Is This How Rome Treats Its Heroes?

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By Busani Ngcaweni

“Is this how Rome treats its heroes?” These words echo across the Colosseum in Gladiator II. They are spoken by Acacius, a soldier who had given everything to Rome, only to be condemned by two ruling brothers whose vanity was greater than their sense of duty. The crowd roared in protest. Men and women shouted for mercy, desperate for Rome to honour its hero. Yet the rulers, deaf to the voices rising around them, ordered the execution. Arrows flew. The body of the soldier who had fought for the empire crumpled into the dust. The Colosseum rose in fury, but the unmoved brothers turned away. Acacius, the gallant soldier of Rome, was silenced.

That scene struck not only for its cinematic tragedy, but also because it felt familiar. The betrayal of the people by their rulers was not unique to Rome. It is a recurring theme in human history. Power corrupts when it ceases to listen, and every Colosseum, whether of stone, national stadium, mausoleum or metaphor, tells the same story when leaders grow deaf to the crowd’s roar.

Shakespeare captured this in Hamlet. The ghost of the murdered king appears to his son, speaking of intimate and political betrayal. His brother has seized the crown and the Queen, and the young prince (Hamlet) can only declare that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, beyond contemplating ‘to be or not to be’. The rot was not in the fields or the forests. It lay in the palace, in the silence and blindness of those who ruled. Eventually, after the tragic death of the protagonists, a foreigner is brought in to save Denmark.

Ehsan Naraghi, writing in From Palace to Prison, describes a similar rot at the heart of the Shah’s Iran. He portrays a ruler with a social distance from the people, buffered by self-serving advisers. The Shah, the stooge of foreign powers, could not hear the swelling voices outside his palace walls. By the time he looked outward, it was too late. The crowds he ignored had become the force that toppled him.

Rome, Denmark, Tehran. The pattern is ancient, yet it repeats with unsettling ease. Leaders imagine themselves secure, only to discover that security built on silence and ‘blue lights’ is an illusion. Also, they learn the hard way that social media likes and headlines are a fragile bubble.

On a recent flight from Beijing, watching Gladiator II on the small screen, these parallels began to weave together in my mind. The death of Acacius, the vanity of the brothers, the ignored roar of the Colosseum: it felt less like history than a mirror. South Africa, too, knows something about betrayal, the indifference of leaders and advisors, as well as rot in the state of Denmark. The African National Congress (ANC), once the custodian of vision, sacrifice and dignity, born of the marches and prisons of a liberation struggle, is now accused of deafness; of being out of touch with the reality on the ground. Its own elected leaders never hesitate to echo this sentiment. Power, like the Colosseum, has its temptations. In the ANC, they call it the sins of incumbency; the President calls the movement “accused number one”.

A few years earlier, I had sat in a creative writing class at Wits University. One of the prescribed texts was CA Davis’s brilliant novel How to be Revolutionary. Her prose is a delicate interweaving of histories: South Africa’s struggle for liberation, the Harlem Renaissance and China’s Cultural Revolution. What struck me was the intimacy with which Davis connected personal lives to vast political forces. In South Africa, her characters labour inside the machinery of government, navigating ethical dilemmas where loyalty to colleagues and loyalty to principle pull in opposite directions. In Harlem, writers compose letters across the oceans, literary figures communicating between black America and South Africa, a signifier of what the late scholar Bernard Magubane called ‘the bonds that bind’. About Shanghai, she writes of the revolution’s fervour colliding with personal betrayal, and the blurring of lines between love and ideology.

Davis narrates these intersections with grace, but as the novel moved towards its end, I felt a growing unease. The final chapters of How to Be a Revolutionary became entangled in the factional politics of China, taking firm positions against that country’s political choices. It was powerful, but it closed the book inward. For me, the broader question was left hanging. What comes after betrayal? What comes after political excesses?

These questions followed me into the last leg of this flight from Beijing. They answered themselves not in prose but in a dream.

As Gladiator II ended, it was time to rest. The Colosseum did not switch off; its arches jagged against the sky. Yet its sand shifted. It became dust, then tar, then the red earth of the Kwamshayazafe sections of Soweto and Inanda. The roar of the crowd changed too, breaking into isiZulu, into Harlem’s jazz-soaked English, into Mandarin slogans, until words dissolved into hum. Acacius tried to wake up, pierced by arrows, but his face flickered into others: the character called Beth from Davis’s South Africa, betrayed by bureaucracy; Hamlet’s father’s ghost, whispering of rot; a boy in Mdantsane with a clenched fist and a stone in hand. The betrayed were no longer one but many. Their Kliptown, a symbol of vision, aspirations and promise, became Kicktown, Kwamshayazafe, where poverty kicks crawling youth to death.

The brothers on the throne shifted too. At times they wore Roman robes, at times the tailored suits of modern leaders, at times the embroidered uniforms of long-dead kings. They mouthed words without sound, their silence more deafening than any speech. But then something changed. The Shah’s throne appeared, only to crumble into dust. In its place grew a wooden bench, around which sat citizens. Not kings, not emperors, but ordinary people, arguing, laughing, speaking over one another. The Colosseum was transformed into a hall of dialogue, the ZK Matthews Hall at the University of South Africa where the national dialogue was recently launched.

Arrows were still drawn. The danger had not disappeared. Yet as the crowd roared again, the soldiers trembled. This time, impossibly, the bows were lowered. The rulers stepped down from their dais to stand with the people. The betrayal did not become bloodshed. The theatre of cruelty became the stage of renewal, the new Kliptown.

In my dream, Harlem’s poets read to schoolchildren in KwaLanga. Shanghai’s snow melted into Venda’s summer heat. Beth from How to be a Revolutionary sat at her desk once more, but instead of resignation she wrote a letter of hope. The fugue was resolved. The chorus was not of betrayal but of resurrection. And at the centre of it all stood the ANC, listening again.

I woke with this vision lodged in me like a refrain. In the days that followed, it coloured the headlines. South Africa’s president launched the National Dialogue, a people’s assembly meant to draw citizens, political parties, social partners and other voices into one space. To many, it seemed procedural. In my dream it looked like a transformed Colosseum. Here, perhaps, was the place where leaders might hear their people before it was too late.

The ANC today stands at a precipice. Like the brothers in Gladiator II, it can ignore the roar, cling to vanity, and let arrows fly. Or it can do what China did in 1978, when its leaders changed the course of history, introducing reforms that defied the expectations of even the sharpest critics. At Wits, reading Davis, I doubted that such turns were possible. On that plane, watching Acacius fall, I feared they were not. But in my dream, I saw otherwise. I have witnessed this Chinese miracle in my research on the frontiers of national and regional development.

Is this how Rome treats its heroes? The question need not be rhetorical. It can be the spark that prevents repetition. The heroes of South Africa are not only those in its past, but also its voters today. To betray them is to pierce the very body of the nation. To listen to them is to stand in the dust of the Colosseum and discover that redemption, though rare, is possible.

This is the dream I carry. That ANC, like Acacius in that impossible vision, might rise again. I dream of the ANC recreating Kliptown, not the Kwamshayazafe that our townships have become; that it might choose to treat its people not as subjects but as the source of its strength; that in doing so, it may be revived, not in fiction or film, but in history itself.

Because the fate of Rome does not have to be ours.

Busani Ngcaweni is Director of the Centre for Public Policy and African Studies at the University of Johannesburg and Professor at China Foreign Affairs University.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.