I ran into a post on social media a few days ago. Someone had turned Animal Farm into a slideshow, cartoon pigs in suits, captions lifted straight from the book, the whole thing dressed up for a scrolling audience. It stopped me mid scroll, the way certain things from your teenage years do when they show up uninvited in your adult timeline.

I read Animal Farm properly for the first time in secondary school, sometime in the nineteen nineties, at Mayflower. It was one of our literature texts, and looking back now, I think it did more to shape how a generation of us thought about power than half the civics lessons we sat through. We were young, impressionable, the kind of teenagers who took everything a little too personally, and this book gave us language for things we were only just beginning to notice about the adults running our world, our schools, our country. We read it partly because it was fun. There is something delightfully absurd about talking pigs and singing sheep and a horse who works himself to death out of blind loyalty. But underneath the fun was something heavier, a story about tyranny, about how leadership curdles, about how the loudest promises of liberation can quietly become their opposite.

Seeing it resurface on social media sent me back to that classroom, and it also made me want to sit with the book again, this time as someone who has watched enough real history unfold to recognize its warnings rather than just admire its cleverness.

For anyone who has not read it, or needs a refresher, Animal Farm was written by George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, and it was published in 1945 in England, right at the tail end of the Second World War. Orwell wrote it as a direct response to the Soviet Union under Stalin, using the fable of a farm uprising to satirize how the Russian Revolution’s promise of equality was betrayed by the very people who led it. Publishers were nervous about the book at the time, given Britain’s wartime alliance with the Soviets, and Orwell struggled to get it into print. It went on to become one of the most widely read political satires ever written, regularly listed among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, including a place on Time Magazine’s list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923. It has been translated into dozens of languages and remains a fixture on school curricula across the world, ours included.

The story itself is simple on the surface. The animals on Manor Farm, worn down by the neglect and cruelty of their human owner, Mr Jones, rise up and drive him off the land. They set up their own system, built on the idea that all animals are equal, and for a while it looks like something

genuinely new is being built. But the pigs, who are the cleverest of the animals, gradually take charge of the planning and the decision making. Napoleon and Snowball emerge as rival leaders, Napoleon eventually consolidates power through fear and propaganda, and one by one the original commandments of the farm are quietly rewritten to suit the pigs. By the end, the pigs are walking on two legs, trading with humans, and indistinguishable from the very tyrants the animals once overthrew.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

That line has outlived the story itself and become shorthand for exactly this kind of betrayal, and it is impossible to read it today without thinking of how many liberation stories on our own continent have followed the same arc. Across Africa, we have watched movements that began as genuine fights against colonial rule or military dictatorship produce leaders who, once in power, built systems just as closed and just as unaccountable as the ones they replaced. Some of the loudest voices against tyranny in the seventies and eighties became the very definition of it by the nineties and two thousands. In Nigeria, in South Africa, and in several other countries that fought hard for independence or for democratic transition, there is a familiar pattern of struggle giving way to entitlement, of a ruling class that starts to sound less like liberators and more like the pigs walking upright at the end of the book, wearing the clothes of the very people they replaced.

It is not only an African story. The war in Russia’s making in Ukraine has put that country’s leadership under a spotlight that echoes Orwell’s own subject matter almost too neatly, a state built on control of information, loyalty enforced through fear, and a narrative carefully managed for both the domestic and international audience. Iran offers its own version, a government that came to power promising to free its people from one form of oppression and has spent decades since policing thought, dress, and speech with the kind of internal surveillance Orwell would have recognized instantly. And even in the United States, a country that likes to see itself as the opposite of everything Animal Farm describes, the last several years of political polarization, competing versions of the truth, and the erosion of trust in shared facts have made a lot of people uneasy in ways that feel, if not identical, at least familiar.

What strikes me most, sitting with this book again as an adult, is that Orwell was never really writing about pigs, or even about Stalin specifically. He was writing about a pattern, one that repeats itself whenever the people who fought hardest against a system come to enjoy the comforts of running it. The tragedy of Animal Farm is not that the pigs were monstrous from the start. It is that they were once genuinely part of the uprising, standing shoulder to shoulder with every other animal on that farm, and power did the rest.

I keep thinking about that slideshow, and about the version of myself sitting in a Mayflower classroom in the nineties, convinced this was just a clever story about farm animals. It was never just that. It was a mirror, and it still is.

So I find myself asking questions I do not have neat answers to.

• How do movements built on genuine grievance protect themselves from becoming what they fought against?
• Is there a point at which power changes a person, or does power simply reveal who they already were?
• Why does each generation seem to need its own Animal Farm moment before the lesson truly sinks in?
• And when we see the signs early, the rewritten commandments, the selective enforcement of rules, the slow silencing of dissent, why do we so often choose comfort over confrontation until it is too late to matter?