Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  The Anuak, a more Central African-looking people from the south, were themselves forcibly villagised. They told stories of houses being pulled down in old villages while women inside were giving birth. A number of Anuak people who fled to the Sudan, declared when interviewed by Cultural Survival, an American non-profit human rights group, that they had been hungry before villagisation, but now they starved as they cut trees and slashed grass. Anuak were pushed off their land to make room for resettlement and this disrupted their normal food supply, and in any case the militia confiscated the Anuak gardens prior to their being villagised. As in Ireland with the Indian maize, the Anuak found that once their normal harvest had been shipped away by truck they had to live on unfamiliar wheat. ‘Wheat is strange to Anuak; we cannot pound it. Fishing was prohibited in the river. Those who fished risked being beaten.’

  The Anuak lost their cattle because they were no longer allowed them. The government also curbed hunting. One of those interviewed escaped to the Sudan in order to avoid being arrested on suspicion of hunting. The Anuak of course had begun to flee in reaction to villagisation much earlier than the famine, though the famine accentuated their movements.

  When Anuak men got married they gave their wife a large bead, valued at $1.50, and two cows. The government began to forbid this practice and to collect the beads by force. Those who refused to hand them over were beaten. Clothing was standardised by the Derg and Anuak women were required to cover their breasts.

  There was also conflict between Anuak and Tigrayans when they were villagised together as a means of enhancing their nationalism. ‘Our people don’t like these highlanders and clash with them … They rob the mangoes planted by the area people … first they settled the highland people into the burial grounds of our ancestors, then they took the land of our ancestors away from us and moved us into the graveyard also,’ remarked one Anuak.

  Anuak and Tigrayans were sometimes forced into the same huts and coerced marriages took place between them. The Gambella People’s Liberation Movement arose in the Anuaks’ ancestral area to attempt to protect their people and undermine the designs of government. But the movement attacked a resettlement camp and one of the buildings burned was a clinic. This brought a terrible vengeance down on the Anuak in the settlement and villagisation areas. The government armed the resettled people from Wollo to kill the Anuak, and massacre was added to the misery of the newly villagised.

  The number of Ethiopian refugees created by politics, famine, resettlement and villagisation between 1975 and 1980 was breathtaking. Nearly 800,000 fled to Somalia, 50,000 to Djibouti, 750,000 from the north-western regions of Tigray and Gondar, and from Wollega and Illubabor in the south.

  At the end of February 1985, the belg rains came and peasants saw hope and resisted settlement all the more, and so stronger and stronger methods had to be used to move them. Escapees from the holding camps were now executed by firing squads, and so too were recaptured escapees from Asosa and Gambella. By the beginning of 1986, 600,000 people had been resettled, a number that fell well beneath Mengistu’s hoped-for quota of 1.5 million.

  Between resettlement and villagisation, six million people were ultimately forced to be where they did not choose to be, to farm unproductively, to labour for Peasant Associations in which they lacked faith, and to contribute hundreds of thousands to the some two million excess deaths of Mengistu’s famine.

  13

  Resistance

  THE MATTER OF the ‘rural outrages’ of the Irish peasantry as a form of resistance to their fate has already been dealt with in part. Ireland’s ingratitude remained puzzling to the British government, indicating to it an innate turbulence in the Irish. In fact, the so-called rural outrages were based on the reality that, in the name of political economy, throughout the period of the famine, grain and other produce, including livestock, were exported out of Ireland. Any attack on the integrity of these exports was not only a violation of God’s commands against theft but an interference with the free market. Charles Trevelyan and others seem to have been surprised when the sight of British troops guarding the shipping of the harvest along country roads, or by way of the canal system of Ireland, generated rage among the Irish people, and the crime of stealing ‘Trevelyan’s corn’.

