To end perpetual hunger, why not abolish villages?

The prospects for 10 million Kenyans don’t look good this year. That is the number of people the Government estimates face starvation.

Mozambique, too, is in similar dire straits. Looking at Kenya, and Africa in general, I feel that until governments take unpopular vote-losing decisions, millions will continue to starve to death.

Whenever mass hunger strikes, the starving usually move in search of food and will gather at a point where some NGO is distributing relief food.

Then the situation improves, people disperse to their villages, and return three years later. The lesson in all this is that it is extremely inefficient to live in scattered villages, and remote places.
In all countries beset by hunger, the towns usually remain unaffected.

The city elite goes on partying and eating three-course meals as the peasants perish. The big men and women in the big town are usually accused of being greedy, heartless animals who are not bothered about stuffing their faces as the rest of the country starves.

That might be so, but food generally tends to go where large numbers of people live close to each other. That happens in the towns, not in the villages.

In some countries, you can drive in the countryside and find two homes close to each other, and for the next five kilometres, there will be no settlement. Then you stumble upon a lonely home in the middle of nowhere.

There are good reasons why we live this way. There is something deeply spiritual about the land on which we settle in the countryside. Our forefathers are buried in it. So the spirit of the clan and the family lives in it, and we keep that important connection to the past by staying on the land.

However, when hunger comes, the spirits of the ancestors will not save you. Even the food-distributing NGO will not scour the villages looking for hungry people in their isolated homes. The hungry will have to crawl to the feeding centre.

What this suggests is that governments should “ban” the traditional villages. People should still hold the right to their land that they can farm, but they should be encouraged to live closer.
Rwanda did something close to this in the post-genocide reconstruction, though it remains controversial.

Part of the ferocity of the killings in 1994 was driven partly by lingering ancient conflicts over land between the pastoralists (the Tutsi) and the farmers (the Hutu).

Also, one reason nearly one million people were killed is that they were scattered in villages, and even if the UN peacekeepers had been able to protect them, there was simply no way to reach the thousands of isolated rural homesteads in time to save the occupants.

After 1994, in most of the country , new homes for refugees and displaced people — which almost everyone was in Rwanda — were built close together.

That freed a considerable amount of land which could be farmed and used more rationally for grazing without bitter quarrels about a neighbour’s cow straying and eating another’s potato crop.

Critics say Kigali has a cynical reason for this; to keep people living in near-encampments where it can control them. And human rights groups fear that this proximity will make it possible for the killers to slaughter more people if there is ever another genocide.

Whatever the case, Rwanda now has a far more rational use of land and has been able to raise its food output and, above all, the freed land has enabled it to reforest 48,000ha in recent years. This proportion is the highest in Africa and in the world as a percentage of land area.

With people living closer, it is easier to immunise, to spread new farming knowledge, provide education and health, and to collect taxes.

But breaking our enslavement to land will require a few other blasphemous actions. For one, governments need to ban the practice of burying people in fibreglass, plastic, and other types of coffins that are not biodegradable. Related to this, is the culture of cementing the grave, and setting down ceramic tombstones. All these are non-biodegradable.

These types of burials mean people who died in the past and today, are taking away land from those who will be born tomorrow.

The next step, would be to encourage — or legislate for — cremation. Thus if you have two acres of land, you should not be allowed to bury more than six people on it. When the family exhausts its “burial quota”, the rest of the fellows who die should be taken to the incinerator.

Stuff like this sounds crazy in Africa, but if we don’t move in this direction, in the years to come, a lot more of us will be going hungry.