Power Dynamics and Post-independence Disillusionment: A Discursive Study of No Violet Bulawayo’s Glory

Struggle for independence integrates people as it heads on with an invariably common interest, but if independence, in post-independence situation, falls into the hands of a dictator, then it inevitably leads to bifurcation, disintegration, chauvinism and compartmentalization of the whole nation. NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, popularly known as African Animal Farm, intertextualizes history with fiction, and offers an acerbic narrative of nearly four decades of political dictatorship of an Old Horse in a fictional African country, Jidada with a –da and another –da, a metaphorical critique of Robert Mugabe’s tyrannical autocracy in Zimbabwe. This allegorical novel portrays the Old Horse’s aspiration for endless and absolute power and his overthrow in a military coup which also fails to ensure justice for all. But power, as Michel Foucault suggests, is proscriptive, concerned more with imposing limits on its subjects. Power which united the people of Jidada in the past during their struggle for freedom against the colonizers and helped them bring independence, subsequently, leads them to disintegration, dividing them between binaries- centre/margin, liberators/traitors, being/non-being. But it, inherently constitutive of knowledge, leads to the rise of awareness among people and makes them aspire for the paradigmatic shift of the oppressive power-structure. True, powershifting is open ended and it generates hope, though it does not ascertain the attainment of the specific objective. This paper, in context of Bulawayo’s Glory, seeks to pursue the research question- why cannot even independence bring all the countrymen on a single platform of solidarity and equality? The paper will borrow the theoretical framework from Michel Foucault’s concept of power and knowledge to carry out the study