Three Famines (9 page)

By then, 3 to 5 million Bengali deaths from famine had occurred.

Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, was a cultivated soldier and held, as well as his
viceregal post, the military role of commander-in-chief for India. Unlike most generals, Archibald Wavell had published his own anthology of poems, entitled
Other Men’s Flowers
, and a biography of the World War I commander Sir Edmund Allenby, a work that showed sensitivity for colonised people, the Egyptians and the Arabs in particular. He had himself lost an eye in that conflict. Married to a rather distracted woman named Eugenie, he may have been a non-practising homosexual. He enjoyed the company of his homosexual aide, Major Peter Coates, and in London stayed at the house of one of Coates’s boyfriends, the politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, a residence archly described by the British diplomat Harold Nicolson as a mixture of ‘baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no’.

Wavell knew from experience a military emergency when he saw one – he had been involved in a number of them. At the beginning of the war he had led a small and highly successful force in North Africa and conquered an Italian army that outnumbered it many times over. He had angered Churchill by reminding him that a huge death toll was not a sign of military success. But then he had been ordered to halt his advance into Libya and send troops to Greece. With his forces strung out between Greece and North Africa, those remaining in North Africa were surprised by the German General Rommel’s Afrika Korps’ counter attack of April 1941. Greece was a debacle, and the withdrawal to Crete no better. Then, as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia, he presided over the collapse of Singapore, Burma and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

Churchill did not blame Wavell for any of these disasters,
which were due sometimes to the folly and incompetence of generals under his command and often to the overwhelming numbers of the Japanese army. The prime minister still thought him one of the best generals of his era, though he also irascibly once said of him that he should be running a country golf course.

Wavell had come close to being appointed governor-general of Australia, a post that would have sidelined him for the rest of this historic phase. He seized the posting to India with some gratitude. In the months leading up to Lord Linlithgow’s retirement, he waited in London and spent each morning reading documents at the India office, developing a plan. He intended to tell Gandhi and Nehru, as well as others, including Mohammad Jinnah, that the British wanted self-government for India as early as possible. Then he proposed to leave them in a room with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutional and international law, so they could reach a constitutional answer to India’s problems, which he would then do his best to implement. Wavell’s argument was that though this was unorthodox, orthodox methods had already failed. Churchill and his cabinet were appalled at his plans. One leading bureaucrat said that Wavell gave no impression of being the strong ruler that a great soldier might be expected to be.

While Wavell was sitting in deliberations with the prime minister, India Secretary Leopold Amery pushed a note across the table that said that Churchill knew as much about India as George III did about the American colonies. From this and other signs, Wavell decided that the cabinet was ‘not honest in its expressed desire to make progress in India’. It would be
left for peacetime, another prime minister and another viceroy to negotiate Indian independence.

On the matter of Bengal, Churchill told Wavell that more food for India could not be provided without taking it from Egypt and the Middle East, where a reserve was being accumulated for other areas of battle and for the ultimate liberation of Greece and the Balkans. Wavell wrote in his journal, ‘Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and the liberated countries from starvation than the Indians.’ He knew there were special arrangements for feeding workers in essential industries, but he pointed out that practically the whole of India outside the rural districts was somehow engaged in the war effort, and that it was impossible to sort one particular individual from another ‘and feed only those actually fighting or making munitions or working in particular railways, as PM has suggested’.

In the week ending 9 October 1943, just under 2000 deaths were recorded in Calcutta, and 1600 the week before. The removal of corpses from the street became a municipal preoccupation. K. Santhanam, a former member of the Legislative Assembly and a journalist, believed 100,000 were dying of starvation in Bengal each week. By contrast, Leopold Amery in London said that between 15 August and 16 October a total of about 8000 had died in Calcutta from causes directly or indirectly connected to malnutrition.

Within a week of taking office in New Delhi on 20 October 1943, Wavell rushed to Calcutta and saw the dying in
the streets outside the gates of houses and the glass fronts of restaurants and bakeries. He intended to galvanise the entire government apparatus to tackle what he significantly called the ‘man-made’ crisis. Then he toured the
mofussil
itself, in particular the nearer western regions, Midnapore and Parganas. What he saw there – corpses scythed down at the height of their hunger by cholera or smallpox, and lying in the roads and ditches – disturbed him profoundly. It was a sight Linlithgow had never deigned nor dared to see. Wavell decided to use the army to aid the civil administration and introduced rationing in all areas in Bengal, including Calcutta. Air-raid wardens throughout the towns of Bengal were now put to the task of carrying bodies from houses and the streets, and burning them in pyres or burying them in mass graves.

