NOVIOLET BULAWAYO’S DEEPLY satirical second novel, Glory, is clearly linked to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), a satire of Stalin’s Russia, first published 78 years ago. The novel is prefaced with a letter from the author to the reader, citing Animal Farm as a major influence, but referring even more powerfully to the oral tradition of “grandmother’s beguiling tales of talking animals and alternate worlds.” The alternate revolutionary world of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin evoked by Orwell is mirrored in Glory, just as Zimbabwe is mirrored in Jidada, the “fictional” country where the novel is set.

Jidada — “with a -da and another -da” — resembles the Zimbabwe I’ve known, visited, and read about since 2001. And yet Jidada is populated with talking animals — “mals” and “femals” — organized into a hierarchy of horses, dogs, cats, cows, and tenacious, adaptable goats, whose propensity for both comedy and violence is as loud and hysterical as the laughter of my closest Zimbabwean friends. With each chapter divided into subheaded sections, the novel’s segmented structure is a testament to the need for new genres to encapsulate the polyphony of voices in the Zimbabwean diaspora. The call and response refrain of African oral storytelling is embedded in Glory via the repetition of “Tholukuthi,” a Ndebele colloquialism meaning “I find that,” which is used to express shock or amazement at the strange doings depicted in the story.

Glory, published on International Women’s Day (March 8, 2022), focuses on the “Crocodile” that has stalked Zimbabwe since the end of the 15-year war of independence in 1979 and the rise of the dominant political party, ZANU–PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front). Robert Mugabe is, for Bulawayo, the crocodile who ate the sun — as Peter Godwin described him in his 2006 book — yet the presence of other villains nurtured during ZANU–PF’s long stranglehold on power means that the current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, presents an even greater danger to Zimbabwe today.

In Bulawayo’s satiric rendering, Mnangagwa is represented by a horse, General Tuvy — a play on the Shona word for shit, duzvi, thus setting up the joke of his name: General Shit. He is surrounded by other generals, depicted as pit bulls, and by a manipulative cat named Jolijo, a sorcerer, who convinces Tuvy that wearing his scarf at all times, like a snake around his neck, will protect him from assassination — a clear swipe at Mnangagwa’s ever-present red, gold, and green scarf, worn in all weathers.

The former president is depicted as an “Old Horse,” with dementia, who dreams of Nehanda, the Shona spirit medium executed in 1898 after leading a revolt against the British colonizers. In his dream, Nehanda “didn’t have her head, and at the end of her neck, where her head should have been, was an opening, and from out of that opening flew these butterflies, a whole rally of them. […] [I]t was like, like watching blood dance.” This horrifying image, besides evoking the work of Yvonne Vera, Bulawayo’s literary ancestor (specifically, her novels Butterfly Burning from 1998 and Nehanda from 1993), is a damning indictment of Mugabe’s betrayal of his people. The legend of Nehanda’s execution is bound to stories of the first chimurenga, or struggle for freedom, which Vera brought to vivid life in her novel. The failure of Mugabe to deliver real freedom and prosperity, despite leading the war of independence from colonial rule (with Joshua Nkomo), hangs heavy on his senile conscience in Glory.

He is also haunted by the killings in Matabeleland in the 1980s, as later in the book he is “soaked in blood […] [A]ll around him were dead, blabbering babies.” Bulawayo portrays him savagely, yet briefly allows him some humanity when, like a fool, he adopts a disguise to walk the streets after his resignation, expressing disbelief at the degenerate state of the schools whose demise he presided over. This reverie is, however, quickly drenched in red rain, rivers of blood, and “bodies, bodies, bodies.”

When Bulawayo writes about Mnangagwa, she shows far less mercy. But the present is much more difficult to handle than the past — slippery, fluid, still shifting into the patterns of history or her-story. The recent past is ripe for satire. But it is dangerous. By raising her voice in this way, Bulawayo is offering the world a lesson about the corruptions of power, just as Orwell did. She is also documenting generations of trauma, “an important archive of the Seat of Power’s cruelty.” The central “femal” characters — a mother and daughter, Simiso and Destiny — mirror each other’s suffering, but by finding each other again, naming and acknowledging each other’s scars, “the ache and pain that have for so long been shut up inside their bodies [become] the weight of butterfly wings.”

Like her meteoric debut We Need New Names (2013), Bulawayo’s Glory is filled with metatextual references to African American political issues and contexts, ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which are folded into her commentary on contemporary Zimbabwean society. All of Bulawayo’s writing centers on dispossession, and a fiercely proud sense of the psychological damage and emotional vulnerability of a dislocated, disenfranchised people who have had to create a new language — new names — to articulate their lived experiences. In Bulawayo’s case, this has included moving to the United States to complete her education.

There is a moment towards the end of We Need New Names when the heroine, Darling, calls home from the United States to speak to her childhood friend, Chipo, only to be bluntly told that Zimbabwe is not her country anymore:
Just tell me one thing. What are you doing not in your country right now? Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?


It has been a long time since the world has cared to listen to stories from Zimbabwe, after over 20 years of farm invasions and the failure of the government to effect any real change. Like many of the millions of Zimbabweans who have left their homeland in the last two decades, Bulawayo now lives and works outside the country, sending money home to her family and returning when she can. In a March 2022 profile in The New York Times, the author affirms that writing this book was her way of “showing up”: “I needed to be part of the collective struggle that was going on. So the book is my participation.”

While the work of Zimbabwean novelists Petina Gappah and Tsitsi Dangarembga deals with the Mugabe era (1980–2017), neither delves into the Matabeleland massacres of his early reign, known by Zimbabweans as Gukurahundi (the rain that sweeps away the chaff). Their narratives have a different historical focus than their younger literary sisters, novelists like Bulawayo, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, who have directly tackled the recent, fractured past.

