Meager Harvests in Africa Leaves Millions at the Edge of Starvation

DOWA, Malawi - In February, when the food ran out, Ezlina Chambukira started selling her precious possessions one by one. First, her goat. Then an old umbrella. Then two metal plates and a battered pail.

For the first time in a decade, severe hunger is sweeping across southern Africa. The United Nations says that two years of erratic weather - alternating droughts and floods - coupled with mismanagement of food supplies have left seven million people in six countries at risk of starvation.

Here in this dusty village of mud huts and unraveling dreams, 14 people have already died from hunger-related illnesses in the last four months, health workers say. It is harvest time, but crops are withered and many people are eating banana roots and pumpkin leaves.

"I have nothing else to sell," said Ms. Chambukira, 36, clutching her four ragged children. "I was praying, praying for the rains. I was praying for God to give me food."

Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Lesotho have already declared national disasters, and Mozambique and Swaziland are also struggling. Four million more people are expected to need emergency aid in the next few months as this season's meager harvest runs out, the United Nations says.

The crisis reflects the continuing economic fragility of many African nations, even here in the continent's most prosperous region. Africa's leaders are increasingly demanding greater access to Western markets for their textiles and agricultural goods in the hope of strengthening nations where millions of people remain vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, government missteps and foreign charity.

Officials say there is still time to avert a famine. So far, none of the haunting images associated with famine are visible here. There are no feeding camps full of hollow-eyed people. There are no carcasses of starved animals, no villages left abandoned as the hungry scavenge elsewhere for food.

Many families have small harvests of corn, the staple that accounts for 80 percent of the Malawian diet, which will carry those people through the months ahead. The World Food Program says it needs about 300,000 metric tons of cornmeal and other foodstuffs to feed the region through September. So far, it has received roughly 30 percent of that amount from wealthy nations that are also financing critical food aid in places like Afghanistan and North Korea. Aid agencies hope that more pledges will be forthcoming as the enormity of the need in Africa becomes clear.

The affected countries are already among the poorest in the world and many people have nearly exhausted their ability to cope.

Many families have sold all of their chickens, goats and cows to raise money to buy food. Others have reduced their daily intake to one meal a day. Others have begun relying on alternative food sources with little nutritional value like wild fruits, leaves, roots and corn husks.

Without adequate food, hundreds of people have died from sicknesses like malaria and cholera that they might otherwise have survived. In February, when many households went without food for a week or more, the European Union found that the number of cases of severe malnutrition identified in local clinics here in Malawi had soared by 80 percent.

Tiyankhulanji Chiusiwa, a 20-year-old woman with worried eyes and withered breasts, has gone so long without proper meals that she has stopped producing milk for her baby. He still suckles for comfort, but he is weakening.

The people have given a name to the period of biting hardship. They call it the time of "gwagwagwa" - the time when "we had absolutely nothing."

"People who have seen what famine looks like are very scared right now," said Kerren Hedlund, the emergency officer for the United Nations World Food Program in Malawi. She says the warning signs here are clearly visible.

Villagers in Malawi typically go through their harvest stocks by around January, but this year some have already run out of food. Right now, the United Nations has food to feed only about a third of the people expected to need emergency assistance through September.

"All the signs indicate that a crisis is looming," Ms. Hedlund said. "Without any relief in sight we know it can only get worse." Not since the early 1990's, when a searing drought struck the region, has southern Africa faced such widespread food shortages.

That crisis was even more dire: about 19 million people needed emergency food, and livestock starved to death across the region because of lack of water and pasture. South Africa, which has been spared the current troubles, was also hit hard. International aid poured in and disaster was averted.

But over the last two years, severe drought, in between bouts of flooding, has battered the region once again. This time, the problem is complicated by the high incidence of H.I.V. infection along with the political turmoil in Zimbabwe and mismanagement Malawi.

The countries of southern Africa have the world's highest rates of H.I.V. infection, leaving millions of people vulnerable to the ravages of hunger. The sale of Malawi's entire backup supply of grain and the past year's political upheaval in Zimbabwe have exacerbated the effects of the natural disaster.

Until recently, Zimbabwe was one of the region's more stable and self-sufficient countries, and neighbors often turned to it for help during food shortages. But the government's efforts to seize land from white farmers, who own more than half the country's fertile land, have disrupted production greatly. The combination of severe drought and farm seizures has been disastrous.

Production of the corn crop in Zimbabwe plunged by nearly 70 percent this year, leaving almost half the population in need of emergency food. With triple-digit inflation, a limp currency and rising unemployment, Zimbabwe can barely help itself, let alone its neighbors.

Meanwhile, officials in Malawi have been assailed by Western diplomats, international donors and civic groups for selling off the country's 167,000-ton emergency grain reserve and failing to account for the proceeds. President Bakili Muluzi denies accusations of corruption. He says his officials were told by the International Monetary Fund to sell the grain to repay debt, a charge that fund officials deny.

But Mr. Muluzi acknowledges that he cannot explain why his officials sold off the entire reserve, when they could have sold part, given that 30 percent of the population may go hungry and there is nothing left.

"This is the question I was asking," President Muluzi said in an interview. "I didn't understand the intelligence about that." The debate is meaningless in the villages, where men and women are too busy scrabbling for food to weigh multiple causes of calamity.

The Chankhungu feeding center for malnourished infants is often full these days, which is unusual during harvest time. Inside the tiny red brick building, mothers and infants receive four bowls of porridge daily until they recover their strength. It is a stopgap solution. The women must go home to make room for other needy mothers, even though everyone knows there is little to offer at home.

"The child is getting better here," said Aliet Kaliati, 35, who cuddled her 1-year-old son. "I don't know how I am going to feed him at home."

