Three Famines (6 page)

These acts, morally repugnant to the well-fed, were often the only means left not only to soothe an unhinging hunger but, above all – a potent motivation in all famines – to make sure that some of the family came through. For the same reason, family groups chose to have less contact with local people to whom they had been close beforehand, and strangers were unwelcome. In the
clachans
of Ireland, the clusters
of huts that developed on the so-called ‘townlands’ of the Irish countryside, it had been customary before the famine to ensure that no family would be permitted to wither away, and there was no blame or shame attached to taking the gifts of food given by other villagers. But now contact was unwelcome – it might have meant the necessity to give charity to friends, or to have them surprised by one’s own somehow shameful deterioration, starvation being a great assault on one’s sense of dignity and self-estimation.

A survivor of the Irish famine in north-west Donegal, at the Atlantic shore’s limit of Ireland, mourned in the Irish tongue that even apart from starvation, such chosen isolation had other effects: ‘Sport and pastimes disappeared. Poetry, music and dancing stopped. They lost and forgot them all and … these things never returned as they had been.’

To give an idea of the way the cohesion of a clan or a township is eroded by famine, it is opportune to go outside Ethiopia and look at a study of the Sudanese Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA, an aid wing of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army in southern Sudan). The research on the matter concerned voluntary cattle slaughter inside villages, and the way it peaked in 1998, during war-induced famines both in the vast, reedy Gogrial area south of Darfur and in Bahr el Ghazal province to the west of Gogrial. In southern Sudan generally, coping with famine had always been the task of village chiefs and councils. If a village family was in extreme danger of starvation, its menfolk were permitted to spear the cow of a wealthy neighbour. This was not viewed as ‘charity’ but as a customary transaction. But in the food crisis of 1998, landowners in southern Sudan began to
fence in their cattle and prevent access to them. Fear, and the volatility of the region, where young militiamen with guns were the true rulers now, produced in chiefs and village worthies a desire to close in on themselves, to protect the family’s resources and to ignore needs beyond that.

Short of selling one’s flesh for food is the stratagem of selling a part. In May 1847 two girls came to a Clonmel barber and emerged bald, having exchanged their hair with him for two shillings and three pence.

But the sale of the entire body, even in such traditional societies, was another attempt at combating famine. In the Irish famine, there was near parity between male and female deaths, indicating that prostitution was not such a commonly adopted means of getting money and food. For where prostitution occurred widely, women – however socially ruined by what they did – survived better.

A famine play of 1945,
The Black Stranger
by Gerard Healy, raised the next-to-taboo issue of Irish women’s prostitution in the famine, though the chief theme of the play is emigration. In a scene of the play, two sailors are overheard asserting that compliant women were always scarce in Ireland before, but that now they were ‘cheap an’ young an’ plentiful’. A character named Bridie sells her body to buy cornmeal for a pregnant woman, and one of her companions declares, ‘I’d do the same meself. What’s a little thing like that, or the sins of the whole world, compared to the life of my baby.’ Did Healy’s play reflect the reality of the situation a hundred years before?

It is interesting that other works of literature and history on the famine did not raise the issue. But prostitution did occur. There was a rise in the number of younger women admitted to the Westmoreland Lock Hospital in Dublin, whose main brief was to treat prostitutes with sexually acquired diseases. For example, the number of women admitted there from the south-west (Munster) and the west (Connacht) rose eightfold during the famine. Arrests for prostitution in Dublin were a number of times higher during the famine years.

In Bengal there was a very nearly twofold difference in male deaths between the ages of ten and twenty as compared to females. Professor T.C. Das, who led a famous survey of Calcutta’s homeless in 1943, was one who noted among the destitutes on Calcutta’s streets the smaller number of girls as against boys in the age group of ten to fifteen years. This was due, he said, to ‘the absorption of girls into city brothels’. A meeting of Calcutta women in January 1944 also addressed the existence of ‘mass prostitution among village women’. By early 1944, the government of Bengal had expressed grave concern at reports received from ‘various sources’ that young destitute women were being recruited throughout Bengal by ‘facile promises’, and were then allocated to brothels or street prostitution. The consequence was not only a gender imbalance but a massive impact on the morale of the nation; a belief that Bengal after the famine would be threatened with social chaos. For the problem for those women who wanted to return to their villages once the emergency was over was that they would be considered unmarriageable outcasts, and this would be their destiny for life.

