Three Famines (2 page)

I
N 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 the 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.

In the early twentieth century – sixty years after the failure of potatoes had put the English peasantry under pitiful pressure, subjected the Scots to the most acute want and coercive emigration, and come close to destroying the peasant population of Ireland – Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragettes went on hunger strikes in prison to shame the authorities and achieve equal suffrage for women. The government feared the potency of this individually chosen hunger by women. In all cases it ordered forced feeding, which was resisted by the hunger-striking young women. But largely, through occasional release and other stratagems of the authorities, the suffragettes survived their gestures.

In 1981, the Irish republican prisoner Bobby Sands, and a number of other prisoners in the H-Blocks in HM Prison Maze, Belfast, volunteered for a hunger strike. It was designed to lend moral weight to their demand for political status rather than the criminal status imposed on them by British law. Sands began his starving process first, in the hope his objective would be achieved before his comrades needed to start theirs. He died after sixty-six days.

Without questioning the courage of either the suffragettes or Bobby Sands, or the obviously disturbing impact their deaths had on those in power, I choose here to look at cases of unchosen hunger, unchosen necrosis, unchosen obliteration.

‘The stomach is cruel,’ said a Bengali victim in 1943. ‘Unless you give it something to eat, it won’t let you sleep.’ But as the stomach howls, the body slowly devours its own substance. Starvation, for Bobby Sands equally as for the millions of its unwilling victims, is the ultimate stage of a long period of malnutrition.

The stages the body descends through while undergoing starvation are well described in medical literature. After a person lacks food for a few days, glucose, no longer absorbed from nourishment, begins to be supplied by invaluable glycogen stored in the liver, and from proteins and body fats. Body fat is broken down into fatty acids and some replacement glycerol, which the body transforms into a small amount of glucose. Amino acids are also processed into glucose. Fatty acids can for a time be used to maintain muscle, and so the glucose is used to sustain the brain, above all. Blood glucose levels, on which the organs and muscles depend for function, begin an inevitable drop. The decline becomes serious, though not yet irreversible.

Now, over ensuing days and weeks, the liver begins to transform fatty acids in the body into an increasing number of ketones – chemicals that assist the metabolism of healthy bodies, but that are now reaching unsafe levels. They too serve to run the brain. But the heart and the blood cannot readily use such an excess of ketones and thus begin to be damaged. Severe damage to the heart is one of the symptoms of the late stages of starvation.

The rate of the breakdown of proteins continues and so the body begins to look for protein in its own muscles and in their cells. Over time, the muscles waste pitifully, and the
cells themselves, plundered of fatty acid, erode, death entering their very nucleus.

This wasting or self-devouring state is named marasmus and at this stage, because of the collapse of the blood’s immune system, opportunistic diseases – malaria, shigella, dysentery or typhus, for example – can easily kill the victim. Deaths from the absolutely
final
phases of starvation make up as few as 10 per cent of the total deaths caused by famine.

Kwashiorkor, the swelling of the bellies of children, which we see in news footage from Africa, is a cruel accompaniment to starvation. The breakdown of muscle causes any remaining fat to accumulate in the belly. It is a condition not unknown in the West among alcoholics and, according to some estimates, 50 per cent of elderly Americans in nursing homes. It also occurs in victims of anorexia.

In the earlier stages of starving, hunger can diminish as the body attempts to negotiate what it hopes will be a short episode of want. But when, in days or perhaps a few weeks, it becomes apparent that the crisis will continue, a preoccupation with food becomes so intense that it has the power to overturn the starving person’s normal morality and sense of self. The victim becomes a new person. The fastidious become slovenly; the kindly become aggressive; the moral are caught up in the great amorality of famine. Fraternity and love wither. Judgement vanishes and a hyperactive anxiety seizes the mind – it is this that in part drives people out onto the roads and gives them the nervous energy to seek nourishment. Perhaps because the brain is, at the same time, sustained yet confused by an unfamiliar proportion of
ketones and glucose, emotional distress, profound depression and agitation overwhelm the victim. In some, a furious and disproportional shame at their condition will cause them to wall themselves in their houses and never re-emerge. Sexual desire dwindles. Sleep brings little comfort, for most starving cannot sleep properly. There are spasms of anger and hysteria, which mystify the aid-givers, should they turn up. Delusions and illusions overtake the mind – in many cases the starving become psychotic and sometimes do not even recognise food when at last they find it. Yet dreams of cannibalism also come to torment the mind.

