Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a nationalist newspaper published in Bengali throughout the region, but also in English in Calcutta, more predictably, but with no less bravery, also published famine photographs, in the teeth of the chief press adviser’s warning that the newspaper was ‘very near the borderline and might get into trouble’.

  One of the photographs Stephens published was the Bengali equivalent of the Woman Begging at Clonakilty: a woman who has come to the city from the mofussil and now sits, head in hands, beside an infant wrapped in rags from which a skeletal arm appears. The infant’s small face resembles that of a withered, elderly man, and the infant may be alive or dead, but if he or she is alive, death is obviously imminent. In another, a woman squats on her haunches by her two dead children. In a further photograph, two older children, ribs protruding, nurse a boy on what looks like rush matting set on the pavement. There were many photographs of huge-eyed children (for the eyes of the starving do not reduce when all else does) and one of a man collapsed on a road in a gutter with one foot still lying on the pavement. They are precisely the kind of scenes the Illustrated London News published from Ireland, and in their raggedness and the withering of their last shreds of muscle, the Bengalis in these pictures share such a terminal state of humanity that they lose national particularity and could equally be figures from Ireland and Ethiopia.

  The reality was that Bengal became a closed region to journalists, both as an arena of war and a site of famine. But former member of the Bengal legislature K. Santhanam, reporting for the Hindustan Times, toured the famine area and ultimately wrote a book on the famine entitled The Cry of Distress. He visited first the north-east area of Bengal at Loharjang, usually a prosperous area. He found it much changed. Most of the children were skeletons, the destitutes were hollowed out and in despair and the middle class were now feeling the hardship acutely. One of the organisers of a relief committee in the area, whose family owned some land, had borrowed 1200 rupees from the Provident Fund, and it had gone into trying to buy highly priced rice on the black market. He belonged to the sort of people who could permit themselves to beg, and whose borrowing power was exhausted. In many cases, farmers had already sold their land and were thus trying to take in a harvest that would belong utterly to the landlord or the hoarder.

  Crossing the river at Loharjang, Santhanam saw women and children squatting or lying pell-mell in slush in the narrow streets. The nakedness of the corpses in the street shocked him and he saw a mother trying to protect her child’s naked body from a biting wind with part of the rag she was wearing.

  Temporary ‘destitute houses’ – something like the Irish workhouses – were created by the authorities, Santhanam reported. In Comilla (in present-day Bangladesh), on the eastern side of Bengal and quite close to the Burmese border, the destitutes were locked up inside buildings by the Red Turbans, the police, and cried out to him, saying they would rather die in the streets. In Chandpur, a little to the west but still in modern-day Bangladesh, he witnessed the handout of inadequate khitchri or gruel, and the tendency of some to choose death over a begging destitution. Santhanam declared that he thought the gruel so inadequate that it lengthened life only at the cost of inflicting a more drawn-out suffering. ‘The smell of the khitchri was thus repulsive, the colour blackish, the whole substance was almost as liquid as water itself; it was not pleasing or soothing for the stomach either; it produced a feeling of nausea (apart from the nausea caused by fasting).’ It did not contain, he said, even half the calories required for survival.

  Yet, while the famine did its work, there were few Santhanams to record it.

  Under Mengistu, as under Emperor Haile Selassie, there was no halfway free press, and no editor such as Ian Stephens to alert the outside world. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, as head of the RRC, was under pressure to depict the famine as a result of the failure of the belg rains in 1983 rather than as government supineness. In May 1984, the RRC used the widespread failure of these short belg rains as a pretext for claiming catastrophic drought. The RRC claimed that the highlands of Wollo, Bale and Showa were the major belg-production areas and that the fall of the belg accounted for at least half the annual production of these areas. Belg crops, however, produced only a small proportion of the food grown in the north.

