‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and why George Orwell was a true visionary

Saturday, June 8, marked 70 years since George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, two years after I was born.
George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, India, where his father worked as a British colonial civil servant. Orwell was a novelist, essayist and critic, more like my colleague on this page of Sunday Monitor.
He was a man of strong opinions, like yours truly, who commented on and participated in some of the major political events and movements of his time, such as, communism, fascism and imperialism.

Orwell participated in the Spanish Civil War and wrote a book about the same. He died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, at the tender age of 46 years, but left a remarkable legacy which lives on through his books, essays and the might of his ideas and opinions.
An inscription on a bronze statue of Orwell unveiled on November 7, 2017, outside BBC headquarters in London aptly summarises what he courageously and relentlessly stood for. It reads: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And Orwell often did precisely that.
In an essay titled Why I Write, Orwell wrote, “every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.”

I came across Orwell’s writings for the first time in 1963 when I was in Senior Three at Sir Samuel Baker School in Gulu. Orwell’s best known novel, Animal Farm, published in 1945 was one of the books we studied for English Literature in Senior Three and this satire of communism and tyranny whetted my appetite for more of his writings.
In 1964, I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time and have read the same a few more times since then, including in 1984 when, on a personal and pleasant note, God blessed me with a son, Emanuel Adriko Okello Acemah. So, I even have good personal reasons to remember 1984, the book and the year.

In 1968, when I was a student of Political Science at Makerere University, I read Orwell’s non-fiction book titled, Homage to Catalonia which is his take on the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. He fought in that brutal war on the side of the republicans who regrettably lost to Gen Franco’s despicable and vicious fascists.
Orwell was, however, first and foremost a journalist and during his lifetime he was best known for his essays, reviews and columns in newspapers.

Significance of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is Orwell’s masterpiece, was published barely a year before he died of tuberculosis. The book gave rise to a new English language adjective, “Orwellian” which means an attitude and policy of control using propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth and manipulation of the past and present.
Does that not sound familiar to citizens and residents of many African countries, including some in our neck of the woods?

In the book Orwell describes an imaginary totalitarian or autocratic regime which controls thought by controlling language, making certain ideas unthinkable, such as sectarianism and tribalism. Several words and phrases invented by Orwell which first appeared in the book entered popular language and can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, such as “newspeak” which means simplified and obscurantist language designed to make independent thought impossible.

“Doublethink” or “doublespeak” which means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, such as, saying that Africa’s problem is leaders who overstay in power and doing exactly what one has strongly and openly condemned, while taking wananchi shamelessly for a ride.
The “thought police” are state agents who suppress all dissenting opinion, and finally “Big Brother” the supreme dictator who controls everything, everybody and watches everyone using his ubiquitous spies and now CCTV cameras.
Talk about vision, George Orwell was a true visionary who predicted 70 years ago what is now commonplace and routine. My youngest son Matthew will find it hard to believe that his daddy was a toddler when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949.

Mr Acemah is a political scientist and retired career diplomat.
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