Lieutenant Colonel K. S. Fitch, who saw many starving in military hospitals, wrote a medical history of the Bengal famine and gave a fascinating picture of the mystifying characteristics of the famished. The desperate cases would abscond from hospital to disappear into the uncertainty of the open countryside – ‘a mass and individual urge to roam’ – feeling driven by an inner need to go on doomed searches for food. In one destitute hospital, an emaciated man was seen sitting on a hospital bed with a dish of rice and curry in front of him, and crying out for sustenance. Starvation had conditioned him not to see the food before him. Fitch mentions decayed and septic teeth, coated tongues, and an irritable and morose childishness and unconsciousness of surroundings. The hungry would pass stools and urine wherever they were. ‘The human destitute became closely akin to the starving pariah dogs seen in eastern bazaars.’

When starvation is well-advanced in a population, relief agencies must be careful with the food they provide to sufferers. World War II survivors of the concentration camps of
Europe and the prison camps of the Japanese often describe fellow prisoners, after liberation, enjoying unaccustomed access to as much food as they wanted, and then dying rapidly and unexpectedly. A sudden large intake of nourishment gives bacteria and viruses the minerals they need to rebound almost instantly and to attack the body, whose own immune system has barely begun to rebuild itself. And since the body’s organs have not had time to accommodate themselves to an onslaught of plenty, they fail in their attempt to deal with it.

S
EASONS OF NEED
and marginal survival for millions generally precede a famine.

The Irish were familiar with a certain level of food shortage. Visitors to nineteenth-century Ireland, usually coming in the summertime, were struck by the obvious hunger that afflicted the peasantry as they waited for the next potato harvest. Travelling from Dublin to Carlow in midsummer 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville was shocked by the poverty he saw. ‘The population looks very wretched. Many wear clothes with holes or much patched. Most of them bare-headed and barefoot … it is a frightening thing, I assure you, to see a whole population reduced to fasting like Trappists, and not being sure by fasting of surviving to the next harvest.’ Summer visitors such as de Tocqueville travelled by main roads, and if the people on the highways presented such a picture, what must things have been like in remoter Ireland?

All this would explain the emotional and sometimes poetic anticipation of the harvest. When the blight came, an Irishman, remembering the days of plenty, wrote, ‘A fond farewell to the white potatoes, it was good to be near them; always arriving in good humour, laughing at us at the head of the table. They were a help to the nurse, to the young and old, to weak and strong.’

Though they did not know it, the potato as the main item of diet for millions of the Irish protected them from scurvy, which occurred elsewhere in Europe, and from pellagra, the vitamin-deficiency disease endemic to those parts of the United States and Europe in which maize was the staple. Potatoes provided the Irish peasant with more than twice the protein of today’s recommended level for active males, possessing nearly twice the energy value, three times the amount of calcium and three times the amount of iron. Sir William Petty, a famed statistician (or ‘political arithmetician’, as the term then went), said that ‘six out of eight of all the Irish fed chiefly upon milk and potatoes’.

The potato had arrived in Spain from Central or South America, one of the less treasured items discovered by Spanish incursions, and reached Ireland in about 1590. There, it came to replace oatmeal as the main food. It was a popular food in Britain and Eastern Europe. By contrast, the French despised it as a stockfeed, and better-off Germans considered its consumption the mark of a peasant. But the potato was iconic in Ireland, and its obliteration in this garden and that created an enormous consternation.

An extraordinary variety of potato existed, and not all Irish were growing the same species. There is a welter of
names – English Reds, Apples, White Eyes, Barbour’s Wonders, Wicklow Banners, Coppers, Pink Eyes, Flat Spanish. On the edge of the famine, the poor were increasingly growing a potato called the Lumper, which was resistant to the disease named curl. Curl weakened the plant by attacking its leaves, but not the potato itself. Lumpers were not as succulent as Apples, but for the Irish small farmer and peasantry they were very reliable – as assured as the sun coming up.

