Three Famines
Also by Tom Keneally
Fiction
The Place at Whitton
The Fear
Bring Larks and Heroes
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
The Survivor
A Dutiful Daughter
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Blood Red, Sister Rose
Gossip from the Forest
Season in Purgatory
A Victim of the Aurora
Passenger
Confederates
The Cut-rate Kingdom
Schindler’s Ark
A Family Madness
The Playmaker
Towards Asmara
By the Line
Flying Hero Class
Woman of the Inner Sea
Jacko
A River Town
Bettany’s Book
An Angel in Australia
The Tyrant’s Novel
The Widow and Her Hero
The People’s Train
Non-fiction
Outback
The Place Where Souls Are Born
Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish
Memoirs from a Young Republic
Homebush Boy: A Memoir
The Great Shame
American Scoundrel
Lincoln
The Commonwealth of Thieves
Searching for Schindler
Australians: Origins to Eureka
For Children
Ned Kelly and the City of Bees
Roos in Shoes
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Three Famines
9781742741345
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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This edition published by Vintage in 2011
First published by Knopf in 2010
Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Co. (Pty) Limited 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Keneally, Thomas, 1935-
Three famines / Tom Keneally
ISBN 978 1 74166 856 8(pbk.)
Famines - History
Famines - Ireland - History - 19th century
Famines - India - Bengal - History
Famines - Ethiopia - History
Ireland - History - 19th century
Bengal (India) - History
Ethopia - History
363.8
Cover illustration © Getty Images
Cover design by Christabella Designs
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Tom Keneally
Title Page
Copyright Page
Imprint Page
Dedication
Maps of the regions
Introduction: the Three Famines
1 Democracy and Starvation
2 Short Commons
3 Nature’s Triggers
4 God’s Hand
5 Coping
6 Villains: Ireland
7 Villains and Heroes: Bengal
8 Villains: Ethiopia
9 Whistleblowers
10 Famine Diseases
11 Evictions, Movements and Emigration in Bengal and Ireland
12 Evictions and Movements, Mengistu-style
13 Resistance
14 Relief: Ireland
15 Relief: Bengal
16 Relief: Ethiopia
17 Other Catastrophes
Bibliography
Index of Searchable Terms
To the memory of Tim and Kate Keneally
INTRODUCTION
the Three Famines
IN A WORLD of cyclical and enduring historic and modern want, this account is in greatest part a comparative story of three terrible hungers. The first of these famines is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, the famine that began in 1845 and whose end-date is a matter of debate among historians. I have written about this famine before, but in terms of the history of Irish nationalism instead of as a famine that echoed and illustrated other famines. By comparing this renowned event with other outbreaks of starvation, I hope to tell its tale anew, and – while not avoiding the causes, actions and ideas that made it – narrate it stripped of its former nationalist rhetoric.
The second hunger is a more hidden famine than the other two, one I encountered first in the writings of Amartya Sen. Though less well-known and submerged by competing accidents of history, it was the even more deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943–4. It was triggered by natural causes, but also by the impact of World War II on north-east India and by British–Indian government policies.
The third great hunger narrated here, that of the Ethiopians, had two phases separated in time – the early 1970s and then the early and mid 1980s. But, though presided over first by an emperor and then by a Stalinist dictator, they were interconnected to an extent that they could in some lights appear to be one continuing reality. I was moved to write about this famine by my own visits to Eritrea in the late 1980s and the evidence I saw that the tyrant Mengistu was spending massively on armaments rather than food and the means to distribute it.
In those people who suffered these famines; in those who denied the suffering or propounded theories to explain it, excuse it, and so see it as necessary; in those who – against the wishes of government – told the world what had happened and still was happening, or tried to address the suffering by giving aid, there is a remarkable continuity of impulses and reactions. So, though these famines are in obvious ways diverse from each other, they were also siblings to each other. It is as if they shared part of the same DNA, being as they are the result of a similar human fallibility, and of dogmatic and determined misinterpretation by governments and officials of both the victims and the events that had overtaken them.
In all famines there is a continuity of the features of the famished. Their hollowed and stark-eyed faces bring forth in witnesses the same sort of horrified descriptions, which become interchangeable; without any editing, one could be used to speak of any of the others.
