The two days Neema had been given to prove her innocence were short in arithmetic and long in fear.
On the first night, two guards sat outside their house. They did not lock her inside, but whenever she rose to go to the well, one of them followed her. People passing by looked at the house as though it already belonged to a thief.
Bi. Rehema gathered the grain found beneath the bed and placed it outside the door.
“Take it away,” she said. “I do not want even its dust inside.”
Neema stopped her. “If we remove it, they will say we are hiding evidence.”
Her mother sat down angrily. The fever had fallen, but her body was still weak. “I have lived poor all my life. Now someone has given me the shame of theft without even giving me the food that came with it.”
Kito arrived that evening with news.
He had seen two men come out from behind the granary before the fire appeared.
One of them had been limping.
“Why didn't you say so?” Neema asked.
“I thought they were guards. Then Jabali said anyone spreading rumors would be beaten.”
“Do you know who was limping?”
Kito shook his head. “But he had a blue cloth around his waist.”
Hamisi had once said that Rashid's porters wore blue cloths on loading days. Neema connected that with the knot on the sacks, but it was still not enough.
That night, Amani appeared behind the house. His face was covered with a cloth.
“Bakari was paid a coin by the granary master,” he said. “I saw it in the payment ledger.”
“Where is the ledger?”
“It is hidden.”
“Bring it.”
Amani shook his head. “If I take it, they will know.”
“Without that evidence, they will imprison me.”
“And if I bring it, they will kill me.”
Neema wanted to pressure him.
Then she remembered how powerful people used the fear of the poor for their own benefit.
She was not willing to become like them.
“Do not bring the ledger,” she said. “Just tell me the payment mark and the date written beside it.”
Amani drew the mark in the dirt. It was payment for two oil calabashes, rope, and three days of work. Beside it was the granary master's initial.
Neema copied the mark onto a piece of wood.
“Why are you helping?”
Amani looked inside, where Bi. Rehema was lying down. “My mother died with a debt that was not hers. I wrote the marks. Every time I see a board, I see her hands.”
Before leaving, he added, “Bakari is afraid of deep water. If he leaves, he will not cross the river. He will take the northern road through the fig thicket.”
Mama Naliaka persuaded her brother and two young men to go looking for him. Neema could not leave because the guards followed her. She stayed behind, gathering evidence about the sacks and the oil.
On the morning of the second day, one guard allowed her to go to the ruins of the granary. People had already taken away the pieces of timber that had survived. Neema knelt at the place where the fire had begun.
She saw that the soil near the window was blacker. Inside it were small pieces of gourd shell. She smelled them. Kerosene.
Beside them, she found a footprint whose one side was heavier than the other—a person who had been limping.
“The soil will not say a name,” the guard said.
“But it can say that someone was here.”
At midday, Mama Naliaka returned. They had not found Bakari, but they had found someone who had seen him buying food on the northern road. He was heading toward the village of Maji-Matatu.
The Chifu sent two riders on donkeys. They caught him before sunset.
When Bakari was brought back, he was exhausted and angry. He denied everything until Amani was called secretly before the Chifu. The clerk drew the payment mark. The oil seller confirmed the amount.
Kito described the blue cloth and the limp. When they examined Bakari's leg, his left heel was injured.
One piece of evidence could be called luck. Four began to form a chain.
Bakari broke at dawn.
He said he had not known that grain would be planted in Neema's house. His job had been to move the sacks and light the oil. The granary master had given him Neema's measure and told him to leave it behind the building.
“Who gave the order?” the Chifu asked.
Bakari looked at Mtemi, then at Jabali.
“I was given money by the people from the granary,” he said. “But they used a sack bearing Jabali's seal.”
Jabali leaped up angrily, claiming that the clerk and the porter had been bribed by Neema. The Chifu raised a hand.
“Neema did not even have enough money to buy one measure of millet,” he said. “What would she have bribed them with?”
For the first time, Neema's poverty became evidence on her side.
Her job was restored, but she did not celebrate when she left the council hall. She saw the shadow of the burned granary over the whole market.
The truth had saved her.
It had not brought back the grain.
---
On the morning of the second day, Neema asked for all the recovered sacks to be brought to the market.
Jabali refused.
“You are under investigation. You have no authority to give orders.”
“Then give the order yourself. If I am a thief, the figures will show it.”
The Chifu, who did not like hearing people whisper that his family had burned the granary, agreed.
Thirty sacks were placed in a line. Each one bore the council's seal. Neema weighed them before the people.
Twelve sacks held millet. Eight held maize. Six were nearly empty, filled with chaff at the bottom. Four held sesame.
“Where did this sesame come from?” the Chifu asked.
No one answered.
Neema asked for the granary ledger. The clerk brought two wooden boards that had survived the fire. Their marks showed that the granary should have held one hundred and sixty sacks of millet and maize, no more.
Mzee Salim ran his fingers over the marks.
“This board was rewritten,” he said. “The old line was rubbed away with sand. Beneath it was a larger figure.”
“Can you read it?” the Chifu asked.
“Not all of it. But this is not one hundred and sixty. It is two hundred and forty.”
The crowd rumbled.
Neema turned to Mtemi. “The sesame sacks have your porters' knot. And the empty sacks were retied. You were moving the Chifu's grain to your granary, then burning the building to hide the gap.”
Mtemi raised his voice.
“Your evidence is four seeds and the words of a blind old man!”
“And the kerosene Bakari bought.”
The oil seller stood behind the crowd. When he saw Jabali's guards, he began to back away.
Mama Naliaka caught his arm.
“Say what you saw,” she whispered. “If you keep silent today, tomorrow they will set fire to you.”
The oil seller swallowed. “Bakari bought two calabashes. He said they were for the lamps at Bwana Mtemi's house.”
Jabali said, “That does not prove the fire.”
Neema took a piece of rope from her pocket. “I found this behind the granary. It has oil and sesame on it. Its knot matches the rope on four sacks.”
Chifu Baraka looked at Mtemi.
Mtemi did not tremble. Instead, he looked at Jabali.
Their eyes met for only a brief moment.
But Neema saw it.
The Chifu saw it too.
“Arrest the granary guards,” the Chifu ordered.
“And bring Bakari, alive.”
Jabali stepped forward. “Uncle, you are allowing this girl to disgrace the council with rumors.”
The Chifu turned slowly toward him. “Why do her rumors frighten you?”
Jabali fell silent.
Mtemi was forbidden to leave town. The following day, Bakari was arrested in a nearby village.
He confessed that Mtemi's clerk had paid him to move forty-six sacks at night.
A granary guard had planned the fire. Jabali's name was not mentioned, but the money used to pay them had come from a purse bearing his seal.
The Chifu did not imprison his nephew. Instead, he removed him from oversight of the market and sent him to manage distant grazing lands.
Mtemi lost one granary and part of his wealth. For the second time, his riches saved him.
Neema was given back her job.
But the victory brought her no joy.
The granary had burned. The town's reserve had dwindled. The drought had not ended.
The people had gained the truth, but truth was not food.
---