eBook - ePub
Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe
Veterans, Masculinity and War
Obert Bernard Mlambo
This is a test
Share book
- 272 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe
Veterans, Masculinity and War
Obert Bernard Mlambo
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
In this highly original book, Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender which advance theoretical discussions around war, masculinity and violence. Mlambo employs a transcultural comparative approach based on a persistent factor found in both societies: land expropriation. Often articulated in a framework of patriarchy, land appropriation takes place in the context of war-shaped masculinities. This book fosters a deeper understanding of social processes, adding an important new perspective to the study of military violence, and paying attention to veterans' claims for rewards and compensation. These claims are developed in the context of war and its direct consequences, namely expropriation, confiscation and violence. Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe contributes to current efforts to decolonise knowledge construction by revealing that a non-Western perspective can broaden our understanding of veterans, war, violence, land and gender in classical culture.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe by Obert Bernard Mlambo in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Histoire & Histoire de la Rome antique. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
1
General Introduction
Introduction
Even the men who have obtained their discharge still follow the standard under the name of veterans another word for protracted misery. A few, indeed, by their bodily vigor have surmounted all their labors; but what is their reward? They are sent to distant regions, and, under color of an allotment of lands, they are settled on a barren mountain, or a swampy fen. War of itself is a state of the vilest drudgery, without an adequate compensation. The life and limb of a soldier are valued at ten pence a day: out of what wretched pittance he must find his clothing, his tent-equipage, and his arms; with that fund, he must bribe … intense cold in winter, and the fatigue of summer campaigns; destructive war, in which everything is hazarded, and peace, by which nothing is gained, are all the soldier’s portion. (my emphasis).
Tac. Ann. 1.17; Arthur Murphy 1908: 20; cf. Dio Cass. 54.14.3
During the liberation war, our nationalist leaders would promise to reward us for our courageous sacrifice. They promised us suburbs and farms of the white men. We all expected, soon after the war, to go on a rampage to grab for ourselves nice houses and farms. My wife, father, mother, three brothers and two sisters were all killed, our homestead burnt and all our cattle were shot by the Rhodesian soldiers … The farms we as veterans of the liberation war expropriated from white farmers have become our homes. I dislocated my right hip fighting for my country during the liberation war. I can no longer walk properly. I now walk like a pregnant woman as I have lost my physicality! This farm is not even enough compensation. The blood we shed, the limbs we lost, the scars we carry on our bodies are the ultimate fealty to our fatherland. The farms we have expropriated are a seal of our manliness.1 (my emphasis).
Interview with a Zimbabwe liberation war veteran
A problem of historical inquiry arises when narratives plucked from ancient Rome and contemporary Africa – disparate historical, temporal and geographical contexts – are juxtaposed as if the two societies were historically, geographically, temporally or sociologically connected. The antitheses of time and perpetual change, to borrow Marc Bloch’s turn of phrase (Bloch 1953: 28), beg questions relating to the possibility of utilizing material from different time periods and geographical spaces. Such a challenge, in my view, was admirably addressed by Ika Willis’ inauguration of a relationship between ‘ancient Rome and now’. In the book Now and Rome: Lucan and Vergil as Theorists of Politics and Space, Willis argues for a transformation in how we should think about history.
Even if one were to think of two consecutive historical epochs taken out of the uninterrupted sequence of the ages (Bloch 1953: 28), there would still be compelling questions which, for want of clarity, may be posed thus, following the precedent of Bloch (ibid.): to what extent does the connection which the flow of time sets between the two periods predominate, or fail to predominate, over the differences born out of that same flow? Should our knowledge of the earlier period be considered indispensable or superfluous for the understanding of the latter? Or vice-versa? Must we believe that, because the past does not entirely account for the present (or vice-versa), it is utterly useless for its interpretation? (Bloch 1953: 517, 521). Does mere temporal and spatial proximity guarantee similarity?