Wavell’s most powerful and highly unpopular cable after this journey was addressed to Leopold Amery and Churchill. ‘Bengal famine is one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and is dangerous to our reputation here both among Indians and foreigners in India.’ His urgency was motivated in part by the desire to save Britain from the world’s censure, and to ensure no collapse of morale in the British Indian army. Indeed one of the chief terms of his appointment was that he should solve the crisis in Bengal, since it was beginning to get in the way of the war. And in that spirit he also cabled, ‘There is now a military as well as a charity problem, since army must have a stable base.’ But humanity and compassion were also at play, and he whipped up the inefficient government of Bengal to recognise and react to the scale of the event.

To the new viceroy, one of the minor villains of the famine
may have been Bengal’s chief minister, Khawaja Nazimuddin, whom the viceroy thought ‘straight but incapable’, and exactly the sort of man of whom the corrupt take advantage. And one of the corrupt in question, Wavell believed, was Nazimuddin’s minister for civil supplies, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former Oxford graduate, one of the founders of the Muslim League and a future prime minister of Pakistan. Suhrawardy, it was claimed, siphoned money from every project that was undertaken to ease the famine, and awarded to his associates contracts for warehousing, the sale of grain to governments, and transportation.

With some justice, Suhrawardy himself blamed the black marketeers and hoarders for the tragedy, and claimed that he had worked around the clock setting up food distribution centres and gruel kitchens all over the city. He argued that he had threatened the grain hoarders and black marketeers – mainly Hindus, he was careful to point out – with confiscation of their produce. This caused rice to appear in the shops of Calcutta sooner than it would have otherwise. Suhrawardy also declared himself to have gone to New Delhi many times begging for rice shipments to Bengal, but found, he said, that Hindus did not want to send rice to a region they saw as largely Muslim.

To Suhrawardy, the famine was entirely a sectarian tragedy.

Wavell’s motives for having the destitutes of Calcutta’s streets gradually removed to army holding camps from November of that year are not clear. It was a movement that the hungry
invaders of the city themselves resisted. But he also involved the army in food and medical relief. He supervised personally the running of kitchens for the famine victims still crowded into Calcutta, and brought in as many government agencies as he could to deal with the crisis. The fact that the army itself proved a creaky and inadequate agency of relief was not his fault.

Above all, he was willing to remain grossly unpopular with his masters by peppering them with cables and memoranda about the famine. Churchill would send a mocking cable to Wavell asking why, if food was so scarce, Gandhi hadn’t died yet? Unchastened, throughout the months of February and March 1944, Wavell continued to ask for assurances of substantial imports of grain. One of his cables declared that the attempt by His Majesty’s government to prove on the basis of defective statistics that India could do without the help demanded would be regarded in India, by both British and Indian opinion, ‘as utterly indefensible’. He considered his own resignation. ‘They must’, he wrote to London, ‘either trust the opinion of the man they have appointed to advise them on Indian affairs or replace him.’ No document so eloquently proves the moral courage and strength of character of Wavell.

Requests from Wavell in New Delhi for food imports into India continued, and finally, in March 1944, the British government offered 400,000 tons of wheat in exchange for 150,000 tons of rice. In contrast, the food stocks of the UK, with a population of about 50 million, rose by about 10 million tons in the second half of 1943. Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery backed up Wavell as far as he could,
but nonetheless was instructed by the war cabinet to suggest that Wavell announce the import of the 400,000 tons without referring to the 150,000 tons to be sent to Britain in exchange. Wavell wrote in his journal, ‘I shall do nothing so dishonest and stupid. And I shall not let HMG think that they have solved India’s problems for 1944 by 250,000 tons when I have told them all along ten million is the minimum.’ And then again, ‘I think I have to resign to bring the situation home to them. They refuse to approach the Americans for shipping.’ Wavell tried to work through the newly founded United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRA), without success. Eventually he himself approached Roosevelt, asking for US shipping to bring grain to India. To Churchill, this was nearly as bad as collaboration with an enemy. In June, Wavell did manage to extract another 200,000 tons from the war cabinet, though this was still far short of what he believed was needed. When the respected prime minister of Canada, William Mackenzie King, offered a shipment of wheat as a gift from Canada, the offer was delayed – for lack of available shipping, Churchill said. Australia had a surplus of 4 million tons of wheat and large supplies of meat, and said they were willing to send both to India, but, again because of the lack of shipping, the offer was turned down. Churchill finally requested US assistance in mid 1944, but by then Roosevelt had also committed the mass of his shipping to the European conflict.

