The Ruzagayura famine

In the autumn of 1943, from about October, a famine began in the hills of Ruanda-Urundi – the Belgian mandated territory covering present-day Rwanda and Burundi – that went down in history as Ruzagayura. It lasted until December 1944 and, according to the most commonly cited estimates, claimed between 36,000 and 50,000 lives. Hundreds of thousands of people, according to some studies, left the country in search of food. The cause was a series of droughts and crop diseases, but the disaster was deepened by the demands of the colonial administration, which had subordinated the territory’s economy to the Allied war effort. The dates are approximate: the famine did not break out on a single day, and historians place its onset “around October 1943”, when, after yet another drought, the reserves from previous harvests ran out.

A colony at war

Ruanda-Urundi, formerly part of German East Africa and occupied by Belgian troops during the First World War, had been a mandated territory of the League of Nations entrusted to Belgium since 1924. It was run by a vice-governor in Usumbura (today Bujumbura), who answered to the governor-general of the Belgian Congo in Léopoldville, Pierre Ryckmans. The Belgians ruled indirectly – through the Rwandan king (mwami) Mutara III Rudahigwa, the king of Burundi Mwambutsa IV and a hierarchy of chiefs, who passed the administration’s orders on to the population and enforced them, often with the whip and fines. It was a densely populated country living from small-scale farming on the hillsides; Rwanda alone had about 1.9 million inhabitants in 1942. Famine visited it regularly – in 1916–1918, in the mid-1920s and in 1928–1930.

After the German attack in the west in May 1940 and the capitulation of Belgium, Hubert Pierlot’s government-in-exile in London based its standing among the Allies on the colonies. The Congo and Ruanda-Urundi supplied raw materials, money and soldiers: the colonial Force Publique fought in Ethiopia and accepted the surrender of General Gazzera, while the mines of Katanga worked flat out for the war industry, which as early as 1941 led to a miners’ strike and massacre. Ryckmans wrote that tin and gold “must take precedence over everything else”.

Rwandans were not conscripted as soldiers – the terms of the mandate forbade it – although some volunteered for the Force Publique and for British regiments in Uganda and Tanganyika. The war effort fell on them in other ways. The population had to deliver slaughter cattle, beans, sorghum and peas for the Force Publique troops stationed in the country, for plantation workers and for the miners of the tin and gold mines in the Congo and in Ruanda-Urundi itself. Men were called up to carry loads, to work in the mines, to build and repair roads and to make bricks. Compulsory crops were grown in the fields: castor oil plants, whose oil served as an engine lubricant, and pyrethrum, an insecticide for Allied soldiers fighting in the tropics. Children too worked on the pyrethrum.

Drought, blight and requisitions

The disaster was set in motion by nature. The Rwandan farming year rests on two rainy seasons: a shorter one, from September to November, when beans and peas are sown, and a longer one, from March to May, when sweet potatoes, cassava and potatoes are planted. But the rains failed several times in a row – in September and October 1942, in April and May 1943 and again in October 1943. The drought also struck Burundi and other countries of East Africa. In 1943 the crops were hit as well by diseases and pests: potato blight (PL), fungi of the genus Rhizoctonia attacking tubers, and the bean fly. After two poor years in succession the peasants had no reserves left.

In normal times such a drought would have meant a hard hungry season before the harvest. In wartime it turned into a catastrophe. According to the Rwandan historian Dantès Singiza, author of the most extensive study of the famine, natural factors would have been enough to cause a shortage, but the deliveries and labour imposed by the war effort clearly worsened its effects. Compulsory deliveries of food and cattle emptied the granaries, and daily forced labour drew people away from the fields at the time of sowing and weeding. The mandate authorities saw the danger: in January 1943 they banned the export of food from Ruanda-Urundi, in March they abolished the food markets that supplied the mines, and in April they suspended tax collection wherever food was short. They did not, however, halt the requisitioning of cattle and food for people working for the war within the territory itself.

Peasants, chiefs, missionaries and King Mutara III himself complained of excessive demands. Some Belgian officials protested too – René Bourgeois, administrator of the territory of Astrida (today Butare), opposed compulsory deliveries of food and cattle to the mining concern Minétain – but most administrators supported the requisitions and the shipments to the Congo.

