famines politics starvation

(all information in this informal entry is from one of two sources: 1) "The End of Chidyerano" by Elias Mandala, and 2) yours truly by the experiences of six months (wow))

After seeing about 300 children yesterday morning at Mayaka, I washed, went to the red binder with our severely malnourished children files, and performed my daily search for defaulters (those who were absent from their two week follow-up).  Only three yesterday--surprisingly low for the 160 or so severely malnourished kids at Mayaka.  These mothers are serious about their children's health.  Yet, with the sun still on its way to the top we decided to take a journey into the surrounding villages of Mayaka for these three.  The first turned out to have moved to the central region to find work in the great British tobacco estates there, and the other was found almost 10 km away behind a nearby mountain--too far to travel, especially with her child's edema having subsided.  Giving her three bottles chiponde, a bar of soap, and a kg of beans for graduation from the program, I advised her on the dangers of the common corn-only based diet which had precipitated the macro-nutrient deficiency of kwashiorkor.  "I have no money" was her simple and profound response to the educational barrage.  Of course she wants to feed her child a diversified diet, of course she would buy vegetables and fruits and beans and meat--but the reality is that filling the stomach is done affordably by milled maize in the form of porridge (the malawian staple of thicker 'nsima' or softer 'pala').  I was asking a paraplegic to walk.

I guess its the ultimate question that daily stares at our world in the face: Why are people starving in 2008?

Hunger is no stranger to the Malawian village population.  For centuries it has been a yearly cycle that brings food insecurity to nearly 80% in the months between December and March.  It is these months in which the planting begins for the next harvest, and it is these months in which the the food from the last harvest has run low or for some plain out.  'Njala,' Chichewa for 'hunger,' has no boundaries: it comes and goes when it pleases, staying longer, staying shorter depending on the year.  Some years are worse, some years are better based on the last harvest and concurrent food prices (largely based on that good ol barrel of oil price).  But njala is a cultural staple, even worked into the local language as the second of two annual seasons of weather: masika (dry harvest season), and njala (wet hunger season).  It is deeply woven into the fabric of Malawian village life, and has been for well over 100 years.  

Njala takes a particularly hard effect on children, as food rules in the villages often put them at disadvantage from receiving protein-rich foods reserved for those working in the fields to prepare the next much needed harvest.  It is estimated that at any one time in the Malawian year 2-3% of Malawian children are severely malnourished, which we know if remaining untreated can lead to death (enter chiponde here).  In times of serious njala the world will see these kids on television, certain agencies having bestowed the magic term of 'famine' after having tested a sample population to find over 10% malnourished. The report will carry something about terrible drought often, linking bad weather to starvation. But until that magic mark, all is eerily quiet on the starvation front.  But surely we can't be so calloused to believe that mothers and fathers haven't over the course of history adopted alternate strategies in times of one or two seasons of extreme weather conditions.  Indeed they have, but as the world has crept into sub-saharan africa it has slowly stripped away these local measures of ensuring food security.  The reality in our world is that droughts don't kill: politics kill.  The story of Chickwawa... 

Chickwawa sits at the bottom of Thyolo escarment in the Shire valley.  The river does run through it, flood plains innumerable and marshes galore.  There is a thin strip of habitable land between the mountains and the river and here the population lives, their mud and brick huts, thatched roofs, and fields surrounding.  But in the absence of irrigation the weather reigns supreme, and since time remembered the Malawians of Chickwawa have led adaptable lives to the variable delivery of rains.  Farming below the escarpment the crops are eternally susceptible to excessive flooding, and it is in these times that Chickwawans have taken to the mountains, trooping up and up to the valleys above to find food, even harvesting small amounts of maize and pigeon peas there.  Droughts also are inevitable, and when the rains are inadequate the people gather the opposite way to the drained marshes harvesting sweet potatoes and maize in the newly exposed fertile lands there.  For centuries the adaptability has meant sustenance for Chickwawans, a people that migrated to Malawi as recently as the 10th century.  A famous quote sums from a 19th century Bishop Charles Mackenzie who had "come to teach these people agriculture," but after seeing their work admitted that "I now see that they know far more about it than I do."  It is unsurprising then to find that it is well agreed that people in the rural areas of Malawi view food insecurity as a primarily political problem.  So in order to understand hunger in its correct context we must burrow into the political backdrop, starting first with the two severe famines of the last 150 years.

The planting rains never came in the latter half of the 1862 season, and the absence continued until June 1863.  A food shortage indeed in the village fields, but the devastating starvation far outweighed previous rain shortages.  What happened in Chikwawa in 1862-63 was a result of combination of political events of the time.  It was early in 1860's that the British anti-slave campaign was gaining momentum in eastern Africa, the previous hub for the French colony slave trade.  At the same time, the demand for sugar and cloves produced on French Mascarene and Zanzibar was sky-rocketing, and the combinatorial effect was that slave traders moved out of east africa into subsaharan, especially the Lake Malawi area.  Some of the first reports from David Livingston's epic journey to the area document the horrible atrocities of what was becoming a thriving slave trade.  Overnight raids of villages rained supreme in what became known as an error of terror.  And the consequence was that in the interest of security the people of Chickwawa became markedly less mobile, choosing to remain in the village area instead of wandering into what had become hostile territory.  And so when the rains didn't come, the people were stuck, unable to move to drained marshes to farm as they had done for hundreds of years before.  It took only one season for massive starvation to set in.

