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.
If the curraghs or coracles had been able to deploy nets, and brought them full of Atlantic salmon and cod to shore, one wonders how it would have been distributed to the starving inland people. There was no refrigeration, and – as was mentioned earlier – no extensive fish treatment or salting works. There were also landlord rights over some sections of coastal waters, and instances of the coastguard confiscating fish. Fish in the lakes and rivers of Ireland generally belonged to landlords, and though they were plentifully plundered by the hungry – at risk of transportation to Australia or imprisonment – it was on a personal and temporary level that the fine flesh of the salmon and trout relieved a family for a day or two.
Irish men, women and children travelled from the interior of the country to reach the beaches to scour the rockpools for limpets and fish for fluke in shallow waters. They collected all the seaweed they could find on the beaches – ‘shore food’, they called it. Carrageen moss and dulse (also called dillisk) were the most common of seaweeds to which the starving Irish had recourse. If prepared properly, carrageen had a neutral but not unpleasant taste, while dulse was said to have a taste of nuts and smokiness.
People who were coast-dwellers knew the rules for consuming seaweed better than those from the inland. Dulse could not be eaten cold, and some other species were not usually fit for consumption until after the first heavy frost in winter. (Coastal people also knew that some shellfish would kill them if eaten raw. For lack of such knowledge, the hungry beachcombers from the interior often suffered gastric illness or death.) Though nutritious and rich in iodine and vitamins, seaweeds lacked calories, and so did not give the eater much new energy.
Everywhere, Irish birds of all species were hunted down for food, and disappeared to the extent that a Wicklow landlord lamented that he never heard birdsong any more. People stole fish from landlords’ streams where possible, and ate worms dug up from the bottom of the river. They sought a plant named charlock, known as field mustard. There was an inherited memory from eighteenth-century famines that it was a food for times of need – ‘charlock of the fields, food of poor people’. Common wisdom said that charlock grew plentifully in graveyards. Once brought back to the Irish hearth, it could be chopped finely, boiled with oatmeal or made into a soup.
A further Irish emergency food was borage, a normally discarded plant pulled up from the midst of the landlord’s corn, but rich in the fatty linoleic acid, and capable of inducing euphoria. Those who ate the weed acquired a yellow tint to their skin, but this was considered a minor price. Cornweed, watercress and nettles, dock, sorrel and dandelion were widely used too. The Irish national symbol, the shamrock or wood sorrel, had declined in quantity as the primeval woods of Ireland were cleared for farming. Now there was not enough of it to be a famine food. But when ploughing was taking place anywhere, people followed the plough and hunted for remnants of the small flower or stalk, which grew from the underground pignut (pratá cluracan), a pleasant-tasting but very small root. They also sought out the roots of fern or dandelion, which they would boil, roast or crush to make a kind of bread. One Galway recipe combined sorrel, nettles and dockweeds with a spoonful of yellow meal. Children were sent to search the woods for nuts, and the bogs and mountains for berries. The fruit of holly, beech, crab apple and laurel, and the leaves and barks of trees, were stripped and devoured.
So the landscape was denuded of previously common plants and fruits. Indeed, the census of 1851 argued that grass itself was eaten by the starving, since dead bodies were found with it in their mouths. In Ethiopia 140 years later, grass would also be eaten – where it existed – as a near-final resort.
Blood from animals provided some nourishment to the Irish. By dark, men would sneak up on young cattle, make a slit in a vein and collect the blood in a jar or pail to take home to their families. Before leaving the animal, they would seal the wound with a swatch of cow hair from the beast’s tail, and with a pin. Cow’s blood would be salted or fried or – if the family had further ingredients to hand – boiled with milk, meal, cabbage, wild mushrooms or wild herbs, and made into ‘relish cakes’. An oral account tells of a man called Curnane bringing seven or eight cows to a starving family to allow them to draw blood, a quart from each cow. In many places, in fact, better-off people such as Curnane would take their cattle to a given site, where the ravening were permitted to draw blood.
We know a great deal less about the wild-food-collecting stratagems of the Bengalis, and there is a reason for that. The Irish and Ethiopian famines were visible history, but the Bengal famine seems submerged, specifically by World War II and its accompanying preoccupations. One of the reasons is that the area was closed off from journalists. For a long time, too, officials were more preoccupied with the threat of Japanese invasion than with the food crisis.