The Irish ate their potatoes by their peat fires, the parents and older children sitting on stools, picking potatoes from a bowl and dipping them in a dish of salt. Such a meal was called ‘dip at a stool’. If possible, as they ate they drank buttermilk.

The three million or so Irish most vulnerable to the famine lacked livestock, except that thousands of cabins were home not only to a family but to a pig, ‘Paddy’s pig’, which would be sold in the spring or early summer so that the family could buy oatmeal and other food to tide them over till the next potato crop.

Similarly, Bengalis generally were poor in livestock. Their staple was rice, which was often parboiled while unmilled and still in its outer husk. This form of cooking happened to drive the B vitamins, thiamine, riboflavin and niacin, into the very centre of the grain, though the Bengali peasant knew nothing of the beneficence of this effect, any more than the Irish peasant did of the vitamins and minerals available in the potato.

The Bengalis were also fish-eaters. Most of the fish they ate were not from the Bay of Bengal but from the river systems. One of their favourites was the climbing perch, able to
work its way across a paddy field, by the motion of its fins and gill covers, from one water course to another. Fishermen would sell the more succulent parts of the fish to better-off folk, and the poor ate fish heads and entrails.

Lentils were available to them, mainly through the markets, and would increase in price beyond the reach of threatened people once the famine began. Rice and fish are still the staples of Bengali life, but their fish, and the fish markets, have been diminished somewhat since the famine by overpopulation and accompanying pollution. Fish on their own – even had the starving had the energy to pursue them – were not plentiful enough to save the Bengalis.

In the highlands of Ethiopia, the equivalent of potatoes or rice was a grain named teff. It had aspects of convenience that had helped it become the staple crop of millions. Other crops often grown on the larger farms, or by landlords, included varieties of wheat, sorghum and a plant named zengada, a wild sorghum that grew in land races – that is, areas of unfarmed land that nonetheless could produce edible grains. Farmers might also grow white barley, maize, millet, peas, rapeseed and linseed. Barley was grown mainly as a stock feed. Durra, a form of wheat now considered a health food in the West, was also popular. Grown in the south-west of the country, around the city of Jimma, coffee was a major crop for trading and was enjoyed in the home as well, where the offer of strong coffee from beans roasted on a small fire was one of the major Ethiopian courtesies. Farmers throughout the country
also grew chat, a mild narcotic whose leaves people chewed. Most of it was exported to Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

But the chief crop for a highland family’s subsistence remained the four varieties of teff. Teff seeds were small, and so the seed crop did not take up much room in the farmhouse. It was easy for the farmwife to grind to a flour, from which the Ethiopians made their chief meal, the huge, thin pancake bread, injera – a fermented bread, bitter to any palate unfamiliar with it. Large circles of injera bread, spread on a low table or a large tray, are heaped with lentils and chickpeas, and each member of the family tears off a segment of the thin bread and scoop up the lentils and other food to form something like an open tortilla.

Ethiopian farmers look on teff with the same reverence the Irish displayed for the potato. They know that it is an ancient seed and a mercy of God. It is also high in calcium, phosphorus, iron, potassium, thiamine, amino acids and more.

The pastoral people in Ethiopia and Eritrea and the semi-nomadic people who lived in the eastern lowlands of Ethiopia near Somalia and the Red Sea, or in the western lowlands near the Sudanese border, owned camels, but above all the livestock they treasured were longhorn zebu cattle. Creatures so cherished by the pastoral Ethiopians look very scrawny and are often diseased, but they were beautiful and important in the eyes of their owners and produced milk, essential to their existence. Pastoralists also owned goats, which they used for meat and also for milk. They lived, and often still live, in
tuqals
– fold-up beehive shelters of grass and bark, easily loaded onto a camel if the livestock chose to move on to new
pastures. As materially poor as they might seem to outsiders, to them their lives were the only desirable version. Yet they knew that some sudden affliction or some drastic failure of rain had the power to suspend and even destroy this.

The failure of potatoes, the lack of rice, the withering of fields of teff were the various instigators that created the conditions for these three great famines, even though for their true causes we must eventually look to other factors.