The call it "Mwamthota" in the stories of parents abandoning children, parents selling children, skeletons at every turn, neighbors turning against neighbors.  Like the famine of 1862-63, 1922-23 mwamthota was neither preceded by a period of massive rain shortage.  In fact, the drought came immediately preceding many seasons of bumper crop, though the rain shortage did last for two and a half seasons.  But again, Mwamthota was a preeminentely a political event as the British colonizers had recently completed a political overhaul of Malawian society replacing the chiefdom system ('Mbona') with the colonial government.  The old system of village law was sunk and a colonial taxation system established, the colonized ordered to produce cash crops of cotton, sugar, and tobacco (the three top exports of malawi still today, and just as worthless as the economy shows).  With the imposition of the new food market by the British, the old chiefdom system of hunting parties and communal farming fell apart as each man was forced to begin to fend for himself as the taxation system set in.  The world as they knew it for those of Chickwawa was turned on its head.  Whereas in the past times of hunger the people would flock to the chiefdoms and be fed through collective effort, the world had changed in 1922, and Mwamthota was the result. The colonial rulers had not the same fortitude nor the insight to anticipate the disaster that struck, and food distribution attempts were a documented dismal disaster.  To compound the problem, it was the British who had just decades before introduced maize to Malawi, a crop that harvests brilliantly in times of good rain but abysmally in droughts.  Food production was even worse than in drought times past where sorghum and millet faired much better as drought-resistant crops.  The early-warning system of chiefdom times had been destabilized, and effective relief was shirked.

For half a century now Malawi has been independent of British rule.  Its been almost 100 years since a major famine, but hunger has not gone away, but rather intensified in its seasonal nature.  The villages of old remain in Chickwawa--even the traditional title of chief continues to be passed--but its clear to all that true political power now rests in a very different place than the big fenced hut in the center of the village.  It was actually a group of Presbyterians that founded a mission outpost in what is now called 'Blantyre' (named after the birthplace of David Livingston in Scotland) in the 1800s under the picturesque Ndirande mountain that has now grown into the largest city in Malawi at 500,000 strong.  The industrial district is by all standards primitive consisting among other small internal industries the two top exporters of carlsberg brewing (denmark) and illovo sugar (owned by a brit).  Other small factories and businesses are growing slowly as many are beginning to make the trek from the village to the city looking for work (though nowhere near the 22 million of Cairo, Egypt).  The import-export economy of the free market is the way of the globalized world, and a game in which malawi--whether it wants or not--will play to the best of its land-locked ability.  But this politically based system based in the powerful business centers has delivered immense repercussions on the very population it aspires to 'develop.'

After the first mission hospital established here, Blantyre has continued to grow.  A massive city in the rolling mountains, it takes much electricity to power the small but growing industry and population.  In the 1970's the decided solution was the building of a series of dams to power the city, and so the Shire was harnessed to power this new global city.  Consequently for the people of Chickwawa, the field-renewing seasonal floods have long since stopped, the marshes have drained (illovo sugars has set up massive sugar plantations in the old marshes), and in the context of a burgeoning population restricting mobility (as I understand from clinic due often to the reality that 2 out of 5 children are expected to die before 5 years of age, so parents overcompensate to have enough children to care for them upon growing old) the old system of adaptability has long since disappeared.  Literally, as I see it everyday, people set in their villages and hope for rain.  And when it doesn't come, food flows from other parts of the country or from mozambique, the high price of diesel and horrible road infrastructure boosting the prices to unaffordable levels. The new powers that be aren't sensed to be responding to the needs of the people. 

I see the cycle of hunger every day in the village.  She arrives with child on back, child in hand holding child, a bag at her side of some small leftovers from a meager breakfast and a used waterbottle she found roadside.  Tired with beads of sweat in the 100 degree heat she has a smile on her face having arrived at her destination.  This mother, like all the rest here today, was born to village parents and at the age of holding a hoe was put to work to cultivate in the fields.  It was then that she was forced to leave school, unable to work and study.  Illiterate and powerless she marries young and begins to produce children for a husband who split his father's fields with two other brothers.  The small field is not enough to support a family of 6, and again this year when the harvest runs out, she hears from her neighbor (who declined to provide support for fear of running low herself) of a clinic down in the valley that distributes chiponde medicine for starvation.  With the father away in town looking for work (and often there contracting HIV), with too little money to afford expensive foods at the nearby market, she has no choice but to pack up all and go down the mountain to seek help.

As I look at mom's little 8 year old helper, I wonder what she dreams of.  Like most 8 year olds she is timid, a big grin and looking away when the tall funny looking azungu speaks to her.  I suppose this child knows her mother's extra-human strength: first to rise, last to sleep, cooking, cultivating, child-rearing, market selling.  But as such a young one does she see her mother forced to maintain dignity in the face of not being able to feed her own children?  Does she see her forgoing her own rations during days of field work to feed the children?  Does she feel the pain of losing a child?  

No child dreams of this life.

Yet the reality is that this is what has waited these young ones for years. By no choice of theirs they lead lives frightfully close to the line of starvation as chance had it they were born in Chickwawa.  Whether you herald its supposed nature or not, the so called "golden age" of communal living is far gone in Malawi while the market remains in its infancy, itself malnourished from the choking of opportunity by four land borders.  Famines don't starve people. Politics starve people.  

So while the government does its best to develop schools and hospitals and roads, some agencies are funding irrigation projects to insert a second growing season in malawi, or donating fertilizer to families who have nutrient-depleted there fields in the scramble for years of food (way to go Egypt).  In the meantime, governments are donating food, others are medically treating malnutrition (chiponde!!), and still others are attempting to genetically engineer cassava to be more resistant to plant viral strains.  But construction equipment breaks down, fertilizer queues are too long for the supply, wars break out and governments renege on agreed donations.  Yes, even in 2008 there is a long way to go to food security, though many agree that even in seven years the country has come a long way.  Individuals and organizations together with governments both foreign and national can work toward a solution to end hunger not just here, but worldwide, so that one day mothers will be able to feed their children as they know how and children will be unhindered to grow to pursuit the fullness of human life.