  The 1984 drought was thus made the absolute cause of the famine. It proved an excellent scapegoat. Its effects were visually and statistically dramatic – production in Wollo was only 28 per cent of the 1983 level. Giorgis did not mention that perhaps the main cause of the famine could be the campaign of the Ethiopian army and air force against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front in North Wollo from 1980–5. The TPLF sought to focus the Tigrayan people’s anger at the continuing Amharic supremacy of Addis, which they believed had gone undiminished, but with a newer, even more savage face. The zone of severe famine coincided with the war zone and the phases of the developing famine corresponded with the major military actions.

  Giorgis, however, continued to claim that he was, in effect, the chief bearer of the news of an act of God – drought resulting in hunger. Whereas, according to one commentator and Africa expert, Alex de Waal, the famine was a war crime. Giorgis would argue that he had tried to persuade Mengistu to acknowledge the famine, and had pleaded with members of the Derg to recognise the imminent danger. He found that they believed sufficiently in the famine, though they did not say so explicitly, to send him around the world – of course, in the most luxurious travelling conditions – to visit sceptical governments and agencies in Europe and North America, and to alert them to the coming threat to Ethiopia. Thus Mengistu was grudgingly willing to acknowledge at an international level a crisis he was determined not to recognise at home. Giorgis admits that on his travels he lied about the policy and political objectives of the Derg, in particular about their purchase of military equipment, in the hope that the flow of aid already being planned would not be diminished. Giorgis had the uncomfortable problem of explaining away not only his master’s attitude, but – as time passed – Mengistu’s expensive plans for the anniversary of the revolution and his unrepentant and increased purchase of weaponry. He was also asked what the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were doing for Ethiopia, apart from selling them weapons and providing military advisers. The Eastern bloc was, in fact, giving no aid.

  If Giorgis later claimed, after his defection to the West in late 1985, to have been a whistleblower within his own country and the world at large, he did not achieve a great success. In the West, as a representative of the Derg he was not trusted, and even now many people from East Africa claim that his dissent from Mengistu’s policies was not as robust as he would say later in his memoirs. But that he energetically carried qualified news of the coming Ethiopian disaster to the nations of the West is undeniable.

  It was, as in the 1972 famine, British television who really alerted the West to the catastrophe. By late October 1984, BBC News broadcast images it had taken outside the town of Korem in Tigray. It was, said the brave commentator Michael Buerk, a former print journalist then in his late thirties, a famine on ‘a biblical scale’, that is, a consuming, apocalyptic famine, with a child or an adult in Korem dying every twenty minutes. The night following the first report a similar story was run, involving footage from Makale, a little north of Korem and the capital of Tigray. A documentary named Seeds of Despair had appeared before Michael Buerk’s reporting. The journalists who filmed these reports had been able somehow to find their way out of town by night and talk their way through roadblocks.

  Western Europe and North America were galvanised by the images from northern Ethiopia. As the whole world began to see the footage, and a tide of private aid began to flow, 400,000 bottles of whisky were being shipped from Britain to Addis Ababa for the tenth anniversary of the revolution.

  10

  Famine Diseases

  THROUGHOUT ALL FAMINES, there are parallels between the diseases that opportunistically strike the malnourished. Dysentery and diarrhoea
, often caused by people eating unfamiliar food, whether wild or supplied as relief, strike hundreds of thousands in a way that is not necessarily as fatal at first as it will be later in the hunger process. Through the process of dehydration, dysentery generally kills children before adults. (The elderly, by contrast, are generally borne away by pneumonia.)

  In Ireland, dysentery and diarrhoea showed themselves from the beginning in gastro-enteric symptoms caused by eating diseased potatoes. Dr Daniel Donovan of Skibereen in County Cork found ‘starvation dysentery’ almost universal among the destitute, and though it was resistant to treatment, treat it he tried. Donovan said that the sufferer’s face was ghost-like and the voice a low whine, very similar to what he called the ‘cholera whine’. The smell from the waste was almost intolerable, like that of ‘putrid flesh in hot weather’. He said that the patient, though he retained his faculties to the end, died without a struggle.

