The present article seeks to validate Bulawayo's We Need New Names as a credible alternative to the official national historiography. It attempts to achieve this feat by obtaining answers to two key questions. The first is whether Bulawayo is fair to indict everyone (even perceived victims) for the general malaise that bedevils her nameless dystopian republic. The second question seeks insights on whether the novelist's sex guarantees women some exemption from the finger pointing that Darling otherwise executes with the candor of a death-row judge, albeit in her naive gravity-defying buoyancy. In search for answers to these questions, the researchers first analyze the portrayal of white people in Bulawayo’s unnamed postcolonial state. It then juxtaposes the presentation of the post-independence rulers of the fictional state with that of the suffering masses with the intention to justify, or otherwise, why both perceived victims and culprits are held culpable to the malaise that obtains. Finally, the research examines how women in Africa (and of Africa) are juxtaposed to women in the west. This last part encapsulates problematizing the brand of Darling’s cosmopolitanism as a possible commentary on both the home she abandons and the one she adopts. Since the underlying objective of the study is to test Bulawayo’s We Need New Names as a credible alternative to the metanarrative, parallels are drawn between events and narratives in Bulawayo’s nameless republic and those in the milieu from which her text emerges in its trans-continental settings.