  In the needy years of 1845–6, a compact region of neighbouring counties – Limerick, Clare, Tipperary, Roscommon, Longford and Leitrim – accounted for 60 per cent of the crimes. The shooting of Major Mahon was considered a most extreme form of rural outrage. But there were sufficient lesser attacks on landlords, such as houghing cattle – that is, severing tendons in their legs – breaking down landlords’ doors, rick-burning, and generally threatening them, that there was talk of passing in the Commons new coercion laws aimed at suppressing crimes of discontent. The taking of or administering unlawful oaths as a matter of forming secret societies, and societies of men to raise wages, were both considered a form of Ribbonism.

  There was a middle-and upper-class revolt as well. In both the Irish and the Bengali famines, a belief that food was being exported from the stricken areas had a powerful influence on people. In Ireland, a group named the Young Irelanders split off from Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Party, which wanted Ireland to separate from England and repeal the Act of Union between Ireland and England, but by peaceful persuasion. Young Ireland, on the other hand, proposed an armed uprising and stopping by force the export of any of the harvest from Ireland.

  The leader of Young Ireland was William Smith O’Brien, a middle-aged Irish landlord and member of Parliament, who had been uncorrupted by offers of cabinet positions from the major Westminster parties. William Smith O’Brien had become aware at the beginning of 1846, in the late winter, that in Clare, which was his home county, as in Cork, Waterford and Kilkenny, coroners’ courts were returning verdicts of death by starvation on an increasing number of corpses. He informed the House of Commons on 17 April 1846. Certainly, said Smith O’Brien, forestalling criticism of himself as a landlord, call on the resident landlords of Ireland to give help to the poor. But why should absentee landlords (such as Lord Palmerston), living in part abroad, be allowed to evade paying the rates for local relief? Smith O’Brien also warned – as would prove to be the case – that the workhouses were not adequate or appropriate to deal with the disaster that was developing. He knew well that there would be further suffering throughout the summer of 1846 while people waited for the new potato harvest.

  It was a brave speech by a man who commuted between his property in County Clare and the House of Commons regularly, and who thus knew the situation on the ground. But whatever such Irishmen said was treated as suspect by those who had never seen Ireland at all, or at least had not seen it in the present crisis. Convinced now that he must take more radical action, he went on strike from committee duty, and so was treated to the rare honour of being imprisoned in small rooms between the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

  O’Brien came to the conclusion that Ireland’s woes could be remedied only by an uprising of the people, who had been provoked by the scandal of the shipping-off of the harvest. His lieutenant, Thomas Francis Meagher, son of the first Catholic mayor of Waterford in centuries, was a young, dandified orator of great presence, handsomeness and powers of rhetoric. He possessed, probably like William Smith O’Brien, a rather romantic idea of rebellion. Young Ireland saw rebellion as a spontaneous thing, a matter more of the sword than of the carbine. ‘Abhor the sword – stigmatise the sword?’ he challenged his contemporaries in Dublin.

  ‘No, my Lord, for at its blow a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic [the United States, that is] – prosperous, limitless and invincible.’

  One of Meagher’s persistent lines concerned the export from Ireland of food its land had produced. In 1847, at a meeting of the Young Irelanders at the Rotunda in Dublin, the young Meagher
lifted a fistful of papers. This was, he said, a statement of Irish exports from 1 August 1846 to January 1847. From the statements, he promised, people would perceive ‘that England seizes on our food while death seizes on our people’. He then gave a summary of the number of barrels of pork, flitches of bacon, firkins of butter, hogsheads of ham, barrels of oats and so on, which were being exported. And, as one Young Irelander put it, the potato was destroyed while fields quivered with golden grain. ‘It was not for you. To your lips it was forbidden fruit.’

  Indeed, the export would have made a difference to the starving Irish if even some of it had been released as emergency rations to the populace, but that would have outraged the principles of free trade. In England, however, not every one subscribed to those principles, and voices were raised against Irish exports, notably that of Sir George Poulet Scrope, an eminent political economist and passionate opponent of Malthus.