  As the food supply declined, one of the other earliest diseases to appear was scurvy, caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. Since scurvy is now seen as a disease easily cured by fresh vegetables and fruit, it is hard to imagine a world in which it was one of the most dreaded diseases. It had a terrible impact on the system: disorientation, depression, agony of the joints, loss of teeth and such ultimate failure of organs that the skin turned purple. Dark purple blotches progressed up the leg to the middle of the thigh, so in the nineteenth century, scurvy was sometimes named Black Leg. In the last phase there was a relentless spate of retching, which eventually exhausted the heart. The Poor Law Commission in Dublin was so worried about scurvy that it sent a directive to those who were running soup kitchens, asking them to try to include well-cooked vegetables in the meals issued inside the walls of the workhouses. Sadly, vegetables too well cooked lack vitamin C as well.

  Hunger edema, which the Irish called dropsy, was common in all three famines in this book. Since the starving body consumes its glucose, fat and protein, and has eroded the muscles, the body can no longer operate efficiently. Neither the heart nor the kidneys are any longer functioning normally, and death soon results from heart failure. Edema was not so commonly filmed in Ethiopia because it was such a contradictory condition – a skeletal upper body combined with fat legs. Famine edema was nonetheless visible in some of the children pictured in photographs published in 1943 by the brave English editor of the Calcutta newspaper The Statesman, and in 1943–4 became a common feature of destitutes who crowded into the city.

  The incidence of the famine-induced eye disease named xerophthalmia, unknown in Ireland when potatoes were the daily diet, was investigated by William Wilde, the Dublin physician (and father of Oscar). Working with a colleague, he found that 94 per cent of the cases of this terrible, blinding disease were to be found among children. He recommended doses of cod-liver oil, pre-dating by seventy years the discovery that cod-liver oil was rich in vitamin A, for lack of which the disease had struck. In Ethiopia in its worst form, said witnesses, xerophthalmia caused blindness in thousands of children and, also in the worst cases, could cause the eye to break open into an ulcer.

  Pollution of streams and wells by dead bodies and by sufferers from dysentery and diarrhoea grew worse in Ireland as more and more people turned up in towns looking for food. The same happened in modern times in Ethiopia – people turning to towns almost by instinct and there contributing to lethal outbreaks of cholera, the bacterium named Vibrio cholera. Cholera was sometimes transmitted to the Irish by their eating shellfish, which had ingested infected water, but most of those who died of it perished from drinking contaminated water sources. The infection caused copious diarrhoea, dehydrated the body, and so brought death.

  People were also afflicted by the water-borne bacterium Salmonella typhi, which causes typhoid fever. Though in Ireland and Bengal the starving and the fevered were attacked by dogs and pigs, sometimes before they were dead, these carnivores could not pay society the benefit of removing the corpse in its entirety. During the Ethiopian famines, however, hyenas played a sanitary role in devouring bodies and diminishing the risk of infecting nearby water, even though it was sometimes the weak but still living who were consumed by them. An Ethiopian aphorism declares that a hyena can take you apart faster than God can put you together. These fast and ruthless devourers of all organic material seemed themselves to be immune from any diseases the dead might carry.

  In the Ethiopian highlands especially, because of the cold nights in which people huddled outdoors, often in mere tatters of clothing, the great killer was pneumonia.

  In Ethiopia and Bengal, malaria was one of the opportunist diseases of starvation, particularly – though not always – of children under five years. In the Ethiopian case, the disease was spread by armed conflict, and moved northwards into Eritrea, where it had never been seen before. In the Eritrean highlands during the war between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the forces of Mengistu, I met an American doctor from Columbia University as we both sat on rocks waiting for the last light to fade and the generators to begin working in the camouflaged Eritrean mountain hospital of Orotta. The doctor told me he was an epidemiologist and was studying the spread of cerebral malaria, a complication of malaria brought about by the same parasite as normal malaria. Cerebral malaria drove the body’s temperature so high that the victim died of exhaustion brought on by frequent and long-lasting seizures. Previously unknown in the northern highlands, the disease had been brought up here by Mengistu’s conscripts, some of them from the far south provinces of Bale and Sidamo near the Kenyan border. Cerebral malaria was then picked up from the blood of Mengistu’s southern conscripts by the northern mosquitoes and democratically transmitted by them – blood meal by blood meal – into the bodies of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the trench line. As always, it attacked with particular force the malnourished.