Famine

From the autumn of 1943 famine gripped almost all of Rwanda, except for the south-western territory of Shangugu, which was saved by a milder microclimate and the proximity of the Congo. It also affected Burundi. The northern regions were hit hardest, among them the area around Ruhengeri and the province of Rukiga. In the south the famine was called Ruzagayura, which Singiza translates as “the one that dries up the human body”; in other parts of the country it was given other names, among them Matemane (“the cutter”) and Gahoro (“the machete”). The multitude of names shows how deeply it was etched into memory.

Missionaries’ testimonies describe corpses lying by the roads and in the undergrowth and emaciated people wandering the hills in search of food. People ate wild plants, banana and fern roots, flour made from banana trunks and acacia fruit. Hoes, clothes, beads and even the wooden posts that held up huts were bartered for food. Thefts from fields, houses and storehouses multiplied, speculation and a black market appeared, and robbers roamed the roads. Mission chronicles from the north of the country even record cases of score-settling in which people dying of hunger were buried alive.

According to Singiza, some officials – both Belgian and Rwandan – at first played down, concealed or even denied the existence of famine in their areas to avoid reproaches from their superiors. Those accused of this included the administrator of Ruhengeri, the Resident of Rwanda and one of the provincial chiefs. Vice-Governor Eugène Jungers is said to have grasped the scale of the disaster only during a visit to the field.

Relief and flight

When the scale of the disaster could no longer be hidden, the mandate administration set up a supply service in Usumbura that bought food and transported it to Rwanda. Together with missionaries and chiefs, meat, beans, rice and peas were distributed to the starving; centres were set up for the weakest, where they were housed and treated. A huge share of this work was done by the Catholic missions, especially the White Fathers – surviving photographs from the mission at Kabgayi in central Rwanda show long queues of people waiting for food distributions – and also by Protestant missions. King Mutara III gave money and game, visited the stricken regions and relief centres, and urged the chiefs to co-operate with the administration. Chiefs gave cattle from their own herds. With the rainy season of March to May 1944 in mind, the authorities handed out hoes, cassava and sweet potato cuttings and seeds of beans, peas, groundnuts and finger millet, built storehouses on the hills and mobilised the population to cultivate.

Many people did not wait for help. Families and whole villages set off westwards into the Belgian Congo – especially to the area around Lake Kivu – and also north into the Uganda Protectorate and east into Tanganyika. The scale of this migration is hard to establish: some studies speak of several hundred thousand people, Singiza, more cautiously, of thousands. Many emigrants never returned, swelling Rwandan communities on the other side of the borders, and their arrival bred tensions in the regions they came to.

The toll

The rains of 1944 and the planting carried out with the authorities’ help brought better harvests. The administration ended its food shipments to Rwanda and closed the relief centres; the famine petered out around December 1944. The number of victims cannot be established precisely. The most frequently cited estimates speak of 36,000–50,000 dead, which would mean about two to three per cent of the population of Rwanda alone. The literature also contains the claim that between a fifth and a third of the region’s inhabitants died, but given the population at the time this cannot be reconciled with those estimates.

The famine undermined the authority of those in power. Popular anger focused above all on the chiefs, who enforced the administration’s orders day to day: some peasants refused to obey them, fled their areas and destroyed their property. The king was also criticised for submitting to Belgian demands, and the missionaries for doing too little to ease the people’s burden of forced labour. According to Singiza, there was even a wish among Rwandans for a plebiscite and the choice of a different protecting power, and the administration itself admitted in its annual report for 1944 that its demands had given rise to “aspirations to a better order”. The Belgian authorities in Léopoldville and the government in London knew of the famine – the council of ministers discussed it, among other occasions, on 24 February 1944 – and the colonial press wrote about it, but the public in occupied Belgium knew almost nothing of it.

Place in the war

Ruzagayura was one of many famines that the Second World War caused or worsened far from the front lines. In that same year of 1943 the great Bengal famine was under way. In both cases drought or crop failure met the needs of a war economy that put the supply of armies and industry before feeding colonial populations. For Belgium, Africa was the basis of its standing among the Allies throughout the war – the Congo supplied copper, tin, rubber and the uranium from which the first atomic bombs would soon be made. Rwandan peasants paid their own price for that contribution.

After the war, in 1946, Ruanda-Urundi became a United Nations trust territory, still under Belgian administration. The memory of the famine and of the wrongs of the war effort entered the collective memory of Rwandans and Burundians, and historians still ask questions today about the responsibility of the colonial authorities and local elites for the disaster. In literature the famine returned, among other places, in the novel Kibogo by the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga.