Source: Zimbabwe – our very own Animal Farm!
Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The final scene of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is the most haunting in all of literature not because of what it shows, but because of what it forces those of us living in Zimbabwe to admit.
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When the animals crowd around the farmhouse window and look from the pigs to the human farmers who have come to visit—and back again—they are struck by a terrifying realization.
They cannot tell which is which.
The pigs now walk on two legs.
They carry whips.
They wear the clothes of the very men they once called monsters.
The revolution has eaten itself and produced nothing but a new set of masters wearing old faces.
If George Orwell had lived to see the trajectory of Zimbabwe, he would have recognized his fable not as a creative allegory but as a precise prophecy, and he would have wept at how precisely the script has been followed in the halls of power in Harare.
The story of our nation began with the same rhythm that defined Manor Farm.
There was an oppressor, bloated and cruel, and there was a liberation movement, lean and righteous.
When the black majority overthrew Ian Smith’s white minority rule in 1980, it felt like the moment the animals finally drove Mr. Jones from the gate.
The promise was written on the metaphorical barn wall for all to see.
All animals are equal.
All Zimbabweans shall be free.
For a moment, it was true.
The hope was real, the joy was genuine, and the future felt like an open hand.
But the pigs, as Orwell understood, are always cleverer than the other animals.
They do not need to destroy the commandments.
They only need to rewrite them, one stroke at a time, while the sheep bleat on command and the horses return to the fields.
In Zimbabwe, the rewriting began almost immediately.
While the Lancaster House Constitution was a product of negotiation rather than pure liberation, the leadership understood its structural weakness.
A constitution is only words.
Words can be amended.
Words can be reinterpreted.
Words can be twisted until they mean their exact opposite.
By 2013, Zimbabwe had a new constitution, one drafted with popular participation and passed by referendum.
It was supposed to be a document that limited presidential terms and guaranteed fundamental rights.
It should have been the foundation of a durable democracy.
Instead, it became the latest target of a slow, patient assault by those who view the law not as a shield for the people, but as a weapon for the elite.
What is happening in Zimbabwe right now with Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3 is not some new betrayal.
It is the completion of the old one.
The bill seeks to extend presidential terms from five years to seven, effectively ensuring that the leadership remains entrenched for decades.
It proposes that parliament, not the people, elect the president.
It moves the voters roll from an independent commission to a government department, placing the very mechanism of democracy into the hands of those who have the most to lose from a fair vote.
It allows the president to appoint ten additional senators, stacking the legislature with loyalists who will never vote against the committee.
Because this bill has the effect of extending term limits for the current officeholder, the Constitution strictly prohibits the incumbent from benefiting from such an amendment without a national referendum.
To proceed without one is a direct violation of the law.
Yet, the government ignores this legal firewall.
They will follow the letter of the constitution while strangling its spirit, and they will call this democracy.
Squealer would be proud of this strategy.
He would stand before the exhausted masses and explain, in that silky and persuasive voice, that these changes are necessary for stability, for continuity, and for the good of the farm.
He would remind them that the pigs need comfortable beds so they can think clearly, and that the resolutions of the committee must always be obeyed to keep the “enemy” at bay.
The Zimbabwean government does the same thing.
They point to Section 328 of the constitution and say they are following the rules.
They do not mention that the rules are being twisted to dismantle everything the rules were meant to protect.
They do not mention that in the darkest chapters of history, the letter of the law was followed even as justice was being buried.
The real war, in both the book and the streets of Zimbabwe, is for the control of truth itself.
Squealer understood that if you can make the animals doubt their own eyes, you do not need to guard the gate.
When the pigs began sleeping in beds, he convinced the sheep that the commandment had always said “with sheets.”
When they began drinking, he convinced them that “to excess” was always part of the rule.
Zimbabwe has spent four decades building this same machinery of erasure.
The Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s, in which an estimated twenty thousand civilians were murdered, were simply not spoken of for thirty years.
To mention them was to invite arrest.
The victims were not just killed; they were removed from history, their graves unmarked and their names unspoken.
When the regime finally acknowledged the killings, they called it a moment of healing and offered no justice, no reparations, and no accountability.
The whisky had been purchased with the lives of those who believed in the revolution, and the survivors were expected to smile and return to work.
The media was crushed with equal precision.
Legislation like the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act required all journalists to be licensed by the state, while critical newspapers were bombed and foreign reporters were expelled.
The Maintenance of Order and Peace Act (MOPA) became the new wall, while Squealer convinces us that suffocating dissent and scattering opposition gatherings is for our own peace and security.
Today, the Patriotic Act represents the latest atrocity in this war on truth.
It is a piece of legislation so broad that it criminalizes any criticism of the government as subversion.
A social media post can land a citizen in prison for decades.
A protest song can make a person disappear.
The Act does not merely punish dissent.
It redefines dissent as treason, reframes the citizen as the enemy, and demands that patriotism mean loyalty to a single party and a single man.
It is the sheep’s bleat codified into law.
And what of the liberators themselves?
What of the men who once fought in the bush and promised their people land and dignity?
While the majority of those who actually fought the war for our freedom are now languishing in poverty, a handful of those who hijacked the people’s revolution live in the mansions of the former oppressors.
This elite clique sends their children to the same private schools in South Africa and England that white farmers once used.
They own vast estates seized from white landowners—estates they do not farm, but hold as trophies of their new status.
The 2023 “Gold Mafia” investigation highlighted allegations of large-scale gold smuggling and money laundering involving high-level state institutions.
While the average Zimbabwean struggles with poverty and a collapsing healthcare system, this handful of individuals accumulate wealth that would make Mr. Jones blush.
The distinction between liberator and oppressor has collapsed entirely.
The animals look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and they cannot tell the difference.
This is the horror that Orwell captured and that Zimbabwe has lived.
It is not merely that the revolution was betrayed.
What Zimbabwe reveals is something worse: it suggests that the revolution contained the seeds of its own corruption from the beginning.
The leadership was always separate from the masses.
The structures of power, once seized, reshape the people who seize them.
The oppressed become the oppressors because power itself, when absolute and unchecked, changes the soul of those who hold the whip.
The farmhouse changes everyone who enters it.
There is a final cruelty in this prophecy.
The animals in the fable are not stupid.
They are simply exhausted, overworked, and deprived of the tools to resist.
They know something is wrong.
They sense that the commandments have changed, that the pigs are drunk, and that the values of the revolution have been sold for profit.
But they cannot articulate it.
They cannot organize.
They cannot remember what the words used to mean before they were twisted by Squealer.
They trudge back to the fields because the fields must be plowed, and the sun is rising, and there is no alternative.
Zimbabweans know this exhaustion.
They know the feeling of watching their constitution mutilated by the very people sworn to protect it.
They know the grief of standing at next to the empty chair of a disappeared activist and hearing nothing from the state but silence and propaganda.
They know that the windmill they built with their own hands has been sold for private gain.
And still they work.
Still they hope.
Still they gather in small groups and whisper about what the words used to mean before the commandments were rewritten.
They are like Boxer, broken and betrayed, still believing that if they just work harder, tomorrow will be better.
And the pigs, in their farmhouse, drinking their whisky and looking out the window, are counting on exactly that.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. To directly receive his articles please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08
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