  John Mitchel, the Presbyterian Unitarian minister’s son, and Thomas Meagher both declared that food exports from Ireland hugely exceeded imports, but there is a later counterclaim by some historians that, by 1847, the opposite was true. Since the British government did not keep accurate aggregate figures of the trade between Ireland and Britain, the question might never be settled. But, as well as of grain, there was also a massive export of other foodstuffs from Ireland, as Meagher had pointed out. A table for one day, 20 December 1846, shows seven ships arriving in Liverpool containing 800 pigs and 139 sheep, along with hundreds of bags of wheat and oatmeal, eggs, lard and other foodstuffs. Ships full of Irish famine refugees tied up beside vessels laden with provender from Ireland. The New York Herald of 5 July 1847 said that arrivals of wheat in their port from Ireland had been ‘very considerable’.

  In 1848, Meagher went to France, where Alphonse de Lamartine, a poet, had been elected president after a bloodless coup in which soldiers made common cause with the workers. The Young Irelanders hoped for a similar revolution in Ireland – spontaneous, driven by moral force and the obviousness of the justice of their arguments. But they would find out that the Crown had no intention of being overturned by such means.

  The signs for Young Ireland were, at first, promising. In the midst of famine, during the spring and early summer of 1848, Meagher was able to hold huge, seditious meetings on top of such sites as the mountain of Slievenamon in Tipperary. With people screaming for justice, many of them middle-class townspeople, Young Ireland saw revolution within grasp. But when the government unexpectedly issued warrants for the arrest of the Young Irelanders, they escaped from Dublin with Smith O’Brien, the parliamentarian and baronet’s son, leading them. As they moved through Kilkenny and then the Tipperary collieries, they gathered thousands to hear them speak, but every evening the local priest would visit these men and women engorged with rage and avowedly willing to rise, and talk them out of it, under the threat of being denied the sacraments. In every area the Young Irelanders visited it was the same, but at last 200 brave souls joined them.

  At Ballingarry, Tipperary, the Young Irelanders attempted to ambush a party of police. After an initial assault by Smith O’Brien’s party, the police ran up a laneway and entered the two-storey house of a woman known to history as Widow McCormack. The Young Irelanders besieged the police, who were so ambiguous in their nationalism that many of them stuck out their hands from windows to shake hands with Smith O’Brien, whom they respected. After many sallies by the rebels, priests arrived and anointed those of the besiegers who had fallen. In the end, the Young Irelanders had to take to the countryside.

  The rising was written off by the press as the ‘Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’. Smith O’Brien, Meagher and two others were found guilty of treason, and by special legislation were sent to Van Diemen’s Land. Mitchel had already been transported for fourteen years to Bermuda, but then transferred to Van Diemen’s Land. Others were transported for sedition or escaped to America.

  From Van Diemen’s Land, a number of them escaped with the help of supporters. Tammany Hall, the Democrat machine in New York, even sent an agent to help rescue Mitchel. Meagher and Mitchel became notable Americans who never ceased to put the famine at the heart of their oratory. Meagher would become a Union general and die while he was acting governor of Montana; Mitchel became a leading Confederate newspaper editor. Smith O’Brien was pardoned in 1854 and returned to Ireland in 1856, where he became a beloved deliverer of occasional long letters published to the Irish people. The price he had paid over an ill-advised cause had earned him the respect of all Irish nationalists.

  In the regions of Bengal, commissioners and district officers reported hunger marches being organised by communists in late December 1942. There were countless crimes against property, and looting of paddy from warehouses, including those containing supplies for feeding the army. But in late 1943–4, there was an increasing lack of protest as people became hungrier and more diseased. Revolution is not the metier of the starving.

  The famine had further political impact. As its news spread across India in 1944, and as the Congress leaders emerged from prison, the famine fortified their criticism of British policy in India. The complacency of Viceroy Linlithgow was, of course, condemned. So was the refusal of the British government to permit more food imports into India through the reallocation of shipping. Because Archibald Wavell had become the new viceroy at the last stage of the famine, his more kindly interventions were not weighed as heavily as Britain’s general failures.