The practice of selling children into prostitution was
reported by a number of witnesses. In August 1943,
The Statesman
of Calcutta declared that the disappearance of young people into the prostitution business was a ‘further evil’. They had been ‘sucked or dragged down into the vice of a large city’. Their country innocence had been stripped away. In the spirit of that same derangement, in Ethiopia-bordering southern Sudan, where both the Sudanese army and southern rebels requisitioned animals and grain, children were sometimes sold into slavery to provide the majority of the family with cash for food, and girls were sent to the town to work as prostitutes – an option considered unthinkable in such a traditional society in normal times.

The exchange rate for a young woman prostitute in some areas of Bengal was said to be a rupee and a quarter, though a girl who was good-looking might attract four, five or even ten rupees. For parents who sold their children, it was often a crazily short-term solution to their needs, since rice cost a rupee a pound.

The issue of prostitution is readily addressed by the contemporary Bengali writers of the 1940s. Ela Sen’s collection of short stories,
Darkening Days
, published in 1944, contains a tale in which one of two sisters’ chances of using prostitution as an option is easier because of a nearby army base. A Calcutta woman pursues the same course in another story. As an observer, Ela Sen believed that about 30,000 from Calcutta’s 125,000 destitute females went into brothels, one in four of them being very young girls. Sen declared that young and middle-aged women were won over by ‘the chicanery of procurers’ who smoothly promised food and shelter, which to the destitute meant paradise. She asserted
that some women who unwittingly sold their daughters to the agents of brothels believed that they were to be taken into a decent institution where they would be fed. But often, Sen admits, the parents knew what they were subjecting the child to.

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s renowned famine novel
He Who Rides a Tiger
is – like Sen’s work – considered to be a reliable guide to the realities of Bengal in the famine years. He writes of a blacksmith who can find work only as a brothel agent, and discovers his own daughter in one of the Calcutta premises he visits. In Bhattacharya’s other work,
So Many Hungers
, a mother who is chastised by another woman for having traded her daughter answers, ‘You too will eat one day, for you have a daughter.’

T. G. Narayan, the Indian writer, also travelled throughout the famine-stricken area as the hunger took hold, and in a feeding camp met Aifaljan, a young woman of eighteen. Her story was representative – before the famine she had lived with her husband, Yakub, and their three-year-old son, Jamamuddin. In June 1943 their rice gave out. In the week that followed, they sold their hut, their utensils and every other material possession. They had nothing left to sell except their labour, for which there were no buyers. Jamamuddin, the son, died. His last cry was for rice, said his mother. Shortly after, Yakub divorced her and left to join the army. She had heard that the recently planted
aman
crop would prove to be a good one and hoped they needed workers in the field. Narayan wondered, would she get harvest work or end up in the hands of one of the slave traffickers?

In rural Ethiopia, as in much of Africa, girls – at some
time between the ages of five and ten – were circumcised. In many cases, this involved the cutting out of the vulva and sometimes of the clitoris by senior women, sometimes midwives, who did the work with razor blades or other implements. (Better-off parents had the operation performed in sterile conditions by health professionals.) Normally, the wound would be sutured with wooden splinters, but an opening was left to allow urination and menstruation to take place. This procedure was considered so important to the future virtue and marriageability of the child that it was sometimes ritually celebrated beyond the place of cutting by drum-beating and music and songs, which swamped the girl’s screams. Her ankles bound together, the child might take a month to recover from the operation. The result at the age of marriage was that the husband should have the assurance of his wife’s virginity, since it would be his erotic task gradually to open up the vagina. If a woman had been with other men, it was obvious to the husband or even to the elder women who might have examined her before marriage. Thus, famine prostitution resorted to by single women made it obvious that a woman was not fit for marriage, and again – as in Bengal but with even greater proof of her fall – she became untouchable and outcast.