Once the emergency, both the military and humanitarian, ended, Wavell was not above the stratagems of other viceroys, particularly playing-off Hindu against Muslim. But his behaviour regarding the famine was professional and
humane, even though circumstances – his late arrival on the scene and the failures of others – prevented him from saving millions of Bengalis.

We cannot know how many died in the famine. Frequently, too, there was no relative left to report a death. In 1943, Amery put the number of deaths at 700,000. The Famine Inquiry Commission estimated 1.5 million, which was believed to be too low. India’s home minister in the early years of independence, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, put the number at 3 million. Others, such as the writer Kali Ghose, mentioned 3.5 million to 4.5 million. Many experts mention 5 million, but the Communist Party of India nominated more than two times that number.

I
T IS POSSIBLE
to attach the ripest and least ambiguous blame for any modern Ethiopian famine first, in the early 1970s, to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and then, even more notably, to his successor, the military officer Major (later Colonel) Mengistu Haile Mariam in the 1980s. The emperor and the tyrant, both for the sake of their imperium and of planned events to celebrate it, denied the existence of famine in their country even as they lived within its reach, when any limo-borne deviation from their daily travels would have proved its clamorous and multifarious existence. In both cases, their denial involved all the organs of state and all permitted media. As for foreign journalists, strategies were devised to keep them in the capital and away from the dying fields, no matter how close those might have been, for as long as possible.

The slight-built, serene Haile Selassie came to maturity
with the belief that famine was an inevitable phenomenon in the empire and an inevitable accompaniment to the imperial processes by which Ethiopia was ruled. Selassie was born in July 1892 in eastern Ethiopia near the city of Harar. His birth name was Tafari Makonnen, to which the honorific Ras, ‘prince’, was added. Hence, Ras Tafari, from which derived the name of the sect that still venerates him. He spent his youth at the imperial court of Addis Ababa observing his relative, the Emperor Menelik II. Menelik, who ruled until 1913, had defeated Italian incursions in such famous battles as Adowa on the northern border of Ethiopia, and kept his country of so many nationalities together by force. He also had his own prodigious famine, on a scale worth examining.

Indeed from the reign of Menelik II to that of Haile Selassie, food policy in Ethiopia was based on attempts to starve regions that harboured grudging subjects or were in open rebellion. Ethiopia teemed with nationalities – Amharic, Oromo, Tigrayan, Ogadenian, Sidamo, Afar and eighty or so others. Though many Amharics were poor, it was from this Christian tribe that Menelik and later Haile Selassie rose. In Addis, the Amharic supplied the governmental elite. The Amharic language in Ethiopia was considered the equivalent of Mandarin in China, and it remains so to this day. Under Haile Selassie, the Eritreans suffered the same imposition and told of people’s hands being lopped off for failure to speak the imperial tongue.

The great struggle of Amharic imperial governments was to keep Ethiopia together by brutality and the application of want as an act of discipline. Under pressure from the great powers – the British, the French and the Germans – in
1889 Menelik had yielded up the northernmost province, Eritrea – the equivalent of Scotland or Ireland in the British empire – to the Italians. But when it was won back in World War II, following the defeat of the Italians, it, like the rest of the country, was made ruthlessly to cohere.

Menelik’s famine, the famine of 1888, was known as the
Kefu Qän
– the Evil Days. It had in fact begun even before Menelik took the throne by force from his predecessor, Johannes IV. The stimulus for the famine was a curious variation on the usual Ethiopian tragedy of drought. In March 1888, Johannes had gone north and besieged an Italian garrison at Sa’ati on the Eritrean coast. When the Italians surrendered, the emperor captured a great deal of military and other material, including a herd of cattle. The cattle, imported by the Italians from India and southern Russia, carried bovine cholera or rinderpest, endemic to the steppes of central Asia. Ethiopian livestock had not been exposed to it at all.

As Johannes marched south again, he spread the disease through his empire – an empire soon to be Menelik’s. First of all, the disease struck Tigray in the north and then moved onwards to the south. The highlands, with their plentiful farming population, were hard hit, but so were the pastoral peoples. An Ethiopian, Asmil Giorgis, observed that the extermination of the cattle spread from the Red Sea port of Massawa to Kafa (in the extreme south), and from Harab (in the Sudan borderlands) to Harar in the east. As oxen died, Ethiopian farmers found themselves deprived of their
ploughing oxen. To add to the disaster, rains failed to fall, and whatever harvest appeared was attacked by plagues of locusts and army worms. In the lowlands, when their cattle dropped dead, pastoralists were immediately deprived of their family wealth and food. There were no relief agencies at all to help, and no organised government relief. Internal conflicts, and the Ethiopian war against Italy and the Sudan, continued with conscription of young men for the army, and this led to the plunder of village granaries by soldiers.

