When she travels to the United States to live with her Aunt Fostalina, she finds no home in a country obsessed with consumerism, in a land where food is plentiful, but women starve themselves in order to achieve a beauty ideal that is totally foreign to someone who has gone hungry. She dreams of a future with her wealthy aunt in America, and she imagines everything will be easy.ĭarling’s eyes interpret this story with an innocence and honesty that only a child can understand.
As she runs wild through the shantytown where she lives, she encounters incest, murder, AIDS, and hunger.
Now, her home has been destroyed, there is no school, and everything is impermanent. We Need New Names tells this story through the eyes of Darling, a ten-year-old girl, who remembers the “Before” time when there were homes and jobs and she went to school. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names is a powerful depiction of a nation at war with itself. White farmers who refused to leave Zimbabwe have been tortured and murdered. He has distributed land to himself and those he favors, and committed genocide against his own people, razing their homes and forcing them to build shantytowns. He has murdered and plundered the people of Zimbabwe. Thirty-five years after coming to power, President Mugabe is still in power.
I was a middle-class white girl, and to me, Mugabe was a liberator who wanted to help his country and reclaim their land from oppressive white colonialists. I remember sitting on my parents’ back patio in Chester, Virginia, arguing with my conservative father, about Mugabe’s intentions. I remember being hopeful about Zimbabwe’s future and Mugabe’s social plans for former Northern and Southern Rhodesia. I remember that I was excited for the nations of Southern Africa. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party was in power. In 1990, I was taking my first political science class, The Politics of Southern Africa.
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