Extracting comparative evidence from narratives of the ancient texts poses a difficulty that the reader does not share the culture of the author, nor indeed his/her language – posing a danger of distortion and prejudice in understanding the ancients. Yet to bring nothing to one’s reading of the text can also be a pitfall because our general sensitivities govern those aspects of the text which we notice the most (McClymont 2007: 77). Sharwood Smith argued that the reader must always bring something to the text. Would I have better understood Meliboeus’ lamentation upon losing his farm to an ‘uncouth veteran’ (Verg. Ecl. 1.71), before, I myself, had seen and experienced the terrible reality of what it meant for a farmer to lose his farm to a group of marauding veterans to which my sister, who is a liberation war veteran, also belonged? Would I have appreciated what it meant to feel a sense of ownership of a home and a farm before I myself had walked the breath and length of a farm which my own veteran sister, who used to be homeless and landless, got by means of appropriation? In the words of Bloch: ‘It is always by borrowing from our daily experiences and by shading with new tints that we derive the elements which help us to restore the past.’ (Bloch 1953: 44). Taylor has argued that:
the vocabulary of a given social dimension is grounded in the shape of social practice in this dimension; that is, the vocabulary would not make sense, could not be applied sensibly, where this range of practices did not prevail. And yet this range of practices could not exist without the prevalence of this or some related vocabulary.
Taylor 1994: 194
By virtue of having witnessed my own sister in the company of a group of her fellow guerrilla fighters, expropriating farms from white farmers, I had a better appreciation of how the notion of masculinity was performed live – something that gave me a mental platform and the visual images to envision and approximate episodes of land expropriation in first-century BC Roman Italy.
Thus, in my approach to the present study, I endeavour to explore an African-Roman correspondence on issues involving ancient and contemporary perspectives on war veterans, masculinity and land expropriation, without simplistically equating the phenomena contrasted in all respects. In the different human contexts, the phenomena of masculinity, war veterans, land expropriation and violence are refracted. When contrasted, could these phenomena reflect explanatory meanings valid beyond a single historical epoch and place?
It is my contention, as argued by Bloch, that some societies which are very remote from one another can surely be more alike, at least in ways that are crucial for some explanatory problems, than neighbouring countries (Bloch 1953). As Marc Bloch has argued, a comparison of medieval French serfdom with bonded labour in Senegal in the twentieth century could shed some light on important new truths (Bloch 1953: 28).
The main question at the centre of this book concerns itself with land expropriation considered in relation to the ways in which the concepts of ‘veteran’ and ‘masculinity’ may be utilized to explore the nature of power and strategies adopted in land expropriation by client-armies in first-century BC Roman Italy. I revisit episodes of land expropriations, as depicted mainly by Appian and Dio Cassius, with a broader aim to examining the iconography of masculinity in relation to land expropriation. I argue that Appian’s and Dio Cassius’ narrative accounts, including other Roman historians, along with some literary poets such as Lucan, Horace and Vergil on land expropriations, are productive of gender images and meanings, involving a ‘veteran-masculinity’ – a masculinity linked to violence, fighting for land as remuneration and also as a reward of honour – a masculinity which violated and feminized its victims or opponents. Since any interpretation of episodes of expropriation depicted in the ancient sources is bound to contexts which existed more than two millennia ago, this book attempts a juxtaposition of ancient Roman war veterans with living war veterans from a modern situation, to understand more about what we can otherwise only access through texts. As such, my investigation of the Roman sources examines episodes in which ‘masculinity’ appears in land expropriation by veterans, in order to lay out a ‘reading’ which indicates how the concepts of masculinity may help explain the meaning of such passages.
The narratives and accounts relating to ancient Roman and Zimbabwean war veterans examined in this book are taken as descriptions of phenomena, and I interrogate and contextualize them for what they tell the reader. Roman historians did not necessarily provide accurate descriptions of what they recorded.2 It is my task in this book to make sense of these narratives. In her book, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Louise White underscores the importance of narrative accounts in historical writing. The material basis of historical truth, she argues, is not eroded in narrative accounts, not even in anecdotes, and the mediation of language is no stronger than the events it describes (White 2000: 25). My analysis is therefore located firmly in disparate narratives and anecdotes which reveal common predicaments of military veterans and their plight as military men, something which in both worlds inevitably cultivated distinctively military forms of masculinity (cf. Berkovich 2017), marked by an indifference to law in a civil society.
