Animal Imagery and the Critique of Power in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: Relevance to Nigerian Political Experience

This study examines the animal imagery and allegorical structure of George Orwell's Animal Farm in relation to Nigerian political experience, exploring how the novella's critique of totalitarianism and the corruption of revolutionary ideals resonates with and illuminates specific patterns in Nigerian post-independence political history. Orwell's Animal Farm is among the most widely taught texts in Nigerian secondary and undergraduate literature classrooms, and its allegorical form invites application to local political contexts, yet undergraduate studies that pursue this application rigorously and specifically remain relatively uncommon. The study applies allegorical criticism and postcolonial political theory to a close reading of the novella, identifying the specific mechanisms through which the pigs' takeover of Manor Farm enacts the logic of elite capture that has been widely diagnosed in African post-independence political transitions. The analysis draws parallels with the structure of Nigerian military governance, the rhetoric of military coups justified as corrective to civilian corruption, and the language of patriotic nationalism used to legitimate economic exploitation. Findings reveal that Orwell's allegorical vocabulary is remarkably portable across diverse authoritarian contexts because it identifies structural rather than culturally specific features of power abuse. The study argues that Animal Farm remains pedagogically valuable in Nigerian classrooms not as a Cold War document but as a template for analysing the rhetoric of power. Recommendations include pairing Animal Farm with Nigerian political fiction in undergraduate comparative literature courses. Keywords: Animal Farm, allegory, Nigerian politics, Orwell, postcolonial critique.