Three Famines Read online

  Emigration or flight to the Sudan and to Somalia became an option for Ethiopian farming families, and the middle class also began to emigrate in unprecedented numbers, though in their case emigration was spurred not only by their having witnessed famine but also as a reaction to its accompanying politics, injustice and government-instigated terror. Until the famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the only travelling Ethiopians were those who had been sent overseas to be educated and to provide future bureaucrats and officials for the Ethiopian empire. Suddenly, however, Ethiopians could be found living in exile in the Sudan and Somalia and, ultimately, from Sweden and Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania.

  In traditionally honest communities, stealing seed and other food, or even stealing money, became common during famished times. In Ireland, the number of people committed for trial for theft rose from 20,000 in 1842–6 to 31,000 in 1847; 38,500 in 1848; and 42,000 in 1849. The statistics for other categories of crime remained level in the same period. One man sent to Australia for his crime was Michael Frawley, who was convicted of stealing money from the Board of Public Works, the body that supervised make-work relief. He claimed he committed his crime for the sake of his young and helpless family, for whom, he said, there was no room left in the workhouse. Michael Cullinan, also condemned to transportation, argued with some credibility that he had stolen a cow because his young family were hungry. But he was never shipped away because he died in prison of dysentery.

  If given an opportunity, famished Bengalis thieved from government food depots without any sense that their acts were ‘criminal’, and sometimes under the blind eye of compassionate Indian police.

  Attempted food theft became common in Ethiopia too. During the famines of the early 1970s and mid 1980s, people in Ethiopia who still possessed their seed crop tried to plant it in secret at night and to disguise the fact they had done so by spreading soil or straw, or employing other ruses, both to hide the fact that a crop had been planted, and to prevent people from digging up and stealing the seeds at night.

  Under the pressure of coping, the ties between people, even within the same family, withered. Some separations, of course, were well-intentioned. In Ireland during an Gorta Mór, parents might send their children to the hated and punitive-looking workhouses instituted under the Irish Poor Relief Act of 1838. There, at least, some form of spartan succour was available, but of such a demeaning kind that many adult Irish were too proud to partake of it. Often the children would never see their parents again, and their parents knew this when they delivered them to the grim outer gate of the workhouse. Men who set out for the Bengali cities were often deluded enough to believe they would get work there and have their families join them later. Likewise, Ethiopian women and children were frequently sent by the fathers of their families to relief camps or towns, while the men searched for work rather than throw themselves on anyone’s mercy.

  But other separations did not have the quality of being designed for mutual good. In northern Ethiopia in the hungers of 1983–4, out of pure desperation families abandoned the elderly and weak, a pattern that had occurred in hungers of the past and would in those of the future. Vulnerable members of the family who seemed already too frail to walk towards relief, real or hoped-for, were frequently left behind to perish in the family house in the village.

  In Bengal, among the families of sharecroppers, landless labourers, fishermen, weavers, barbers and potters, husbands abandoned wives and children were sold or left to die. Married men often expelled their widowed sisters from the house, and thus as good as condemned them to death by the roadside.

  A frightful option taken in all famines is the maternal choice between feeding the child who might survive instead of the one who will not. An extreme Irish case of this preferential maternal love, reported by Mary Anne Hoare, a contemporary writer, was that of the woman who chose to neglect her ‘miserable pallid infant’ to suckle an eighteen-year-old son, a boy who worked on the road projects that were begun as famine relief. The family’s survival depended on the boy, not on the infant, the latter almost certainly doomed whatever the mother did. For starvation induces a pragmatic desperation in its subjects, and this choice, too, is a coping mechanism. And as a crime it is minor compared to some of the other options historically taken with children.

  These acts, morally repugnant to the well-fed, were often the only means left not only to soothe an unhinging hunger but, above all – a potent motivation in all famines – to make sure that some of the family came through. For the same reason, family groups chose to have less contact with local people to whom they had been close beforehand, and strangers were unwelcome. In the clachans of Ireland, the clusters of huts that developed on the so-called ‘townlands’ of the Irish countryside, it had been customary before the famine to ensure that no family would be permitted to wither away, and there was no blame or shame attached to taking the gifts of food given by other villagers. But now contact was unwelcome – it might have meant the necessity to give charity to friends, or to have them surprised by one’s own somehow shameful deterioration, starvation being a great assault on one’s sense of dignity and self-estimation.

  A survivor of the Irish famine in north-west Donegal, at the Atlantic shore’s limit of Ireland, mourned in the Irish tongue that even apart from starvation, such chosen isolation had other effects: ‘Sport and pastimes disappeared. Poetry, music and dancing stopped. They lost and forgot them all and … these things never returned as they had been.’

