Three Famines (4 page)

B
EYOND PENANCE AND
prayer, starving people have always adopted other and more palpable strategies, and these recourses are again similar, famine to famine.

Among the images of women that appeared during the Irish famine in the
Illustrated London News
is the memorable
Woman Begging at Clonakilty
. Clonakilty is a town in West Cork, a region where the famine was at its most intense. In this renowned engraving, the woman has in her right arm a skeletal baby corpse. In her left hand she holds a begging bowl. The woman in the illustration, with her dead baby in her arms, is described as begging for money to buy a coffin for her dead daughter.

Her utter helplessness, however, her torpid look, hides the truth that, like other women in all famines, she has been an actor in her own tragedy, fighting it by every stratagem she can think of. She has pursued all her options with all her energy
on her way to this fatal state. Looking at her and her modern sisters, we feel a primal desire to believe that we could never let ourselves arrive at such a pass as this, that we would never become as passive as she seems to be. But there is another issue to raise. Even at these final stages of her hunger, is there any possibility that she is still actively pursuing her duty to survive? Apart from her obvious grief, is she using the small corpse as a begging aid? And should these two possibilities be mutually exclusive? In the extreme mental derangement that characterises famine victims, in the shrinkage of family feeling, which is one of the marks of starvation, both possibilities can operate together. And if she is begging for money for food as well as a child’s coffin, then that is exactly what modern famine experts call ‘a coping mechanism’.

The Red Cross and World Food Program estimate that the average healthy person needs 2010 calories of energy every day to do their normal tasks and resist disease. Yet one of the first coping mechanisms, from the cabins of Ireland to the huts of Bengal and the farmhouses and
tuqals
of Ethiopia, is to economise on the amount of food eaten daily in the family, thus reducing the intake necessary for good health. In East Africa, men and boys are fed first and the mother eats after them, having cut down on the food placed before the family. The appetite of the males often reduces even further what is left on the plate for women and girls. This is a form of customary practice, profoundly embedded though frowned on in the West, and sometimes condemned in tones that almost question the entitlement to relief of people who practise such cultural faux pas. But it is impossible to alter cultural habits in the span of a famine or even of a century.
Besides, it is likely that in the early stages of all famines – historic, recent and present – women in families have tended to take the greater portion of hunger on themselves.

The result of cutting down on food is, within a few days, a weakening of the immune system. As the family rations itself, keeping next year’s seed crop sacredly reserved in a container safe from hungry gaze, it also finds its members have less strength. The farmer and his wife and children, even if they can hang onto their land and their seed crop, will lack as much vigour as they had last year for working hard on the next crop which, even if not attacked by blight, burned off by drought or eaten by locusts, will be less bountiful. Thus shortage begets shortage.

Another coping strategy in famines is the sale of family assets. In Ireland, it was a matter of selling clothes or fishing nets. Sadly, people bringing their goods to town to sell them on market day found the prices they got much lower than they had hoped: many other people were doing the same as them in a glutted market. In Bengal and Ethiopia, families sold radios or bicycles, which had often been bought before the emergency especially so that they could later be exchanged for food in harder seasons. People in Bengal exchanged their pots and pans, furniture and trinkets for the fistfuls of food that grain trading pawnbrokers paid them from pouches they carried about with them. Early in the famine, twenty cart-loads of household utensils moved out of the port town of Barisal. One observer says the buyers were always ‘aprowl’ with their small rice bags and, if necessary, cash.

Bengalis sold the metal roofs of their huts. They sold their plough cattle to contractors supplying meat to the military
forces. They mortgaged or sold their rice-producing land. As a result, over 250,000 Bengali families lost all the land they possessed.

In Ethiopia, women and children made long journeys to town to sell firewood or wild bush food they had gathered. But, again, since so many others did that, the prices they got were much lower than in normal times. Selling livestock in Ethiopia, especially the family ox, and the necessity of ploughing by hand were considered akin to the loss of self, a crisis for all the family. The health of the ox, or the ability to buy a replacement one, was crucial to a man’s
amour-propre
as a functioning figure beneath God’s sky; the number of cattle a man owned confirmed his self-worth. Sale or loss of livestock was a humiliation for millions of pastoral peoples, such as the numerous minority people called the Afar – according to legend the descendants of Ham, Noah’s son. Their land was arid and included the Danakil Depression, a low-lying desert in the east of Ethiopia, one of the lowest and hottest places on earth, where some harvested salt. So among the pastoralists, the sale of animals was always considered a last option. An observer could tell how hard the Ethiopians were feeling hunger by the lines of their cherished cattle going to the towns for sale. The sickness or death of livestock could mean death for the family, in any case, because of the loss of the value of that cow and the loss of milk.
In extremis
, cattle could be slaughtered for scrawny meat. But that was the equivalent of a farmer and his family eating their seed for the next crop, devouring from within their family’s status and health.

In both the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the normal barter system broke down – no dealer wanted to
exchange food for clothes or kitchen utensils. So, like the pastoralists, farmers had to sell the family livestock, mainly oxen and goats, for money. What they acquired that way quickly vanished – not only on foodstuffs, but sometimes also on water and fodder for any remaining animals.

They could resort to local money-lenders, and might have already done so before the famine. If the latter, they were now in a frightful state of thraldom to these men, who often charged 100 per cent interest. Even those who were not in debt, however, might now approach the money-lender, but find it hard to get a loan.

