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 years later, with her teenage son, that she realized that the book’s cycles of revolution and betrayal were “such a Zimbabwean story.” That thought prompted another: The book should be translated into Shona – one of Zimbabwe’s dominant languages. 

Over the next several years, Ms. Gappah and Tinashe Muchuri, a poet, led a team of Zimbabwean writers to transform “Animal Farm” into “Chimurenga Chemhuka” – literally, “Animal Revolution” – which was published earlier this year. The goal, they say, is to reach a new generation of Zimbabwean readers with the classic story, but also to upend the way African languages are often seen in literature. 

“Japan developed in Japanese. China developed in Chinese. But there’s a dissonance in Zimbabwe – and a lot of other African countries – where we feel English is the language of modernity and our mother tongue is the language of the ancestors,” Ms. Gappah says. “We wanted to show that you can read the classics in Shona, and nothing is lost because this is a modern language too.” 

This is far from the first foreign work of literature to be translated into Shona, of course. When Zimbabwe achieved independence from its brutal white-minority government in 1980, its writers clamored to join “the pan-African intellectual circuit,” says Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a scholar of African and comparative literature at the University of Oxford. 

Encouraged by their bookish new head of state, a schoolteacher-turned-revolutionary named Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean writers began translating works of African literature – like Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “A Grain of Wheat” – into Shona. “These translation projects were part of a much bigger political project” to open Zimbabwe to the world, Dr. Mushakavanhu says. “It was a way of collapsing borders.” 

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP/File

A man pushes an empty cart past a portrait of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who once encouraged Zimbabwe's writers to translate African literature into Shona, in Harare, Sept. 6, 2019.

But as Mr. Mugabe’s politics – like those of porcine dictator Napoleon in “Animal Farm” – grew increasingly paranoid and parochial, the country’s literary space shriveled. Although not specifically harassed and imprisoned in the same way as journalists, fiction writers also fell victim to the country’s increasing isolation – and economic collapse – in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the time Mr. Mugabe entered his third decade in power at the turn of the 21st century, most major Zimbabwean writers were publishing – and often living – outside the country. 

Among them was Ms. Gappah, who was working as a lawyer in Geneva when she published her first collection of short stories, “An Elegy for Easterly” (which was later shortlisted, fittingly, for the Orwell Prize). 

In 2015, she dashed off a post on Facebook about her idea to translate “Animal Farm” into Shona. 

“A group of friends and I thought it would be fun to bring the novel to new readers in all the languages spoken in Zimbabwe,” she wrote. “This is important to us because Zimbabwe has been isolated so much in recent years, and translation is one way to bring other cultures and peoples closer to your own.”

Two dozen writers put their hands up, and the group began experimenting. But ultimately, it was Ms. Gappah and Mr. Muchuri, who writes in Shona, who took over the project. 

The translation appealed to him, Mr. Muchuri says, because Orwell’s brand of allegory had so many parallels in Zimbabwean storytelling. 

“Our culture often uses animals to tell stories about people and society,” he says. One modern example is writer NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2022 novel “Glory,” an “Animal Farm”-inspired satire about the fall of a dictator named Old Horse – an equine stand-in for Mr. Mugabe. The novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. 

To give “Chimurenga Chemhuka” its own Zimbabwean flair, the translators made creative use of Shona dialects. While the book’s text was narrated in a standard form of the language, the characters have different regional accents. 

Old Major, the boar whose stirring speech inspires the animals of the farm to rebel against their human master, speaks in Karanga, the same dialect as Zimbabwe’s current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. 

Squealer, the spin doctor who serves as Napoleon’s propaganda minister, speaks a form of Shona from eastern Zimbabwe that is flecked with English terms, “because this character loves fancy words and spinning stories,” Ms. Gappah says. The sheep, meanwhile, speak in slang. 

The result, says Dr. Mushakavanhu, is a translation that draws out the book’s dark comedy. 

“One of the results of the closing of Zimbabwe in the last 25 years is that our writers have been forced to become political, to always explain the evils of our political system,” he says. “We lost that space to be playful in language and find humor.” 

Now that “Chimurenga Chemhuka” is finished, Mr. Muchuri says the writers are turning their attention to other translations that will be equally relevant for Zimbabweans. 

“People learn better in their own language, and we want people to know that there is nothing lost or missing when they read in Shona,” he says. “Next, we would like to do ‘Julius Caesar.’”