  Malaria was also a massive killer in the Bengal famine. When, in late 1944, supplies of the new synthetic drugs mepacrine and quinacrine reached Bengal, the black marketeers, in an attempt to maintain the high cost of quinine, spread rumours about the damage these medications could do.

  For inoculations, the undermanned medical staff, whether military or civilian, intercepted peasants on the roads to markets. For fear of foreign elements being introduced into their bodies, these people were resistant to the idea. Sometimes they would let themselves be immunised, but refused to subject their wives to it. Public meetings were held to explain the reason for the needles, but they never entirely overcame the people’s prejudice against them.

  There were two other dangerous diseases at work in Bengal. Beri-beri, a disease known to Westerners mainly from accounts of the experiences of prisoners of the Japanese during World War II, was common. (The name is said to come from the Singhalese, I cannot, I cannot.) Beri-beri was in fact a disease not unknown in happier years, as the white rice staple of Bengal was already low in thiamine, a lack of which brought on the malady. Again, lethargy and fatigue mark this illness, as gradually the cardiovascular, nervous, muscular and gastro-intestinal systems give way. Beri-beri felled its quotient of the starving ill who lay littered along the streets and riverbanks of Bengal, in the outdoors to which the frenzy to find food had driven them.

  Shigella, a disease named after the scientist who identified its bacterium in 1897, Kiyoshi Shiga, was common in the Bengali and Ethiopian famines, caught by eating infected food or from contact with human carriers, who might be as yet unaffected by it. Shigella commences as other fevers do, but then begins to release toxins, which are carried by the blood to all parts of the body, producing acute pain throughout. The temperature of the person can rise to 43°C. Shigella bacteria also kill off the first layer of cells in the intestine and produce a number of small lesions in the large intestine, so that there is anal bleeding and diarrhoea. The real danger is that of dehydration, which, if not checked, will cause the patient to go into shock and die. People would often appear to get over Shigella, only to drop dead a few days later. The same
amazed observations of recurrent illness were true of both Ireland in the late 1840s and Bengal and Ethiopia in the 1980s. A solution of glucose and salt in water can be given to be absorbed by the damaged gut until it has time to heal itself, but this simple remedy was not available to the victims in the famine fields of Bengal and Ethiopia.

  Khichri, the Bengal gruel provided during the famine, also contributed to health problems in the eyes of Bengali people. It was popularly believed that those who ate it fell victim to dropsy, beri-beri and other diseases, including dysentery and diarrhoea. Or perhaps it was its lack of nutrition that allowed these symptoms to arise.

  Through Field Marshal Archie Wavell’s involvement in the British army in relief, Lieutenant Colonel K. S. Fitch was the doctor in charge of treatment for famine symptoms in a section of Bengal, and dealt with 1400 victims. In physical terms, the figures Dr Fitch kept on them were, apart from the tropical diseases, an echo of the illnesses contracted in the Irish workhouses a hundred years before. More than 35 per cent of the people whose treatment Fitch supervised suffered from dysentery, nearly one in three from edema, one in four from scabies. Then there were tropical ulcers. The ulcers, nicknamed ‘Naga sores’, were due to malnutrition and low resistance to the parasite that caused them, and were particularly hard to treat, penetrating to the bone. More than half of Fitch’s patients were thus afflicted with various famine fevers, even apart from malaria. Since Fitch’s numbers for various diseases added up to more than 100 per cent of patients, it was obvious that many people showed the symptoms of two or even more perilous conditions at the same time.