Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War by Obert Bernard Mlambo (review)

Reviewed by: Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War by Obert Bernard Mlambo Jo-Marie Claassen Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War. By Obert Bernard Mlambo. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. xxvi + 246. Hardcover, $103.50. ISBN: 978–1-3502–9185–0. Should military veterans be rewarded with land, and, if so, where? These questions are of particular importance within an agrarian (pre-industrial) economy. The author of this book is from Zimbabwe. He here attempts a comparison between military veterans as agents of land expropriation as he experienced it at first hand in his own country and similar activities in late Republican Rome. His explicit intention is to clarify readers’ understanding of ancient forces in play under various Roman generals such as Sulla, Julius Caesar and Octavian by illuminating similarities and differences with his own lived reality, at times citing the experiences of his own sister and father during the War of Liberation in Zimbabwe and its aftermath, also quoting copiously from the writings of African contemporaries. A variety of ancient sources is consulted, including, among others, Vergil, Appius and Dio Cassius. Mlambo’s exposition is well founded on theory and extremely persuasive. He starts by arguing for the validity of such a comparative approach, quoting a variety modern approaches, even some aspects of feminist theory. Using these as points of departure, Mlambo looks at points of similarity (and some, remarkably few, differences) between the many land expropriations perpetrated by Roman generals to reward veterans’ loyalty or to ensure their continued fealty to their leaders and a similar process in his native country under Robert Mugabe. In the latter case, a sense of entitlement and bitterness against the white farmers, who from the 1890s onwards had taken their ancestors’ lands, fuelled the violent expropriation of (mostly) agricultural [End Page 120] land by Zimbabwean veterans. In many cases the latter dispossessed even fellow-Africans working on white-owned farms, causing new hardship in the country. In the first of eight chapters, Mlambo discusses the theoretical underpinnings of his approach, including thorough exploration of the concept of masculinity as a factor in veterans’ world-view, which involved both natural biology and culture. He also explains his own application of “practice theory” and his use of ancient sources. He cites Appian for a definition of war veterans as “those who fought on behalf of another” (30). Veterans were clients and instruments of the elite of both societies, who used both their clients’ bodies and their desire for land in order to achieve their own ends. Chapter 2 draws a detailed comparison between ancient Rome and modern Zimbabwe, with emphasis on both differences and similarities in the concept of “war veteran” in the two societies, the role of colonization in both (with Rome an active colonizer and Zimbabwe a passive victim of colonization), the “manipulation” of dead bodies and wounds, scars in either society and the appearance of “female masculinity” in Zimbabwean veteran context versus the relative helplessness of Roman women (with some exceptions, like Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia). Chapter 3 gets to grips with land ownership, masculinity (again) and war, citing inter alia Dio Cassius on the dispossession of citizens of cities which had opposed successful Roman generals, whereas in Zimbabwe, soldiers, and hence veterans, had seen themselves as repossessing land that had been forcibly taken over in the late 19th century during colonization by British imperialists. The concept of veterans as heroes of the struggle who had “taken back” what had been their ancestors’ land, with an emphasis on their heroic masculinity and sense of entitlement, is compared with Roman veterans’ sense of personal entitlement to land as a reward for the heroic hardship they had endured while fighting for their respective generals. The fourth chapter is devoted to what Mlambo terms “warfare madness”—a mindless rage that gives impetus to serious fighting and, often, wanton destruction, as depicted in authors such as Lucan, Dio and Appian and also displayed by Zimbabwean guerrilla-fighters. Too often, women were the victims of such assertion of fighters’ military masculinity in both societies. The topic of Chapter 5...