In Bengal,
zamindars
, that is, landlords, were the chief source of lendings. Their money-lending had always had an impact on the life of Indian communities throughout the subcontinent. Often
zamindars
were absentees, living in Calcutta and other cities, but lending money at high interest to local figures, who then made loans at further interest. The practices of money-lenders in Bengal provoked frequent protest and a nineteenth-century rebellion led by the
bargadars
, sharecroppers. But when famine came and at some stage the
bargadars
and the agricultural peasants, the village tinsmiths or barbers, went to the lender’s house to plead for a loan, they found this minor grandee was more interested in demanding repayment of earlier loans than extending more money. In Bengal there also existed a culture of modest lending between families. In the crisis of 1943, those who had advanced money to their kinfolk began to call in their loans.

Some families cherished the hope that they could give their daughters in marriage to better-off families, who could
afford to pay a dowry of money and animals. But this was even more unlikely in famine times.

In Ireland the money-lenders were called
gombeen
men, from the Irish word
gaimbin
, meaning interest money. The
gombeen
men were often general storekeepers, usually willing to gouge the hungry with fierce loan rates. But, like the money-lenders of Bengal and Ethiopia, they had little interest in lending to people who occupied or owned little or no land they could offer as security, and who might be dead before the loan could be paid.

After reducing food intake, selling family possessions and taking loans, a hungry people’s next step in coping is to turn to food they would not normally eat, to the food they considered until now as food for their animals.

In Ireland, turnips had been a despised stockfeed plant. Some farmers in Kilkenny, a better-off eastern Irish county, who had lived well until the famine struck, now locked themselves away in secrecy to eat turnips. These more affluent people considered it shameful to devour turnip boxty (turnips turned into a form of flat cake or bread), or eat the mashed-turnip dish named champ. (Poorer folk, by contrast, tried to make a potato boxty out of their rotten tubers and ate it without any of the embarrassment the better-off turnip-eaters felt, but at much higher peril to their health.)

In Ethiopia, plants that grew on landraces, hybrids of wild and domesticated grains, were generally – like the Irish turnips – considered stockfeed, and so there was a similar
reluctance to eat them. Ethiopians lay under even more serious food prohibitions, and observed the same food laws concerning animals as the Jews. Animals with uncloven hoofs, and uncloven hoofed animals that did not chew their cud, had always been prohibited, and only those properly slaughtered could be eaten. The traditional slaughter required the animal to be turned to the east, and the prayers, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’, or, ‘In the name of Allah the Merciful’, to be recited. It is unlikely that Ethiopians would have eaten prohibited animals during the famine since they were very rarely found in the country, but no doubt if other meat was encountered, the hungry would not have enquired whether it had been slaughtered according to the proper rituals.

In Bengal, food taboos concerned pigs and turtles for Muslims, and cattle for Hindus. Widows were required to be vegetarians, to avoid foods associated with lustiness – meat, fish, onions, garlic and spices. Again, hunger must have often overcome these prohibitions. Yet many Brahmin women, the members of the intellectual and priestly caste, rather than lower themselves to hunt for or accept food, wasted to death in their homes because they could not bring themselves to eat gruel prepared by either lower-caste or Muslim hands.

As well as unaccustomed or unsanctioned foods, emergency food growing wild – food that is not the product of agriculture or the pastoral life – was sought by the hungry. These were foods only sporadically eaten in times of plenty, and which could not be depended on as a staple.

If the farmers of the Ethiopian highlands found ploughing by hoe intolerable, was there some cultural reason why the Irish did not save themselves by fishing? They proved, after all, to be energetic scavengers. Some argue that a cultural resistance to fish-eating influenced the Irish, but the ruthless appetite human beings extend to other, less succulent, life forms in any famine makes that unlikely.

In Ireland there were, in fact, a number of fishermen in places such as the village of Teelin on the north-west end of Donegal Bay who survived on their fish haul, mainly by selling it to buy quantities of other food. Part of their fish they dried and salted, but their salting and smoking system was very primitive. In Galway and Mayo, further down the coast, many herring fishermen were too poor to buy salt to preserve a catch. An observer from the central relief committee of the Society of Friends, the Quakers, a group who became highly active in famine relief in Ireland, declared that the finest fishing ground was off Portulin, a small village on the remote Erris Peninsula abutting the Atlantic in north-east Mayo. But the only access to and from the place was along the most primitive trails over a high, boggy mountain. Fish would begin to rot in the process of fishermen negotiating this terrain.

The Quaker observer also mentioned that though the Portulin mornings were often fine, the weather would change in the afternoon. Wind would spring up and blow with such violence that the curraghs, wickerwork frames covered with hide or canvas and crewed by four or five men, would be overset or, dependent on the direction of the gale, likely to be destroyed on a coastline of fierce cliffs broken only by the small coves of Portulin and Portacloy.

As for the rest, there were a number of realities that inhibited fishing. Firstly, particularly in the west of Ireland, there were few heavy fishing boats able to load up with large catches – and even those were only twelve to fifteen tons. The curraghs – owned by poor coastal fishermen – were very manoeuvrable, but not big enough to allow the use of nets and far too flimsy to reach the outer grounds where the fish were. In that regard, though lashed by frequent gales, the coasts of Scotland were a little more forgiving. But if an Irish curragh crew managed to reach the outer grounds and a gale blew up from the east, the men would then have to try to reach Halifax in Nova Scotia – for to attempt to row back to the Irish coast would be impossible. Some witnesses describe men going out in any weather to find fish, but for lack of a catch they were often forced, like Bengali fishermen later, to trade their nets for food. So the relief from fishermen around the coast was small, and tended to help out small village communities or single families rather than the mass of Irish.