There is nothing new under the sun and there is nothing exceptional about South Africa’s problems. Our problems have their specific permutations, but there is nothing we are dealing with that has not been tackled elsewhere in human history.
Land reform is one such example.
One wonders, if the white nationalist right spreading the hideous lie of a white genocide all the way to the Trumpian White House, knows that land reform has precedents throughout human history, even in the Roman Republic.
In ancient Rome, the revolutionary leader of the day – we could say, the political parallel to Julius Malema – was one Tiberius Gracchus who led an internal land reform revolution in 133BC (33 years before the birth of Julius Caesar).
Unlike Malema, however, Gracchus came from an elite family. His family had distinguished itself in the wars that destroyed Carthage in North Africa. Tiberius had fought in those and other wars.
However, upon his return home Tiberius was disgusted at the opulence of the Roman elite, and their general social detachment from the lives of those fighting on the frontlines to expand Rome’s borders.
Plutarch, the Greek-Roman historian describes how initially, lands grabbed by Rome in wars were distributed among the poor and how laws were promulgated to prevent the over-concentration of these imperial land in the hands of the few:
“Of the territory which the Romans won in war from their neighbours, a part they sold, and a part they made common land, and assigned it for occupation to the poor and indigent among the citizens, on payment of a small rent into the public treasury. And when the rich began to offer larger rents and drove out the poor, a law was enacted forbidding the holding by one person of more than 500ha of land. For a short time, this enactment gave a check to the rapacity of the rich, and was of assistance to the poor, who remained in their places on the land which they had rented and occupied the allotment which each had held from the outset.”
However, the land limit laws failed and the rich came to accumulate more conquered land and began to employ large labour forces of slaves to cultivate them.
Plutarch narrates further:
“But later on, the neighbouring rich men, by means of fictitious personages, transferred these rentals to themselves, and finally held most of the land openly in their own names.
“Then the poor, who had been ejected from their land, no longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen, and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens.”
Tiberius Gracchus, though from the nobility, was stunned by the dispossessions of the ordinary farming Italian peasants, many of whom had fought in the Roman armies.
When these peasant-soldiers went to fight wars, the rich took their lands fraudulently or by other coercive means.
To Tiberius, land inequality was the basis of political inequality and the weakening of Roman military supremacy.
Tiberius took on the Roman senate and proposed agrarian reforms. However, the Roman senate refused to accept his proposals. As such, Tiberius began a populist campaign which rallied the Italian peasants.
By popular vote, Tiberius won the seat of tribune of the plebs – a seat representing ordinary people in 133BC. Through this he was also able to pass laws which aimed to limit land holdings and redistributed them to the poor and landless.
Tiberius was killed, along with hundreds of his followers, by members of the Roman senate. His populist politics changed Rome forever, and he is remembered for his famous speech where he asked, “Is it not just that what belongs to the people should be shared by the people?”..