It is believed that an astounding number, a third of the Ethiopian population, died over the four years from 1888 to 1892. It suited Menelik’s chroniclers to depict the famine as yet another example of a people struck by natural causes, unabetted by political and social factors, and responded to mercifully by a compassionate emperor. But, as in pre-famine Ireland, the underlying conditions of land tenure in which the Ethiopian peasant lived in 1888 left him and his family in a state where hunger was a familiar companion. Under the landholding system named
gult
, the tenant had to pay 75 per cent of his produce to his landlord. He was required to provide free labour for the landlord’s farm – as the possessors of Irish potato plots were; free transport of the landlord’s crops; firewood for his fuel; and, on demand, unpaid labour as a domestic cook, a guard or a builder of granaries. The peasant was utterly concerned with subsistence and was unable to absorb the shock of any emergency, any inroad on any aspect of his subsistence.

The regions of Tigray, Gondar and Gojjam – that is, the entire north – were struck by the failure of the harvest in November 1888. This was the major harvest of the
year, dependent on the mid-year rains called the
kremt
or
meher
– the same rains that would fail to turn up in the early 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and in 1983 under the tyrant Mengistu.

The scenes of the
Kefu Qän
go largely unrecorded in Europe, except for the occasional account of European witnesses. In October 1890, the Italian government representative in Showa in central Ethiopia declared that people were resorting to cannibalism. Ferdinando Martini, an Italian who later became governor of Eritrea, left a picture of what the famine was like, describing how, in the countryside: ‘We are accosted for help, and from their deathbeds suddenly rise a mob of skeletons whose bones can be seen under the taut skin as in the mummified skeleton of St Bernard. They cry,
meskin, meskin
(help, help). I stumble on young boys searching in the excrement of camels to find a grain of durra.’ Parents sold their children as slaves to the Arab traders rather than see them starve. Bandits roamed the countryside, taking the already depleted possessions of ordinary people. Lions, leopards, jackals and hyenas became so confident in the incapacity of humans to resist them that they prowled the villages and even the larger cities to feast on the victims. In some villages they would attack the living who, lacking the strength to defend themselves, were dragged screaming into the night. The usual famine diseases – smallpox, typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera and influenza – bore away the weakened.

As nine out of every ten cattle in the country perished and seed withered in the ground, refugees headed for the coast or the cities, convinced – like others in the past and future – that there would be grain there. But the Italians in Asmara, the
capital of Eritrea, were so appalled by the numbers of refugees that they closed the gates. Other victims made for Entoto, Menelik’s capital near the present site of Addis Ababa.

Amharic accounts of the famine, including those of Menelik’s official chronicler, tell us that Menelik responded like a genial and responsible leader. He gave out food from his own granaries, forbade the consumption of meat in his palaces, distributed healthy cattle, had rudimentary shelters built for the starving and hoed in the fields to show the peasantry that it was not beneath an emperor to labour without oxen. The difference was, of course, that he did not have to hoe all day, nor did he eat at a table where the food dwindled and then disappeared.

Menelik’s successor, the Emperor Joshua, was never crowned, and was disliked for his rumoured conversion to Islam and his sympathy during World War I with the Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary, who urged him to attack British Sudan and Italian Eritrea. He was deposed in favour of Menelik’s widow, who elevated Ras Tafari to the role of crown prince, heir to the throne and regent. Ras Tafari, the future Haile Selassie, was a small scrap of a man with piercing eyes, who now set about courting the West, to whom he would become a darling. As I write, there are still Europeans and Americans alive who were charmed by him and cannot tolerate a word against him. He had the cachet, too, of being, ultimately, emperor of the only African country not in any permanent way conquered by the European empires.

In 1923, the true power in Addis, he abolished slavery,
and newspapers began to operate, most of them heavily in favour of the crown prince. He toured Europe and negotiated the entry of Ethiopia into the League of Nations. He met the Pope and Mussolini, visited the great capitals and received an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. The impression he gave – that under him Ethiopia was a rational empire – would remain in place for decades after his fall.

