and he doesn't bring it up.
Once he got a buyer who, instead of counting faces, took the pile apart down the middle. He found the cracked ones, paid him half and carted the stack off anyway. Limbani didn't argue and didn't ask him to count it again. On the next stack he did exactly the same thing: four faces of whole brick and the cracked ones in the middle. That was two years ago. He has told nobody on the stretch and nobody has asked him.
