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.
8
Villains: Ethiopia
IT 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 in
side 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.
The famine was a state secret. For the emperor, military matters were far more pressing. As Mengistu would after him, the emperor was wasting a great deal of money fighting Eritrean rebels. But by January 1974 a large part of his army was in mutiny. A general on an inspection in Ogaden, near the southern border of Somalia, was arrested by the soldiers, who forced him to eat the same fare that they were served. There was plotting among the officers in Harar. A division in Eritrea mutinied, apparently over the issue that in the Ethiopian army only dead officers were buried, while privates and NCOs were left to the air, the animals, the birds. (I saw the phenomenon from the Eritrean side of the trenches in 1989, where other ranks of Ethiopian soldiers lay in the open, unburied by the thousand, mummified under a ferocious sun.) As of the famine among his subjects, Selassie declared in a newspaper article, ‘Rich and poor have always existed and always will. Why? Because there are those who work … and those that prefer to do nothing … each individual is responsible for his misfortunes, his fate.’