THIS is the first of a three part series on Tapiwa Chipfupa’s documentary film on Zimbabwe, entitled, The bag on my back.
It was recently aired on the Al Jazeera Witness programme and it demonises Zimbabwean sovereignty and it would be unfair for us to let it go unchallenged.
It is not an attack on her family or her person, but simply a reaction to information she has brought into global public space.
Tapiwa is a South African-based black Zimbabwean woman film maker and her story is a sad one.
It is an attempt to blame personal failure on the government of Zimbabwe.
In the documentary film that is downloadable from You-Tube, when Tapiwa introduces herself, she does not pronounce her surname ‘Chipfupa’ as a ‘bone’ and it is only after reading it that most people would be able to connect the sound to the referent.
In that regard, her act comes across as a conscious phonetic effort to gag the name, so that it doesn’t tell its story.
In the Zimbabwean context, it is of course needless to say African ancestors rarely gave meaningless names.
Human experience was recorded in anything that could contain meaning; in names of people; in names of dogs, cattle; in tales; in songs; you name it.
And, in that context, it is not likely that ‘Chipfupa’ was used to archive peaceful human experience.
The documentary was apparently produced in 2012 and the summary of her story is that she is the bitter 35-year-old single mother and daughter of a former farm manager.
She has fond memories of how her father bought a Ford Corsair in 1977 and joined the ranks of the few black people who owned cars in a colonial setting where the car was every white person’s right.  
Tapiwa alleges that in 1997, her father lost his job after the farm he was managing was compulsorily acquired and redistributed to 10 indigenous beneficiaries.
While suggesting that the beneficiaries of the Land Reform Programme are relatives of President Robert Mugabe, she cannot explain how, Auntie Charity, her own mother’s sister, was one of the 10 lucky beneficiaries of the sub-division of the farm her father used to manage.
She cannot explain why her own father chose to go and live in racist exile rather than seek resettlement, given the know-how he had on how farms could be properly managed.
Tapiwa lets the world know that her mother was the first to leave Zimbabwe for England, and she fondly remembers her waving her hand and saying: “Bye Salisbury!”
And that was 1998, 18 years after black people had won self-determination and changed the colonial name ‘Salisbury’ to ‘Harare’!
For five years, she and her father hung on and then he too left with the other siblings.
After giving birth to her own daughter Michella, she too leaves for South Africa. She calls it ‘exile’, and in not as many words, she tacitly admonishes ‘Aunt Marjory and Uncle Shepherd (who) decided to stay and braved power cuts, water and food-shortages and hyper-inflation that made their salaries and their currency worthless.’  
And it is as if the whole wide world does not know the xenophobia she went to brave in South Africa where Zimbabweans were being petrol-bombed, stabbed, insulted and necklaced with burning tyres in gruesome acts of intra-racial hate fuelled by a racist white-owned media. 
Tapiwa does not tell in what ways xenophobic attacks and the naked racism of the apartheid owners of the South African economy were easier to brave than the electricity cuts, inflation and food shortages of Zimbabwe.
While in South Africa, Tapiwa attempts to join the rest of her family in England but she is denied entry.
She comes to Zimbabwe to attempt to find herself.
Her re-entry into Zimbabwe is uneventful … no harassment … nothing.
So, then, it means her definition of ‘exile’ was not in the sense of ‘banishment’. Hers is self-imposed exile.
While in Zimbabwe, Tapiwa Chipfupa is free to go where she pleases, and yet she describes the whole country as permeated with jealousy, fear and suspicion.  
As a woman who has been denied entry into UK countless times, Tapiwa Chipfupa fails to use that experience to appreciate that it is not Zimbabwe that is permeated with jealousy, fear and suspicion, but the UK.
She fails to recognise that England’s stringent visa requirements on her part are not only an instrument of censorship, but also a definition of jealousy, fear and suspicion too.
The viewer will be at pains to see what the Chipfupa family problem is.
Tapiwa is desperate to join the rest of the family in the UK, but is consistently denied entry not by the Zimbabwean government, but by the UK government.
She says her parents cannot leave UK until their papers are processed and, they have already been waiting for 12 years.
And, if they have been waiting for 12 years it means they are not British citizens and they are therefore illegal immigrants, who, if they really want to come home they only have to come out of cover and be deported on a free ticket.
And, the irony in the whole thing is that the same family actually owns an empty house in Vainona and if they are really serious about re-uniting as a family, nobody is stopping them from coming back.

To be continued