In Zimbabwean language, ‘Animal Farm’ takes on new meaning
When Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah first read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” as a lonely 13-year-old at boarding school, she was transfixed. The story of a group of animals who overthrow an unjust regime only to be betrayed by their leader “made me sob,” she remembers.
Years later, she revisited the novel as a university student and learned that the book had been written as an allegory for the Russian Revolution. “I respected it on a new level,” she says.
But it was only when she read the book a third time many
