MURSI RESPONSE TO DROUGHT: SOME LESSONS FOR RELIEF AND REHABILITATION

Abstract

THE FAMINE NOW affecting Ethiopia is probably the worst in the history of Africa, and yet it has come only ten years after an earlier famine which galvanised both national and international relief and rehabilitation efforts on an unprecedented scale. In answer to the inevitable question 'What went wrong?' there has arisen a chorus of accusations, from politicians, relief agency staff, academics and journalists, each pointing the finger of blame in any direction but their own. In this article I want to resist, as far as possible, the temptation to ask who is to blame and ask instead what lessons can be learnt from the present disaster which might help to prevent its otherwise inevitable recurrence. To answer this question I draw upon my experience, as an anthropologist, of a part of Ethiopia which has seen, since 1971, its worst drought and famine in living memory which has not been affected by any large-scale or sustained relief and rehabilitation programme. If anthropology has any practical contribution to make towards solving the problem of famine, at least part of this contribution must lie in showing how complex is the relationship between a particular set of environmental circumstances and the culture of a particular community. For one cannot know the extent of an environmental crisis (or even that one exists), nor appreciate the likely consequences of a particular intervention, without appreciating the role of culture, both in determining what particular combination of circumstances constitutes a crisis, and in governing a people's response to it. Culture, in other words, is not a mere object, acted upon by nature, but a subject which constitutes or gives meaning to nature. One way of showing this would be to describe the history of a particular relief or rehabilitation programme and to show how it failed to achieve its objectives and/or led to unintended and undesired consequences, because the cultural complexities of the situation were not adequately understood. Another, and for obvious reasons, less common wav is to show how a particular people have responded, in the absence of outside attempts to sustain or change their way of life, to ecological pressures which have pushed them close to the limits of their adaptive capacity. It is a case of this kind that I present here.