What is more, some narratives from both contexts contain descriptions of physical bodies of war veterans. Bodily substances such as blood, scars and wounds, and also weapons of war, military fatigues, military standards and battle scenes, are also examined in this book as essential resources for constructing and performing masculinity (see Lendon 2005; McDonnell 2006: 14). They reveal images of masculinity and the nature of war veterans’ masculinities, and they too ascribe terms in which meanings and details of notions of masculinity are contained. Although such narratives yield historical evidence which belongs in different historical contexts and different human histories and experiences, I argue that when juxtaposed to and/or with each other, they share generic qualities and detail along with epistemologies that can allow for insightful comparative descriptions and interpretations of the phenomena of veteran, masculinity, violence and land expropriation, in shaper relief. I use both prepositions to and with to describe the relationship between phenomena in ancient Rome and Zimbabwe because the putative relationship of the two, I argue, is both asymmetrical and in some respects symmetrical as the present study shows.
The narratives and accounts relating to ancient Roman and Zimbabwean3 war veterans examined in this book serve to frame several issues within the context of masculinity, land expropriation and the political economy of the physical bodies of war veterans.
•Firstly, I explore the ways in which physical bodies of war veterans inform the representation of a veteran-masculinity with a view to linking the importance of the relation of cultural expressions of physicality – particularly the body of the war veteran – and the relation of masculinity concepts and land expropriation to observable features of the physical body – a forceful rhetorical form that captures and expresses ideas in ways words cannot (cf. Harold and Deluca 2005: 274, 263–86).
•Secondly, I explore the roles played by images of a veteran-masculinity in bridging the symbolic gap between, on the one hand, various paraphernalia – such as military boots, military fatigues, weapons4 (swords, shields, guns, axes), body-parts and bodily substances – such as blood, sweat, wounds, scars, etc. respectively – and, on the other hand, the struggles for ownership and control of land, money and influence in which masculine subjectivities5 and masculine failures6 of war veterans were determined. The inclusion of paraphernalia and weapons here takes cognizance of a definition of masculinity7 that includes also certain inanimate objects that are connected with the male gender because of some essential quality, such as relative superiority or strength.8 Regarding body-parts and bodily substances, practice theorists have argued that practices are the chief and immediate context within which the preponderance of bodily properties crucial to social life are formed, not just skills and activities but bodily experiences, surface presentations, and even physical structures as well (Schatzki 2006: 11). Thus, the practice theory’s importance for the present task lies in its relationship to my materially focused approach, in highlighting how activities of war veterans interweave with ordered constellations of non-human entities (ibid., 12). Indeed, because human activity is dependent on the non-human environment within which it takes place, understanding the practices of war veterans in the two societies should involve apprehending material configurations.
•Thirdly, I examine the manifestation of similar energies of masculinity in different forms in the continuum of land expropriation activities by war veterans recorded in the narratives of the two worlds of veterans.
•Fourthly, through a cross-cultural comparison, I discuss the overlapping functions of discourses of masculinity – shared among war veterans and their leaders in both societies. I explore how such discourses could mobilize fantasies of the possession of land, houses, etc., and mastery of expropriated possession. This is in respect of promises made to veterans by their generals during the wars in which they fought, which often never materialized. How did the promises work as part of discourses of masculinity in motivating war veterans? What role did the discourses play in creating a sense of entitlement among war veterans? How did such discourses of masculinity cause war veterans to self-identify as masters and champions of the worlds in which they existed? I, therefore, examine how a war veteran’s masculinity9 shored up and affirmed through speeches and promises of land and money by his general, and how discourses of masculinity served as a bulwark against tribulations, calamities, suffering, anxieties and fears faced in war.
•Lastly, I examine narratives and anecdotes bearing images of masculinity and other themes (distinct or related to masculinity) involving war veterans’ engagements in expropriation, and in situations where they exhibited irrational impulses or a madness of warfare. My examination takes note of situations whe...