Shack after shack, reduced to a pile of smoking embers and buckled corrugated-metal sheeting. Here and there he sees the remnants of the small, meagre lives of these people, so essential to the rural economy but unrecognised by it: a stack of enamel bowls ready for an evening meal that was never eaten; a cracked mirror in which someone, against all the odds, had tried to show a presentable face to a world that couldn’t have cared less; a portrait of the late Samora Machel, Mozambique’s charismatic revolutionary leader, still pinned to the plywood partition that lies on the ground. He knows about Samora Machel, his struggle against Portuguese colonialism in the sixties and the subsequent, even more vicious, battle with the apartheid regime in South Africa, which had been grafted onto the history syllabus when he was in secondary school.

Staring at the faded poster of the smiling leader in his heyday, he’s weighed down by a profound and almost debilitating sense of disappointment. Machel’s victory, winning back the right of an African people to call the land their own, seems so empty now. South Africa should have been next. But here he was, still caught in a fight over land. There was a betrayal at the heart of this latest struggle in South Africa that eclipsed anything its Portuguese colonisers had done in Mozambique. When the Portuguese took the land, when they exploited its natural largesse, they had done so as conquerors: they hadn’t pretended otherwise. The whole point of the exercise was to enrich people many thousands of miles away, not those whose sweat seeped into the ground as they toiled under an African sun. But in this new battle in South Africa, it was men who had won the land in the name of freedom who were enriching themselves at the expense of those who’d been so naive as to think the great struggle had been about them.

Now he’s back in town. He sits at a table, alone and in the dark. A single light bulb hangs uselessly in the centre of the room and the curtains are drawn tight. His mahogany skin is rendered pallid and gaunt by the blue wash of a computer screen. His tired eyes stare through spectacles that mirror the screen. Long, elegant fingers, normally so deft and expressive, lie beside the keyboard, motionless. He wants to write but can’t think where to start. The thoughts are there; the words are elusive. He, too, has seen the video that Lindi and Anton witnessed.