Kenius Mkanda, a government health worker, says that about 75 percent of storerooms in the village of Kaundama are empty. The shortages have created sharp tensions between families fortunate enough to have a small harvest and those with nothing. Stealing - something that was rare in these close-knit communities of extended families - is now rampant.

The local chiefs have been gathering to try to ease tensions and to find a way to feed the hungry. In the churches, the congregations have been calling to the heavens. Everyone agrees that help must come from somewhere, but it is slow in coming.

"Last year, I had a little," said Moyas Abraham, a basket weaver, whose wife was scavenging for corn husks and peanuts. "I have nothing in my granary now." Mr. Abraham was sitting atop a heap of straw, braiding supple strands into sturdy baskets. His wife and four children rely on his earnings because their crops failed this year. But few people are buying baskets these days.

So when his children beg him for porridge, Mr. Abraham struggles for the right words. He considers telling pretty lies to ease their fears, to give them hope. Then he looks at his empty granary and tells the truth.

"I can't tell them things are going to get better," he said. "They can see for themselves. There is hunger and it is really bad."

The perils of designer tribalism [Excerpt] In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de l'homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.

It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate. Bruckner's book is a vigorous indictment of "Third Worldism"-the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for "the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.")

The very power of Bruckner's indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) "Solidarity with oppressed peoples," Bruckner wrote, is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism.

Clearly, Bruckner's message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980s-more so, perhaps, since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into established opinion.

It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCO's extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that the West's real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its responsibilities as a colonial power.

Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner's sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. "An overblown conscience," he points out, "is an empty conscience." Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our "soft pity," as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.

The universalization-which is to say the utter trivialization-of compassion is one side of Third Worldism. Another side is the inversion of traditional moral and intellectual values. Europe once sought to bring enlightenment-literacy, civil society, modern technology-to benighted parts of the world. It did so in the name of progress and civilization. The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterday's enlightenment be rebaptized as today's imperialistic oppression. For the committed Third Worldist, Bruckner points out, salvation consists not only in a futile exchange of influences, but in the recognition of the superiority of foreign thought, in the study of their doctrines, and in conversion to their dogma. We must take on our former slaves as our models. . . . It is the duty and in the interest of the West to be made prisoner by its own barbarians.

Whatever the current object of adulation- the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America -the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.

It is all part of what Bruckner calls "the enchanting music of departure." Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world-its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition-are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. "Ignoring the real human race entirely," Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, "I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world." The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts "were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history." [End Excerpt]

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Zimbabwe denies land grab by ruling elite - Colonel Muammar Gadaffi taking his cut*** HARARE, Zimbabwe - Allegations that top politicians and ruling party elite took confiscated white-owned land intended for the landless and impoverished were "patently stupid and indecent," a government spokesman said Thursday. However, ruling party officials were not excluded from a program to allocate seized land to some 54,000 new black commercial farmers, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said in a statement. A report compiled by farmers that was distributed Thursday said hundreds of senior officials, ruling party supporters, military, police and intelligence officers, and even journalists in the state media were allocated plots ranging in size from a few acres (hectares) to farms of thousands of acres (hectares).***

Mugabe dishes out goodies to cronies*** "The United Nations says this is our longest dry spell in 20 years, and yet all our dams are almost 80 percent full. Our dams are so full because the water has not been used to irrigate crops. There are no crops in the ground because government supporters stopped farmers from growing food because they wanted the land for their masters - and now 6 million people face starvation. What a sickening irony." Buckle said that last week, Zimbabwean Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said that any white farmer who did not put a crop of wheat into the ground would have his farm listed for seizure. ***

"I'm not sure where the minister has been these last two years, because he has already listed 95 percent of Zimbabwe's farms for government takeover," Buckle explained. "There are now only 308 farms in the entire country not listed for state seizure. Neither Dr. Made nor any of his officials are prepared to offer any written guarantees to a farmer that he will be able to grow, reap and sell his wheat before the government moves in and takes the farm over. The 6 million starving Zimbabweans have Dr. Made and his government to thank for their plight. We have become like Somalia and Ethiopia and are holding out our begging bowls to the world. A world that would rather feed us than help us to get a democratic government who care for their people."

Mugabe's hungry and unpaid stormtroopers threaten violent revolt***"We've turned ourselves into killers and thugs - and for what?" asked David, 35. "We have no money, no jobs and no future. All we have are hungry stomachs and bad dreams about what we've done." He described the missions of murder, abduction and arson on which he sent young men and women earlier this year to help keep Mugabe in power. "We did everything they wanted," he said. "We won the election for them, but they have treated us no better than donkeys. They have used us and thrown us away." .... "I don't want to do those things any more," said Sam. "My parents are so unhappy." David added: "We're in a jail of our own - never free to leave and always being punished for what we do. We'll never have our lives back until Mugabe is gone." ***

Zimbabwe should not be an exception***In the face of a stubborn and credible opposition Mugabe cannot successfully employ the same tactics he has used in the past to destroy opposition parties. This one is synonymous with the people of Zimbabwe and is therefore indestructible. Fifteen years ago, when Mugabe was still considered a hero, he could have counted on many countries to voluntarily rally to his cause. Now he is reduced to blackmailing some African states into endorsing his neurotic leadership.

They do this to cover up their own shame and embarrassment because when your fellow black brother or sister behaves as abominably as Mugabe has done, the immediate reaction is to cover up in the face of fierce external condemnation. There is this strange perception in Africa that as soon as non-black people condemn a black leader's behaviour, there should be a show of solidarity by other blacks. How about universal principles that bind together our collective humanity regardless of colour? When a black leader bankrupts his country by pursuing foolish policies he/she must be condemned.***

Zimbabwe court rules seizing of white-owned land legal

Africa Watch

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