Glory, as we have seen, summons the spirit of Nehanda, as did Vera’s novel some three decades previously. The prophecy made in the moment of Nehanda’s death was that “these bones will surely rise again” and the people would one day be free. When Vera died of AIDS-related meningitis in April 2005, her final manuscript, Obedience (about the totalitarian authoritarianism of Mugabe’s ZANU–PF), was left unfinished and remains unpublished. But it is almost as if Bulawayo has revived her predecessor’s spirit in Glory, through the shared imagery of the lightness and freedom of butterflies, of jacarandas that bleed. Though ethnically Shona, Vera’s history of engagement with Matabeleland makes her the literary ancestor of Bulawayo, Ndlovu, and Tshuma.

Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018) focuses on the psychological instability of those who had lived through genocide. The novel is in conversation with Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), which graphically but poetically detailed both the sadism and the humanity of a perpetrator of atrocities during the Gukurahundi. Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight (2021) also develops a bold, painful, personal narrative about what it was like to live through that holocaust. These two novels, along with Glory, link the present moment with the abiding historical demand for change, with the unresolved and unburied past. Not since Dambudzo Marechera, in his 1978 novel The House of Hunger, described his protagonist’s spilled blood in the dirt as resembling a map of Zimbabwe has the nation been painted in such bloody terms — as a place of cruelty, madness, and violence.

Of the three recent novels, it is Glory that is the most outraged, most full of explicit accusations of blame aimed clearly at the country’s current president and the corrupt system of patronage that scaffolds his shambolic, bloodthirsty government. Therein lies its revolutionary potential, as well as its failing as a conventional novel. Glory shocks and appalls, relentlessly attacking the seat of power, but it often leaves emotion behind in its vitriolic — albeit often laugh-out-loud hilarious — lampooning of the criminal, inhumane, murderous capacities of those who hold power in today’s Zimbabwe.

Contrary to other reviewers, I did not like this book and would be hard-pressed to recommend it to my friends and family. The book is a political satire featuring an African nation ruled by a post-colonial corrupt and murderous dictatorship. The main characters, those in power and those powerless, are humanized animals. Although the message is important and Bulawayo was creative in her writing, I found it exhausting to read and difficult to follow. The repetitive phrases and sentences and the insertion of nonsense words only increased my frustration. I was left wondering how I would have felt about this book had Bulawayo used people instead of animals and used a different writing style.

Glory is a creatively imagined novel narrated by animals that reflects the tumultuous reign and fall of Zimbabwe’s leader, Robert Mugabe. The writing style completely fits the subject and setting, the characters are well developed, the story is important and the presentation creative. The book is filled with symbolism and references to mythology which may make it a difficult read for some. I loved it.

I honestly could not finish this book, which is very atypical for me. I couldn't get past 40%. I disliked everything about this book...the repetitive nature of the prose style, the characters, the misguided female, the anthropomorphizing of the animals, etc.

Conceptually extraordinarily clever. However, the unique writing style created an additional layer of distance between the reader and the story, so I was tuned out from the actual interests and lives of the characters. I also found it far, far too long.

NoViolet Bulaweyo gained acclaim for her first novel We Need New Names, a finalist for the Booker-prize and many other awards. Her new novel, Glory, bids fair to win similar acclaim.

A trenchant satire inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Glory follows the fall of the Old Horse, leader of the fictional African nation of Jidada. His fall brings great hope that justice will finally come, decades after Jidada’s revolution against colonialism. A young goat, Destiny (all the characters in the book are non-human animals), lost her father when the revolution became a dictatorship. Now she hopes things will be different.

What Destiny learns about her own country’s history and its fight for freedom is more than a metaphor for Zimbabwe. It holds lessons for all people who fight for justice for themselves, their families, their nation and the world.

Was happy to include this novel in March’s edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for Zoomer magazine.

I loved Bulawayo's first book, We Need New Names, and had high expectations for this one - A dictatorship in an unnamed African country reimagined with animals sounded intriguing but ended up being repetitive and tedious.

“Glory” is truly unlike any book that I’ve read in a while, and I meant that in the best way possible. NoViolet Bulawayo does excellent work combining the absolutely fantastical and absurd with the all-to-familiar in this tale set in her fictional, sub-Saharan and entirely animal-populated nation of Jidada.

There were elements of the book that I admittedly were challenged by, especially at first. Bulawayo’s writing style is not only unique, but boldly so. I also feel that there were a few references that I think went over my head due to a familiarity with southern Africa that is still a work in progress. Overall though I enjoyed the several-hundred page ride, and am happy to recommend this to anyone looking for an excellent read that’s likely quite different from what they’re used to.

This is an allegorical novel a la Animal Farm (1945, George Orwell) which describes the agony of living in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) under ruthless dictators after the revolution which freed it from British colonial rule. The people in real life Zimbabwe are represented in the story by many types of animals who yearn for food, employment, education, fredom and safety for their families, but instead are hungry, poor and terrorized by their government. The book succeeds in painting a very clear picture of how dictators get in to power and remian there, despite the will of the people. The author has a very unusual and distinct style of writing which uses double words ("country country"), repetition (words repeated for several paragraphs) and countless examples (15 vs. 3 or 4) for clarity and emphasis. While sometimes I grew frustrated with the repetition, I couldn't put the book down and felt for the animal characters as I would human ones. Interestingly, her first novel about names and what they mean, now has a name she herself has chosen: NoViolet (meaning "with her mother Violet") and Bulawayo (the name of the city and province where she is from in Zimbabwe and which is the setting for "Glory"). She is an extremely articulate speaker who probes deeply in her novels.