Even farther along in the starving crisis, the most baleful coping mechanism is cannibalism. There were a number of cases of cannibalism in Russia in the early 1920s, during the collectivisation-induced famine of 1919–23. In fact, dead
bodies were sometimes traded and human flesh was transmuted into meatballs, cutlets and minced meat. So many cases occurred in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis in World War II that the Russian security forces formed a special squad to punish those guilty of it. But for people who would dig up the buried bodies of animals to eat, cannibalism might not have seemed a huge further step.

In 1851, the Irish census stated that a stipendiary magistrate in Galway City heard the case of a prisoner arrested for stealing food, who was discovered in his cabin with his family and a part-consumed corpse. With astounding tolerance, the magistrate found there were extenuating circumstances, since the man was subject to the mania that struck people in the late stages of starvation. Elsewhere in Ireland, a passionate observer wrote, ‘Insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’ Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the Ethiopian army officer who ran with questionable success his country’s relief agency, had the same reaction when he saw cannibalism in an inadequate feeding centre in the Ethiopian highlands. These people were not to blame, he argued, as the Irish magistrate had nearly 130 years before. Starvation was not only a blight on the physical organism, but also on the brain. There was evidence that, under its influence, children were abandoned or suffocated by their mothers.

Because of the blankness of the Bengali record, we do not know if, or on what scale, famine cannibalism existed. But Bengal would have been unique if it had not happened there also.

M
OST FAMINES LEAVE
behind in the survivors and their offspring the name of a supposed chief villain – the mal-administrator or tyrant, whom those who live and remember and pass on remembrance will forever after condemn and curse above all others. Particularly in the case of the Irish and Bengal famines, it could be argued that the disaster had many fathers, and even Mengistu, who is justifiably and overridingly the culprit for the Ethiopian famine, had the full-throated support of members of the ruling military, the Derg, and of his head of security, Legesse Asfaw, in all he did and did not do.

But to begin with Ireland: in a song often sung by Irish rugby fans, ‘The Fields of Athenry’, a young Irishman about to embark on a convict transport exchanges final words with his wife as ‘the prison ship lies waiting in the bay’, ready to bear him into exile in Australia. One of the verses points to the often-named great Satan of the Irish famine.

The corn referred to represents the grain that was shipped out of Ireland throughout the famine, popularly believed to have been sufficient to save the Irish. And Trevelyan is Charles Edward Trevelyan, who never visited Ireland during the crisis but who was, by way of his office at the Treasury in Whitehall, administrator of government relief to Ireland.

Certainly, there was an unyielding quality in the gifted Trevelyan, a man of nearly forty years when the famine struck. He was an evangelical Christian, and when he became convinced that certain events were in accord with the workings of Providence, he could not be moved from accepting those events. Similarly, at a secular level, his belief in the theory of political economy promoted by John Stuart Mill, a prophet of the uselessness of government intervention in famine, and others was immutable and to be embraced rigorously. These qualities were construed as virtues by his masters and many of his contemporaries, and that was the way he construed them himself.

Born in 1807, Trevelyan was the son of an Anglican archdeacon of Taunton in Somerset, and a child of a cultivated family of limited income but of broad intellectual and religious connections. In 1834, he became the devoted
husband to Hannah Moore, the sister of Thomas Macaulay, the great historian, who was then a member of the Supreme Council of India. In his twenties, working as assistant to a commissioner of the East Indian Company in Delhi, Trevelyan helped to reform the Indian civil service and donated his own money to public works. He was anxious to clear barriers to trade – something that would be consistent with his behaviour in the Irish famine, when he saw trade, and not relief, as both sovereign and solution.

