A famine is what happens when the weather stops cooperating. A catastrophe is what happens when the government stops too.
First, the Sky Went on Strike
The trouble started in 1887, when the rains over northern Ethiopia simply didn’t show up. Not a bad season — a prolonged drought that settled in like a houseguest who doesn’t read the room. Crops failed. Pastures thinned. And just as everyone was adjusting their expectations downward, history delivered the sequel nobody ordered: rinderpest.
Rinderpest is a virus that turns cattle herds into statistics, and in a country where cattle were the savings account, the tractor, and the dinner, it was a financial crash with hooves. The herds that survived the drought died of disease. The people who depended on those herds followed.
Then came the locusts, because apparently the famine had a loyalty program.
Then the Government Went on Strike Too
Here’s the thing about Ethiopia in the late 1880s: it wasn’t just fighting hunger. It was fighting everyone.
Emperor Yohannes IV had spent years locked in the Mahdist War against Sudanese forces to his west, a conflict that drained money, manpower, and — critically — attention. In March 1889, he met the Mahdists at the Battle of Metemma. He won the battle. He also died in it, which is the historical equivalent of acing the exam and then falling down the stairs.
His death cracked the kingdom open. Menelik II and various local warlords scrambled for power, and while the great men of Ethiopia were busy sorting out who got to be in charge, nobody was sorting out who got to eat. Food distribution networks collapsed. Banditry flourished. In a famine, the difference between “hungry” and “dead” is usually a functioning government, and Ethiopia temporarily didn’t have one.
And Then the Diseases Clocked In
Famine has a cruel business model: it weakens bodies, then sells them to whatever pathogen is hiring. Typhus and cholera swept through the starving population and killed thousands more. Weakened immune systems, crowded movement of refugees, contaminated water — the whole grim assembly line.
The result was one of the deadliest famines in recorded history, known in Ethiopia as Kifu Ken — the Years of the Evil Days. The exact death toll is debated, but the scale was apocalyptic: historians estimate that roughly a third of Ethiopia’s population perished. A third. Imagine your entire contact list, and then delete every third name.
The Lesson, If You Want One
The Great Ethiopian Famine wasn’t a single disaster. It was a stack: drought, then rinderpest, then locusts, then war, then the death of the one man holding the center, then the collapse of order, then typhus and cholera arriving like the fourth horseman who was running late.
Nature fired the first shot. Human beings — emperors, warlords, armies, bandits — made sure it landed.
So when people say a famine is “natural,” remember Ethiopia in 1889. The rain failed. Everything else was a choice.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Introduction
- 1:08 — Ethiopian Expansion Under Yohannes
- 1:28 — On the Move
- 1:32 — Ethiopian Expansion Under Yohannes
- 2:04 — Italian Colonization of Eritrea
- 2:36 — The Ground
- 2:40 — Italian Colonization of Eritrea
- 3:00 — Treaty of Wuchale
- 3:36 — Battle of Gallabat
- 4:20 — Succession Crisis
- 4:52 — Rinderpest Arrives
- 5:26 — Drought and Locusts
- 5:53 — Famine Spreads
- 6:18 — Cholera and Typhus
- 6:51 — Refugees Flee to Towns
- 7:22 — Menelik’s Relief Efforts
- 7:52 — Italian Exploitation
- 8:15 — Mahdist Raids Continue
- 8:47 — Treaty of Wuchale Dispute
- 9:34 — Famine Peaks
