Thinking the African Food Crisis - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 777

theideologyoflateVictoriancapitalism)runningheadlongintoglobalclimatepertur-
bationtookthelivesofsome60 millionpeople.
One of the signal lessons to have been learned from the serial failures to improve
food security and life chances in the arid lands of West Africa is that the boundary lines
between mass starvation and the longue duree of permanent hunger and undernourish-
mentareporousandlimsy.Existentially,whatwearewitnessingissomethingcloseto
slow death, a death by attrition: “The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out
of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a
deiningconditionoftheirexperienceandhistoricalexistence”(Berlant2007,754;see
Nally2011).Putsomewhatdiferently,whatI havecalled“silentviolence,”whichconveys
thepermanencyandnormalizationofhunger,isinfactthenecessaryetherfromwhich
famines and mass starvation draw their ignition and fuel. At the same time, this violence
representstheradicalreductionofhumanexistencedowntowhatAgamben(1998)calls
“bare life.” Famine and hunger are inextricably intertwined, the deepest expressions of
whatDavis(2001)properlycalledthe“warovertherighttoexistence.”
The Dynamics of Food
Insecurity: A Nigerian Story (1976-2012)
My book Silent Violence was written against the backdrop of, and in some measure as
a direct response to, the great Sahelian famine that struck West Africa and the Horn
ofAfricabetween1969and1974.Overhalfamillionpeopleperished,perhapsmany
more.InitswakecamedevastatingfaminesinBangladesh,Mozambique,Sudan,Korea,
andUganda.In1976I arrivedinnorthernNigeriatoconductavillagestudyinKaita,
a Hausa community near Katsina town5(Figure32.1),aregionlocatedatthesouthern
perimeter of the Sahelian savannas. The goal was to study a set of paradoxes; namely,
why was hunger and starvation not accompanied by absolute scarcity (there was always
foodinthemarket),whywerethosewhoperishedtypicallythosewhogrewfood,and
why would farmers sensitive to the vagaries of rainfall in a drought-prone and high-risk
environment resign themselves to starvation in the face of drought?
Silent Violence argued that Hausa peasants possessed a sophisticated grasp of local
agroecology,butthesepractices—inrelationto,say,rainfallvariability—wereshaped
bytheirclassposition.hecommercializationofland,grain,andlabor—andthecoer-
civeoperationsofthesemarketsinthefaceofunequalassetdistribution—produced
particular social patterns of vulnerability to drought and food insecurity rooted in the
relations of production. At the same time, local protection systems rooted in the moral
economy of the community were rapidly eroding, exposing peasants to the vicissitudes
of the market. These findings have, in a sense, become the starting point for the study of
foodsecurityacrosstheSahel,thoughconventionalwisdomheldotherwiseinthe1970s.
InanexcellentreportontheSahel,Gubbels(2011,16) arguesthattheruraleconomy