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Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task

Animal Farm has been translated into Shona – why a group of Zimbabwean writers undertook the task

SINCE independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has in some ways become like Animal Farm. Like the pigs in the classic 1945 novel by English writer George Orwell, the country’s post-liberation leaders have hijacked a revolution that was once rooted in righteous outrage. In Zimbabwe, the revolution was against colonialism and its practices of extraction and exploitation. Author TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU, Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford The lead characters in Animal Farm have the propensity for evil and the greed for power found in despots throughout history, including former Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe’s leaders have also acted for personal gain. They…
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Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review

Koos Prinsloo: the cult Afrikaans writer has been translated to English – here’s a review

THERE are some writers you wish you had encountered years ago. There are some authors you only discover – for many reasons – years after their death. The Afrikaans writer Koos Prinsloo is one such, for me. He wrote during the last violent decade of apartheid – a system of forced racial segregation implemented by the Afrikaans-speaking white minority rulers of South Africa. While the country was undergoing states of emergency and increasing internal revolt, Prinsloo wrote from deep within the dominant white patriarchal culture. But his work spoke directly back to this domination by representing a maligned and repressed…
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