  To give an idea of the way the cohesion of a clan or a township is eroded by famine, it is opportune to go outside Ethiopia and look at a study of the Sudanese Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA, an aid wing of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army in southern Sudan). The research on the matter concerned voluntary cattle slaughter inside villages, and the way it peaked in 1998, during war-induced famines both in the vast, reedy Gogrial area south of Darfur and in Bahr el Ghazal province to the west of Gogrial. In southern Sudan generally, coping with famine had always been the task of village chiefs and councils. If a village family was in extreme danger of starvation, its menfolk were permitted to spear the cow of a wealthy neighbour. This was not viewed as ‘charity’ but as a customary transaction. But in the food crisis of 1998, landowners in southern Sudan began to fence in their cattle and prevent access to them. Fear, and the volatility of the region, where young militiamen with guns were the true rulers now, produced in chiefs and village worthies a desire to close in on themselves, to protect the family’s resources and to ignore needs beyond that.

  Short of selling one’s flesh for food is the stratagem of selling a part. In May 1847 two girls came to a Clonmel barber and emerged bald, having exchanged their hair with him for two shillings and three pence.

  But the sale of the entire body, even in such traditional societies, was another attempt at combating famine. In the Irish famine, there was near parity between male and female deaths, indicating that prostitution was not such a commonly adopted means of getting money and food. For where prostitution occurred widely, women – however socially ruined by what they did – survived better.

  A famine play of 1945, The Black Stranger by Gerard Healy, raised the next-to-taboo issue of Irish women’s prostitution in the famine, though the chief theme of the play is emigration. In a scene of the play, two sailors are overheard asserting that compliant women were always scarce in Ireland before, but that now they were ‘cheap an’ young an’ plentiful’. A character named Bridie sells her body to buy cornmeal for a pregnant woman, and one of her companions declares, ‘I’d do the same meself. What’s a little thing like that, or the sins of the whole world, compared to the life of my baby.’ Did Healy’s play reflect the reality of the situation a hundred years before?

  It is interesting that other works of literature and history on the famine did not raise the issue. But prostitution did occur. There was a rise in the number of younger women admitted to the Westmoreland Lock Hospital in Dublin, wh
ose main brief was to treat prostitutes with sexually acquired diseases. For example, the number of women admitted there from the south-west (Munster) and the west (Connacht) rose eightfold during the famine. Arrests for prostitution in Dublin were a number of times higher during the famine years.

  In Bengal there was a very nearly twofold difference in male deaths between the ages of ten and twenty as compared to females. Professor T.C. Das, who led a famous survey of Calcutta’s homeless in 1943, was one who noted among the destitutes on Calcutta’s streets the smaller number of girls as against boys in the age group of ten to fifteen years. This was due, he said, to ‘the absorption of girls into city brothels’. A meeting of Calcutta women in January 1944 also addressed the existence of ‘mass prostitution among village women’. By early 1944, the government of Bengal had expressed grave concern at reports received from ‘various sources’ that young destitute women were being recruited throughout Bengal by ‘facile promises’, and were then allocated to brothels or street prostitution. The consequence was not only a gender imbalance but a massive impact on the morale of the nation; a belief that Bengal after the famine would be threatened with social chaos. For the problem for those women who wanted to return to their villages once the emergency was over was that they would be considered unmarriageable outcasts, and this would be their destiny for life.

  The practice of selling children into prostitution was reported by a number of witnesses. In August 1943, The Statesman of Calcutta declared that the disappearance of young people into the prostitution business was a ‘further evil’. They had been ‘sucked or dragged down into the vice of a large city’. Their country innocence had been stripped away. In the spirit of that same derangement, in Ethiopia-bordering southern Sudan, where both the Sudanese army and southern rebels requisitioned animals and grain, children were sometimes sold into slavery to provide the majority of the family with cash for food, and girls were sent to the town to work as prostitutes – an option considered unthinkable in such a traditional society in normal times.

  The exchange rate for a young woman prostitute in some areas of Bengal was said to be a rupee and a quarter, though a girl who was good-looking might attract four, five or even ten rupees. For parents who sold their children, it was often a crazily short-term solution to their needs, since rice cost a rupee a pound.

  The issue of prostitution is readily addressed by the contemporary Bengali writers of the 1940s. Ela Sen’s collection of short stories, Darkening Days, published in 1944, contains a tale in which one of two sisters’ chances of using prostitution as an option is easier because of a nearby army base. A Calcutta woman pursues the same course in another story. As an observer, Ela Sen believed that about 30,000 from Calcutta’s 125,000 destitute females went into brothels, one in four of them being very young girls. Sen declared that young and middle-aged women were won over by ‘the chicanery of procurers’ who smoothly promised food and shelter, which to the destitute meant paradise. She asserted that some women who unwittingly sold their daughters to the agents of brothels believed that they were to be taken into a decent institution where they would be fed. But often, Sen admits, the parents knew what they were subjecting the child to.

  Bhabani Bhattacharya’s renowned famine novel He Who Rides a Tiger is – like Sen’s work – considered to be a reliable guide to the realities of Bengal in the famine years. He writes of a blacksmith who can find work only as a brothel agent, and discovers his own daughter in one of the Calcutta premises he visits. In Bhattacharya’s other work, So Many Hungers, a mother who is chastised by another woman for having traded her daughter answers, ‘You too will eat one day, for you have a daughter.’