  At a local level, when the famine eased Bengali women joined men in political demonstrations based on the Tebhaga movement, which would reach its height in 1946–7. Tebhaga protesters, who consisted of the families of sharecroppers, bargadars – people who had not suffered the extremes of famine the landless labourers and their families had, but had experienced want sufficiently now to try to amend their situation – demanded two-thirds of their families’ produce for themselves, leaving one-third for the landlord, instead of the established arrangement of a fifty-fifty split. The argument of the bargardars was that the landlord made the least contribution to farm improvements and labour.

  What had happened up to this point, too, was that the tenants were traditionally required to stack the harvest at the owner’s property, and share with him the straw and other by-products. The tenants now refused to observe this tradition. They argued that the harvest should be stacked at the tenants’ compounds, where land agents would not rig the figures to enlarge the landowner’s portion of the crop share, and where the landlord would not get any share from the by-products.

  The landholders refused to accept the terms, called in the police and had many of the Tebhaga activists put in gaol. But the movement made such progress in some regions that the peasants declared their zone as Tebhaga elaka, liberated areas, and Tebhaga committees were set up to govern local areas.

  The famine – along with traditional grievances against landlords – was a motivator of the movement. Tebhaga had originally been organised by Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party, with which the Muslim League had a sympathetic relationship, but was followed, too, by many people whose chief ideology was simple justice. Such was their thirst for equity and their sense of grievance that the movement became an uprising, and angry torchings of the houses of the opulent caused some landlords to flee their land. The Tebhaga movement hit nineteen districts of Bengal but was intensely felt in coastal areas such as southern Parganas and Khulna, and as far inland as the river provinces to the west of Assam in the north, and Rangpur and Jalpaiguri. That is, it occurred in areas both in the east and the west, and among Muslims and Hindus.

  Though the famine might have been one of the spurs of the movement, it continued after Indian independence. A bill was introduced into the Indian Legislative Assembly in early 1947 to satisfy some of the sharecroppers’ demands.

  Ireland’s Parliament had been abolished in 1800, after the uprising of the United Irishmen. This was a continual cause of complaint from Irish na
tionalists and a perceived factor in the severity of the famine: the Irish complained that, had they had their own parliament and not been ruled from Westminster, the famine’s impact would have been less severe. Their lawmakers would have convened in Dublin and been capable of bringing to their parliament reports of the famine, which they had observed firsthand in their own constituencies. These personal observations were something neither the British cabinet nor Trevelyan chose to make.

  In the same way, Eritrea had had its own parliament until Emperor Haile Selassie, attempting to draw the loyalty of the province exclusively to himself, abolished it in 1961. The Eritreans saw themselves as a separate people, and the Eritrean rebellion began immediately after the abolition, though at first, like the planning of the United Irish uprising of 1798, it was the preserve of intellectuals and elites. The Eritreans resented the loss of their own legislature not least because, during the less-than-kindly fifty-year Italian occupation of their country, and then afterwards, they prided themselves on adopting Western technology. They argued that under their own government, with its emphasis on education, their province was far more sophisticated and well-supplied with schools and clinics, and their citizens so much more accustomed to independent thought, that now the emperor was punishing them for all that by abolishing their progressive parliament. In the early 1970s, they would also be outraged by the emperor’s chosen ignorance regarding the famine, and by the general backwardness of his government, which let it happen.

  In 1961, a long, punitive thirty-year occupation of the Eritrean capital, Asmara, by the Ethiopian army began. First the emperor and then Mengistu counted the crushing of the Eritrean rebels a national priority, and spent money on the conflict that would have been better devoted to feeding their starving. The rebellion that overthrew the emperor had, at first, created hope of peace in Eritrea, but within the Derg, as we have seen, there was a lethal tussle which the hawks, led by Mengistu, won. The military budget in 1984, just as the famine reached its height, consumed 60 per cent of national income, and Mengistu’s Ethiopian army was 300,000 strong.