For nineteen years, from 1840 on, he was assistant secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. It was in that role that he came to be responsible for what the British government devised for Irish relief and, to an extent, that he became an architect of the government’s policy. This task was merely a prelude – in the eyes of Whitehall officials and Westminster politicians – to his ultimate governorship of Madras from 1859, and the distinction he would achieve as a cabinet member of the British government of India, positions he occupied without the slightest hint of venality. He was cast in a new mould; neither a man of inherited wealth nor a nabob on the make.

Like the family of the historian Macaulay, Trevelyan was a spiritual child of William Wilberforce, the evangelical reformer who had campaigned successfully for the abolition of slavery in Britain and its possessions. But the secular influences on him came from the political economists of the day. The impact of a passage from John Stuart Mill such as the following would have coloured his view of the world and of how to deal with its ills: ‘In cases of actual scarcity,’ wrote Mill, ‘governments are often urged … to take measures of
some sort for moderating the price of food.’ There remained, however, said Mill, ‘No mode of affecting it [price], unless by taking possession of all the food and serving it out in rations as in a besieged town.’

In the besieged town of Ireland, the rations were not going to be seized and served out. Adam Smith reinforced the concept: ‘A famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of a dearth.’ Famines were matters in which governments should not try to intervene or attempt to achieve some sort of false justice in food markets. The best hope of salvation was to let the market do its mysterious and beneficent work. So, in the eyes of Trevelyan and his fellow thinkers, the famine resulting from the potato blight was a catastrophe that could not be substantially interfered with.

Another major influence on Trevelyan was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a population theorist who declared a calamity in Ireland inevitable due to over-population. In his
Essay on the Principles of Population
, first published in 1798, Malthus forecast the unarguable cleansing in Ireland, though he moderated the idea in his
Principles of Political Economy
in 1836. But he had also famously written in an 1817 article: ‘The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.’ The Malthusian view served and enhanced the principles of political economy: resignation to what could not be prevented.

One of the reasons Malthus had an impact on Trevelyan,
and other officials and politicians, was the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, population growth in Britain as a whole had reached an unprecedented 11 per cent per annum, and poor relief expenditure – again in Britain as a whole – had risen to almost seven and a half million pounds per annum, compared with an annual expenditure of just over one million in 1776. Most of this expenditure, it should be said, was paid not by government but by a poor rate levied on land holders.

Combined with the two theories of inevitability, both the economic and the demographic, was the conviction that Providence had also provided for a great cleansing of Ireland. Certainly, the like-thinking cabinet of Lord John Russell, who became British prime minister in 1846, believed Trevelyan had done all he could to temper the sufferings of the Irish in the face of the severe but necessary workings of that divine dispensation. On 6 January 1847, Charles Trevelyan wrote, ‘It is hard upon the poor people that they should be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.’ Since God had ordained the famine ‘to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’

Trevelyan stuck to his views in various media – for example, in a famous letter to Lord Monteagle, a Whig politician, chancellor of the exchequer from 1835–9 and a progressive Irish landlord. Unlike many landlords, Monteagle – in between sittings of Parliament – actually lived on his land in the west of Ireland. On 9 December 1846, while a remarkably
severe winter began to bring the first outbreak of famine disease to the Irish, sheltering, wild-eyed, by peat fires, Trevelyan wrote in reply to Monteagle’s appeal on behalf of the peasantry: ‘It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land. In the great institutions of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturalist in a free exercise of their respective employments … the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all wise providence in a manner as unexpected and un-thought as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we may rightly perform our part, and not turn into a curse what was intended for a blessing.’

Again, Trevelyan was not alone in these views. The diarist (and racing aficionado and cricketer) Charles Greville said of the Irish in perhaps the darkest year of 1847 that they ‘never were so well off on the whole as they had been in this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the saving banks are overflowing.’ Besides, they spent their money to buy guns with which to ‘shoot the officers who were sent over to regulate the distribution of relief’. If a subtle intelligence such as Greville’s thought such things, one can imagine the opinions of others.