After the death of Menelik’s widow in 1930, Haile Selassie became Emperor, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings. He improved the streets and buildings of Addis, and introduced electric light for his coronation and that of his wife, the Empress Menen.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, when Caproni bombers blasted villages and machine guns slaughtered the antiquely armed Ethiopian army, drove Haile Selassie into exile in Europe, where he became the African favourite of all opponents of fascism. He returned to Ethiopia in 1940 by grace of British forces, which had cleared the country of the Italian army. After the war, he helped to found the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and persuaded other African states that its headquarters should be placed in Addis – the capital of the only uncolonised nation in Africa.

And yet, internally, his state was run like a medieval kingdom, with accompanying poverty and chronic hunger. After he fell from power, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapúscínski visited a number of the emperor’s old officials who were in hiding, desolated and demented by the loss of their status. These deposed men spoke graphically about the way the emperor had governed. Whether he was at home in the palace
of Menelik in Addis, or touring the provinces, exacting from them food for his entourage and setting up tented cities to accommodate his court, the emperor maintained government by devoting to all major aspects of the state an hour at a time. He presided, for example, over an Hour of the Ministers, an Hour of Assignments, an Hour of Development, an International Hour, an Army-Police Hour, and so on. The Hour of Development, in a country where most public facilities, and thus food distribution, remained primitive, occurred between four and five in the afternoon. In a special black tent, the Hour of Justice was held. In an even more medieval pattern, there were the Hour of the Cashbox and the Hour of Informants, at which people would denounce ministers of state and other officials, and an Hour of the Supreme Court of Final Appeal. At the end of the latter hour, those who by clamour or main force did not manage to get the emperor’s attention for their final appeal, went away unheard. The hours, along with his setting of some ministers to spy on others, and a full-fledged secret security force, allowed him to rule by dividing a cabinet that lived in fear of his anger and judgement. Satisfactory governance did not exist, and the focus of cabinet was on Addis Ababa or whatever site the emperor’s court happened to be.

Selassie crushed a number of regional rebellions and dealt with minor famines by ignoring them – the one in Tigray in 1963, and in Wollo in 1966. When, in the early 1970s, UNICEF tried to bring the attention of the government to the drought and crop failure in Wollo and Tigray, the vice minister of planning told them, ‘If we have to describe the situation in the way you have in order to generate international
assistance, then we don’t want that assistance. The embarrassment to the government isn’t worth it. Is that perfectly clear?’

The 1972-3 famine, of which the emperor attempted to achieve wilful ignorance, struck in particular the two northern provinces, Tigray and Wollo. The famine began with the failure of the main rains in mid 1972. Nor did the
belg
, springtime rains, come in early 1973. The lack of
kremt
rains in mid 1972 caused an almost immediate disaster in the pastoral lowlands towards the Sudanese border to the west, and over in the grazing grounds of the east, bordering Somalia. But it was the lack of
belg
rains in early 1973 that had a devastating, if slower, effect in the farming highlands.

Amartya Sen calculates, however, that in 1972–3 there was only a 7 per cent decline in the harvest from normal output. Seven per cent should not have produced famine. There was no sudden and precipitate lack of food output in Ethiopia, certainly not enough to justify the emperor’s famine. Yet by December 1972, the Ethiopian Red Cross was trying to succour a thousand refugees from Wollo who had arrived outside Addis Ababa but whom the officials of the court did not want to see inside the capital. In this time of want, the Ethiopian peasants undertook a long march towards the cities, just as the Irish and Bengalis had done – the impulse served as a sort of ‘symbolic performance’; a remonstrance, as one commentator has called it.

The emperor ordered that road blocks be set up to stop
more peasants from marching on the capital. He changed the itinerary of a visit to Wollo in November 1972 to avoid meeting a crowd of 20,000 people who were gathering to beg for his mercy. It was a priority for the emperor and his officials that there should be no food demonstrations inside Addis, and he always made sure there was food for sale at an acceptable price in his city, in the hope of keeping its citizens ignorant of outside events. Nonetheless, there was political activity involving university students who, in the imperial court’s eyes, should have been more grateful for their education. They had already embarrassed the emperor by responding to a 1970 cholera epidemic in the countryside by taking preventive health education into the villages. Now, in 1973, they tried to hold an exhibition of famine pictures taken in Wollo and Tigray, but it was broken up by the police. In the Wollo capital of Dessie, school students protested against the famine. A number were arrested, and six students were shot down by the police and army. And when foreign correspondents asked to go to the northern provinces to observe the famine, the emperor refused to permit them, arguing that the region was subject to bandit attacks and the roads were unsafe.