  T. G. Narayan, the Indian writer, also travelled throughout the famine-stricken area as the hunger took hold, and in a feeding camp met Aifaljan, a young woman of eighteen. Her story was representative – before the famine she had lived with her husband, Yakub, and their three-year-old son, Jamamuddin. In June 1943 their rice gave out. In the week that followed, they sold their hut, their utensils and every other material possession. They had nothing left to sell except their labour, for which there were no buyers. Jamamuddin, the son, died. His last cry was for rice, said his mother. Shortly after, Yakub divorced her and left to join the army. She had heard that the recently planted aman crop would prove to be a good one and hoped they needed workers in the field. Narayan wondered, would she get harvest work or end up in the hands of one of the slave traffickers?

  In rural Ethiopia, as in much of Africa, girls – at some time between the ages of five and ten – were circumcised. In many cases, this involved the cutting out of the vulva and sometimes of the clitoris by senior women, sometimes midwives, who did the work with razor blades or other implements. (Better-off parents had the operation performed in sterile conditions by health professionals.) Normally, the wound would be sutured with wooden splinters, but an opening was left to allow urination and menstruation to take place. This procedure was considered so important to the future virtue and marriageability of the child that it was sometimes ritually celebrated beyond the place of cutting by drum-beating and music and songs, which swamped the girl’s screams. Her ankles bound together, the child might take a month to recover from the operation. The result at the age of marriage was that the husband should have the assurance of his wife’s virginity, since it would be his erotic task gradually to open up the vagina. If a woman had been with other men, it was obvious to the husband or even to the elder women who might have examined her before marriage. Thus, famine prostitution resorted to by single women made it obvious that a woman was not fit for marriage, and again – as in Bengal but with even greater proof of her fall – she became untouchable and outcast.

  Even farther along in the starving crisis, the most baleful coping mechanism is cannibalism. There were a number of cases of cannibalism in Russia in the early 1920s, during the collectivisation-induced famine of 1919–23. In fact, dead bodies were sometimes traded and human flesh was transmuted into meatballs, cutlets and minced meat. So many cases occurred in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis in World War II that the Russian security forces formed a special squad to punish those guilty of it. But for people who would dig up the buried bodies of animals to eat, cannibalism might not have seemed a huge further step.

  In 1851, the Irish census stated that a stipendiary magistrate in Galway City heard the case of a prisoner arrested for stealing food, who was discovered in his cabin with his family and a part-consumed corpse. With astounding tolerance, the magistrate found there were extenuating circumstances, since the man was subject to the mania that struck people in the late stages of starvation. Elsewhere in Ireland, a passionate observer wrote, ‘Insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’ Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the Ethiopian army officer who ran with questionable success his country’s relief agency, had the same reaction when he saw cannibalism in an inadequate feeding centre in the Ethiopian highlands. These people were not to blame, he argued, as the Irish magistrate had nearly 130 years before. Starvation was not only a blight on the physical organism, but also on the brain. There was evidence that, under its influence, children were abandoned or suffocated by their mothers.

  Because of the blankness of the Bengali record, we do not know if, or on what scale, famine cannibalism existed. But Bengal would have been unique if it had not happened there also.

  6

  Villains: Ireland

  MOST FAMINES LEAVE behind in the survivors and their offspring the name of a supposed chief villain – the mal-administrator or tyrant, whom those who live and remember and pass on remembrance will forever after condemn and curse above all others. Particularly in the case of the Irish and Bengal famines, it could be argued that the disaster had many fathers, and even Mengistu, who is justifiably and overridingly the culprit for the Ethiopian famine, had the full-throated support of
members of the ruling military, the Derg, and of his head of security, Legesse Asfaw, in all he did and did not do.

  But to begin with Ireland: in a song often sung by Irish rugby fans, ‘The Fields of Athenry’, a young Irishman about to embark on a convict transport exchanges final words with his wife as ‘the prison ship lies waiting in the bay’, ready to bear him into exile in Australia. One of the verses points to the often-named great Satan of the Irish famine.

  By a lonely prison wall

  I heard a young maid calling,

  ‘Michael they are taking you away,

  For you stole Trevelyan’s corn

  That the young might see the morn.

  Now the prison ship lies waiting in the bay.’

  The corn referred to represents the grain that was shipped out of Ireland throughout the famine, popularly believed to have been sufficient to save the Irish. And Trevelyan is Charles Edward Trevelyan, who never visited Ireland during the crisis but who was, by way of his office at the Treasury in Whitehall, administrator of government relief to Ireland.

  Certainly, there was an unyielding quality in the gifted Trevelyan, a man of nearly forty years when the famine struck. He was an evangelical Christian, and when he became convinced that certain events were in accord with the workings of Providence, he could not be moved from accepting those events. Similarly, at a secular level, his belief in the theory of political economy promoted by John Stuart Mill, a prophet of the uselessness of government intervention in famine, and others was immutable and to be embraced rigorously. These qualities were construed as virtues by his masters and many of his contemporaries, and that was the way he construed them himself.