There were more humane and instinctively compassionate voices in Britain. Charles Dickens later condemned Trevelyan’s view. In
Bleak House
(its first instalment appearing in 1852), he would mock ‘the gentle politico-economic principle that a surplus of population must and ought to starve’.

As well as his philosophic conditioning, Trevelyan brought to the famine some impressive, though not abnormal, prejudices against the Irish. First of all, the peasantry clung to Catholicism, with its debilitating irrationalities, its superstitions, its hostility to progress in thought, and the brake on inventiveness and adaptability it was seen to impose on people. Trevelyan believed the Irish too indolent to farm like civilised people, and in that regard the potato-growing term ‘lazy row’ seemed to confirm some of his prejudices. A lazy row or lazy bed was, in fact, quite a rational method, in which the potatoes were planted in a mound as a result of the planter shovelling out a row of sod and piling it on the planting mound after breaking any of its grass roots in the sod with a mallet. This was the best method for the Irish, who dug up the potatoes as they needed them and left the rest in the ground. It was true that growing potatoes did not require as much effort as growing oats, but the image of Irish laziness must be surely alleviated by that of the hundreds of thousands of Irish males who looked for harvest work during the summer, frequently travelling to England as deck cargo to do so.

For Trevelyan and many others, the devilish laziness of the race ran hand in hand with the unrest of the Irish in the face of God’s will. This unrest manifested itself in ‘rural outrages’. Landlords and their agents, and tithe proctors who collected tithes for the Established (non-Catholic) Church, were threatened by notices hammered to doors and trees demanding improved and more compassionate treatment. If their behaviour did not improve, they were subject to physical attack, sometimes being ambushed and killed.
The secret societies of peasants guilty of these assaults were called Ribbon Societies, and their members Ribbonmen, on the basis of their having early in their history worn ribbons during their assaults. These primitive acts of rebellion were seen as merely an index of the intractability, the unteachability, the malice of the Irish, rather than as an outfall from the grievous land situation under which most inhabitants of that fateful island lived.

A clinical psychologist, Deborah Peck, identifies the mental tendencies of those in power over the mass of the starving. The powerful perceive themselves to be loyal citizens, virtuous, industrious and thrifty, while the victims are disloyal, disreputable, lazy and improvident. The powerful, in their view, behave with sexual appropriateness; the victims are sexually profligate and, in their lust, breed recklessly. The powerful have rational religious beliefs. The victims’ brains are perverted with multifarious superstitions. Trevelyan and others in power in Britain certainly accepted as givens these distinctions between themselves and the Irish.

In terms of sexual inappropriateness, the general belief had it that the Irish were guilty of early marriage and headlong child-begetting, and this perception was partially fuelled by the fact that the Irish considered they would always be able to feed themselves with potatoes and thus had no inhibitions about founding a family. Yet, as twentieth-century research would show, the average age for marriage among males in Ireland in 1840 was nearly 28 years (Trevelyan married, in England, at
27 years) and for women, 24.4 years – well above the averages for many other parts of Europe.

Trevelyan also blamed Irish landlords for their laziness and its influence on the backwardness of Irish society and agriculture. The Devon Commission, appointed to inquire into the state of law and the practice of land-holding in Ireland, having published its report in February 1845, just before the famine, attributed the apparent apathy of Irish proprietors to their lack of ready money. Many Irish landlords had inherited ‘encumbered estates’, estates on which their forebears had borrowed large sums in the golden days of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when prices for agricultural goods were high – in part because Britain was at war with the French and, from 1812, with the Americans.

Trevelyan took up the theme of landlord incompetence and venality full-scale, blaming both landlords who lived on their estates and those who were absentees in England or the Continent for their major share of Irish backwardness.

The religiously devout Trevelyan considered murder a great wrong. It is sobering, then, to think that the deployment of convinced, virtuous intent – a belief in the most elevated philosophic principles of the day – and an intense belief in a providential deity, could be almost as destructive as the malignity of a dictator such as Mengistu Haile Mariam.