Glory is the story of post-independence Zimbabwe. It’s been told before, but never in such a riotous way, anthropomorphised into farce-tragedy, an allegorical satire that makes us cry with laughter and weep with dismay.
The book opens with an Independence Day celebration in a fictional country called Jidada, an allegory for Zimbabwe.
Finally, the ruler, the Old Horse, deigns to arrive at the ceremony. But he cuts a decrepit and pathetic figure. The narrator gives a subheading to the scene, from within the mind of the senile ruler: “Tholukuthi huh???”
Lucidity then surfaces momentarily — “Tholukuthi aha!” — as Old Horse surveys the fawning crowd of animals. Content in his arrogance, however, he falls instantly asleep with “the seasoned serenity of a very old baby”.
It won’t take readers long to identify most of the animal characters. Old Horse is, of course, the nonagenarian president Robert Mugabe. Vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa is another old horse, Tuvius Delight Shashaand.
It’s a narrative you’ll be familiar with. Tuvius is humiliated at the Independence Day gathering by the mocking, venomous speech of the donkey, Marvellous (the Grace Mugabe of the piece). Marvellous has her PhD, so she is also called Dr Sweet Mother, and is apparently miles ahead of Tuvius in the succession race.
Soon enough, however, the Old Horse is deposed by Tuvius in a coup, with the help of the army of Defenders (a pack of slavering pit bulls) who can’t stand the thought of taking orders from the haughty Dr Sweet Mother. That this all takes place in 2017, the year Mugabe was ousted, makes the comparisons all the more obvious.
It takes a few chapters for readers to acclimatise to Bulawayo’s prose style and language, which blends simple phraseology with menacing oratory, social media disjointedness and Zimbabwean patois.
Satire works more powerfully than nonfiction to illustrate the country’s descent during the 37 years of Mugabe’s rule
For example, the word “tholukuthi” is used throughout, meaning “to find out”, or as an exhortation — I’m telling you! — when the narrator, as oral historian, embellishes or demands we pay attention.
The narrator has much to tell, but the author is also mocking us for being so wilfully oblivious in the first place. “Surely you knew this?” the author seems to say.
By the end of the novel, reading the word tholukuthi is a prick of conscience, a mnemonic that embraces all the outrageousness implied in the continuing decline in Zimbabwe, a disaster that frequently bubbles over South Africa’s northern border.
Dreadful reality
Readers soon find themselves asking: Is Jidada a failed state? What kind of a country is this?
Fictionalised, Jidada’s lunacy takes many forms: innocuously hilarious, damagingly stupid, blatantly malevolent.
Pretty much like the real Zimbabwe of today, where hyperinflation has raged for decades, 40% of people live in extreme poverty and even the World Bank doesn’t provide an unemployment statistic, though it notes that only a third of workers actually receive a salary.
Glory shows, in full throttle, this betrayal of democracy and perversion of revolutionary ideals.
Satire works more powerfully than nonfiction to illustrate the country’s descent during the 37 years of Mugabe’s rule, and the bizarre two weeks in November 2017 when he was deposed.
Many have asked whether that, officially, was even a coup. In Glory, this question resurfaces.
Satire works more powerfully than nonfiction to illustrate the country’s descent during the 37 years of Mugabe’s rule, and the bizarre two weeks in November 2017 when he was deposed
In one scene, the dog tasked with informing the Old Horse of his house arrest seeks to reassure him: “All I’m saying, Your Excellency, sir, is stating the true fact that what is happening here is most definitely not a coup.”
The president can hardly fathom what is happening, and his unfinished cup of Earl Grey drops and shatters. To which the dog responds: “Very sorry about the coup, I mean cup, sir.”
Glory teems with incoherent, maniacal ramblings, the disjointed syntax designed to mirror the chaos inside Jidada.
For example, one of the coup plotters, a drunken pit bull named Gen Lovemore Shava, rages: “The Revolution will be defended like it’s always been defended, Comrade. With the gun, and in these. Revolutionaries will not be usurped by nonentities! Forward with the Gun!”
The pit bull is malevolently serene when sober, and has one of the book’s best lines, reminding Tuvius/Mnangagwa that he is so well educated that he deserves to seize the presidency: “You have a PhD in ethics, Chief, from the famed University of KwaZulu-Natal ... even the Tweeting Baboon of the US doesn’t himself know what a PhD smells like.”
The image conjured up by that line is priceless, made even more delicious by the knowledge that Mnangagwa has all sorts of dubiously awarded qualifications.
A bullet for populists
There is, of course, a wider relevance to all this.
As Bulawayo indicates above, a state of Jidada exists in many countries around the world, and Glory’s scathing parody is also aimed at these autocratic regimes, and all populists.
It will resonate even with readers who know little about Zimbabwe. “Make Jidada great again!” is a refrain in the speeches of Jidada’s ministers, and there is a long list of them with fantastic titles: the minister of the revolution, the minister of corruption, the minister of order, the minister of things, the minister of nothing, the minister of propaganda, the minister of homophobic affairs, the minister of disinformation, the minister of looting.
The satire also cocks a snoot at Zimbabwe’s intimidation of the media and writers. Mnangagwa’s regime recently prosecuted one of the country’s globally recognised authors, Tsitsi Dangarembga, for participating in anti-corruption protests. Dangarembga’s book Nervous Conditions was included in the BBC’s 2018 list of the world’s 100 most influential books.
“While the first liberation struggle might be against the coloniser, the second, inevitably, is against ourselves,” said Jamaica-born British writer Sara Collins, in praise of outspoken writers like Dangarembga and Bulawayo.
South Africans should take special note. We’ve had our own Old Horse, and are still paying the price for the Jacob Zuma years. Today, our problems may be summed up by the title of one of the chapters in Glory: “A Leader Who Thinks He Is Leading and Has No Power Is Only Taking a Walk”.
It underscores why reading Glory ought to help us overcome our cognitive dissonance where, even knowing the truth of what we see, we often still behave at odds with reality.
For example, Jidada’s army who helped plot the coup are a pack of greedy dogs, and presented as the defenders of the revolution. Yet by the end of the story, even they know they are defending a farce.
Bulawayo also regularly uses repetition as a literary device, such as when she describes the Defenders contemplating whether to follow orders and attack a sea of protesters, or step back.
She writes: “And sure enough, the Defenders sat in their vehicles and considered the maths of the Revolution …”
She repeats the phrase “considered the maths of the Revolution” 42 times — which, it is surely no coincidence, is the number of years between Zimbabwe’s independence and her writing Glory.
Above all, the book is a reminder to her countrymen to consider Mugabe’s true legacy.
There are direct references to the Gukurahundi genocide, a series of atrocities in Matabeleland in the 1980s in which 20,000 people were murdered by Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade. Mnangagwa was a critical participant in this slaughter.
As Glory’s narrator puts it, a long string of leaders have been “breathing fiascos with no love or respect whatsoever for the nation they purported to serve, yes, tholukuthi, toads with no leadership, no ethics, no principles, no sense of justice, no compassion, no discipline, no honesty, no idea of what real service to the nation looked like”.
What, then, was achieved by the liberation war, asks Bulawayo. What actually changed after the coup?
This is the question at the heart of the novel.
As a biting satire about liberation turned sour, you can of course laugh through its 400 pages. But Glory is a clever book about a dastardly regime and awful times that followed for the people of Zimbabwe.
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus/Penguin, 2022)
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