Along with everything else, the sufferers lose not only accustomed food and seed crops and livestock, and clothing and all dignity, but also their particular culture. No matter how separated in time, they become members of the nation of the famished, who have more in common with each other than with the cultures starvation steals from them.
But, as narratives, there are also great differences between these disasters. One famine occurred in a country – Ireland – where there was c
ertainly popular sedition but no full-scale military conflict to afflict the rural population. The bayonet and the rifle were part of the fatal mix, but they were not deployed anywhere near as actively in Ireland as weapons would be in Ethiopia.
The famine in Bengal was unwittingly, though not blamelessly, instigated by the conditions of World War II. There was the imminent threat of the Japanese entering British-ruled India across the border from Burma, which they had captured with resounding military competence in 1942. This military pressure facing both the British government of India, and indeed the war cabinet in London, made it easier for those in authority to make choices that failed to meet, indeed worsened, the Bengali crisis.
But official and large-scale savaging and murder did not occur in Bengal and Ireland the way it would in Ethiopia in the mid 1980s, when, under the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam the army slaughtered peasants, dissenters against the founding of collectives on the Stalinist model, escapees from detention and minority peoples unpopular with the central government. To identify this distinguishing factor does not, of course, deny the torment of the Irish or Bengalis. But in Ethiopia, the violence undermined the growing of food and the survival of many people who were already under threat of extinction by hunger. In addition, in Ethiopia, a vicious war against rebels in the provinces was waged by Mengistu, regardless of its massive cost and its capacity to make the country’s famine more intense.
This book, in telling its story, will argue that famine occurred in all cases not because of the loss of a single staple food, or because of natural disasters – drought or plant pestilence – in themselves. Whether applied to Irish families in the 1840s, Bengali families in the early 1940s, or Ethiopian families in the 1970s and 1980s, commentators have sometimes said that ‘famine’ is actually the wrong term to use. For the victims felt with some accuracy that the land itself produced enough food. It was the fact that the food became inaccessible to millions that produced the emergency. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, for example, a nineteenth-century radical whose family left Ireland because of an Gorta Mór, argued that ‘there was no famine in the land’, but that food was taken out of Ireland to feed domestic needs on the British mainland. As the poet John O’Hagan wrote at the time:
Take it from us, every grain,
We were made for you to drain;
Black starvation let us feel,
England must not want a meal!
This is not to deny the however niggardly official aid instigated, sometimes against their own principles, by government, nor the private aid donated and distributed in a more generous spirit. Both forms of relief are believed to have saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet at the same time the Irish could complain that detachments of the British army and armed police were used to enforce thousands of evictions and to guard exports of food from Ireland.
In Ethiopia in the 1980s, the army operated as a vengeful force, destroying lives and imperilling the normal supplies of food. ‘When we came back from the forest,’ an Ethiopian refugee would later say, ‘our wives were [already] in prison and we were accused of working with the rebels. They put us all in a big ditch as a prison and many died there. Many are still there.’ Mengistu’s army then burned down sixteen houses, shot people and raided corn and coffee. ‘There was no hunger before this.’
Such testimonies are too numerous to have been totally fabricated. The famed Four Horsemen rode wild in Ethiopia.
The argument, therefore, that famine is due utterly to a natural disaster, or even to the previous sins of the victims themselves, is one that suits governments, who naturally wish to be exempted from all blame. Inevitable acts of God and deliberate previous wrongdoing by the famishing have brought on the calamity – so goes the assertion. Among other perceived faults of the starving: the Irish married too early, bred too many children and based their existence on one crop easily grown; the Bengalis were over-breeders, were caste-ridden and suspected of disloyalty to the Empire; the Ethiopians resisted relocation to collectives, were reluctant to plough without oxen and lacked a clear Marxist appreciation.
To show these ideas are fraudulent is one of the main purposes of this narrative; in all the cases narrated here, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions and administrative incompetence were more lethal than the initiating blights, the loss of potatoes or rice or livestock or of the grain named teff.
1
Democracy and Starvation
IN HIS BOOK Development as Freedom, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Amartya Kumar Sen, wrote, ‘No famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.’