But we do know something of the plants sought out by the starving. As mentioned, among the Hindu population, Bengal Brahmin women sometimes chose death over undignified foraging. But others broke the taboos of their status to go out gathering famine foods their husbands had too much pride to collect. Whether Muslim or Hindu, people searched for radhani, or wild celery, and for the fruit of the marula, or elephant tree. This is a food much loved by elephants and claimed to have four times the vitamin C of an orange. Cob-nuts (a form of hazelnut), wild mushrooms, rats and snakes and frogs were also hunted down.
Similarly, wild foods were gathered by Ethiopian farming families, including the many hundreds of thousands of them forcibly and disastrously resettled in unfamiliar regions to the west or south-west of the country. The Ethiopians scoured the countryside for wild dates and waterlily roots, and both farmers and the pastoral people stripped bare any berry trees they found. In the lowlands and the highlands of Ethiopia, there were a range of species of figs. A plant named balanites aegyptiaca gave edible yellow fruit, and roots that could be boiled up with cabbage to give the eater a good dose of vitamin A. Among pastoral people, the yehub nut tree produced fruit that tasted like almonds, and its leaves were so full of tannin they could be used to make tea. The less appetising water-berry or water pear was resorted to, and in desert regions, the baobab tree, called the bottle tree in English, grew large berries that could be mixed with milk. Black nightshade had a more ambiguous reputation. Its berries were generally eaten by children out herding the cattle or camels or goats, but its boiled-up leaves could be toxic and produce mental derangement and loss of eyesight. Ethiopian women of the kind who were seen on aid brochures (on their own way to becoming modern reproductions of the woman of Clonakilty) had knocked down termite mounds to find the grain that ants had stolen, or picked seeds out of the manure of animals.
But the fruits that made up the broad spectrum of wild foods in Ethiopia and Bengal were – like Ireland’s fish and seaweed and charlock – inadequate on their own to save life. Such sources were exhausted, in any case, by the time the starving had wasted away towards their final state.
That was when the most appalling foods were sought. The Irish had always found temporary relief from summer hunger, in the months when potatoes were not available, not only by selling their pigs but also by slaughtering the sheep that grazed mountain areas. But in the famine, they would resort in the end, and in competition with other starving people, to diseased cattle, to pigs infected with bovine cholera, to dogs who had eaten corpses, to dead horses, rats and carrion in general. That is, they became recklessly omnivorous, as would also be the case in Benga
l and Ethiopia.
Emigration is a coping mechanism in many famines, though in others – in Bengal for instance – it took the form of an internal exodus. The poorest Bengalis, located mainly but not exclusively in West Bengal, were a vulnerable class who, stricken by lack of food, began, like the Muslim poor, to make for the cities. This exodus had occurred in Ireland too, as will be narrated later. Apart from the restlessness of the famished condition, perhaps there is a primal belief in the ravening mass of country people that the central authorities and their urban wealthy do not understand the depth of misery that prevails in the countryside. So the starving bring their visible suffering to town, where it might be seen and relieved.
Hindu and Muslim Bengali farmers made their march to the larger towns of the region – Chittagong on the coast, Comilla nearer the Burmese border, Barisal to the west of Comilla, Krishnanagar, north of Calcutta, and, above all, Calcutta itself. In this internal immigration, the refugees from the country, once in the cities and disappointed by a lack of concrete help there, pleaded loudly and desperately at doorsteps and gates for the water in which the household servants had boiled rice, and competed for the muddy stalks of vegetables discarded in the streets. They fought over refuse in the dustbins and competed with the scrawny dogs of the city for shreds of meat. Rats and mice, dead or alive, were deemed a treasure of temporary protein.
For Ethiopian peasants and labourers and their families, there was, soon enough, that overriding urge to get to the cities. But this pilgrimage was thwarted, as those of so many Irish and Bengalis had been. Those who, at the end of all their other struggles, dragged themselves to the city of Addis Ababa in 1983–4 were not permitted to enter, and so were left to form a line for hundreds of miles in length along the roads leading to Mengistu’s capital. The government kept them out of Addis by armed force, a denial method used in the 1970s by the emperor whom Mengistu had deposed.