How does this dictum apply to the Irish famine? Though at the time of the famine the term ‘democrat’ stood in most British minds for something close to the sense ‘Communist’ attained in the West in the 1950s, Britain considered itself the home of liberal institutions. The Reform Bill of 1832 had been a definite move in the direction of liberalism and progress. Just the same, after its exciting passage through the British Parliament, only men owning property worth £10 per annum qualified for the vote – that is, one in seven. And even there inequity existed: three dozen new seats had fewer than 300 voters, whereas the industrial cities had thousands. Despite a large movement for democracy and manhood suffrage, Britain probably did not qualify as ‘a functioning democracy’ in the modern sense in the mid 1840s, and perhaps especially because in Ireland itself, those who had the vote before the famine, if we surmise an adult male population of, say, 2 million (which allows for a population of 4 million children and of 8 million in total), came to a bit more than one in forty-four males (45,000 voters, all told).
So Ireland itself in the 1840s could not be described as a democracy or a successful polity at all. Like other famines, Ireland’s grew from a prelude of poverty and shortage of nutrition, but the lack of direct democracy and franchise, common in that era anywhere on earth, had left millions unrepresented, voiceless and so captive to want, where any accident to their staple food could leave them hungering in the dust.
In India, government had always been paternal. There was an unspoken idea that good administration was a valid replacement for democracy. The cabinet in New Delhi, presided over by the viceroy, was appointed, as was the viceroy himself. In 1935, a new form of constitution (the Government of India Act) created a federal assembly, but of its 375 members, none were popularly elected. Two hundred and fifty members were to be put forward by the legislative assemblies of the provinces and 125 nominated by Indian princes. The 1935 act, however, also allowed provincial elections to be contested by purely Indian political parties, culminating in the election of Indian provincial legislatures. To the British this seemed a step in the direction of democracy, but in the view of nationalist leaders such as Gandhi, too slow and contemptuous a one. Many saw the new act as a device to divert Indian political passion into local elections, into struggles for local eminence. The powers of the provincial governments, of which the government of Bengal was one, were limited to local administration under a British governor. He had the power to reject any law which in his or the viceroy’s opinion was a threat to national security. He also had the power to suspend the local parliament and take over all government himself.
In Bengal, the business of enrolling voters was slow, and some millions of people who would be threatened by the Bengal famine either were not registered to vote at the first provincial elections in 1937, or lacked the competence or confidence to approach the polling booth. In these elections the two major parties were Congress, who ran candidates of high caste or social standing, and the Muslim League. Congress was in power in Bengal as the famine germinated, but the largely Muslim League government of Khawaja Nazimuddin took over in March 1943. The province was divided, the Muslims wary of trusting Congress, which they saw as the party of the Hindus.
In Ethiopia, the Derg had originally been elected by soldiers and policemen, and thereafter the election of leaders occurred not among t
he general population but among the Derg itself. Under Soviet urging, the Workers’ Party was founded in late 1979 as a ‘vanguard party’ whose members would help shore up Mengistu’s Ethiopian state. Theoretically, delegates to the Ethiopian Congress were elected from the various ‘mass organisations’ such as the All-Ethiopia Urban Dwellers’ Association and the All-Ethiopia Peasants’ Association. But, in turn, the input of most Ethiopian people into the election of these bodies was negligible, for the mass organisations were run by supporters of the Derg and party members. Few people likely to give trouble to the regime were elected delegates to these bodies, let alone to the congress of the Workers’ Party. The nomination and election of delegates to the three congresses the Workers’ Party held was therefore under the control of local party machines. Between 1200 and 1300 like-minded delegates from all the regions would attend these party congresses. But in general they spoke with one voice.
Thus the people who would perish in these three catastrophes had no input into the policies that would be applied to what they were undergoing.
Famine and the starvation process fascinate those of us who live in what is called the developed world. The fascination is sometimes perverse, to the extent that in the late twentieth century a term was minted for those who liked to observe its effects firsthand – ‘disaster tourism’. To us the famine victim is remote, separated from normal, robust people by an impenetrable glass, and located far beyond our understanding of human experience. For, though we can find malnutrition on our streets and in our nursing homes, famine itself is seen as a phenomenon of the past. Starvation makes its appearance in the West most spectacularly in individual and political cases. Firstly, it does so in the mental disease anorexia nervosa, which occurs chiefly among young women who seek such fearful control over their bodies that they reduce themselves ultimately to the point of self-devouring starvation. Otherwise, starvation has manifested itself as a form of political protest and civil disobedience, a deliberately undertaken wasting of the body so that it becomes a graphic and potent statement of ideology or political meaning.