HomeOld_PostsThe bag on my back: An unrealistic documentary

The bag on my back: An unrealistic documentary

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ANY film maker or story teller worth their salt knows that the skill of an artiste is appreciated differently by different audiences; a wise one knows which performance is likely to get the most effect.
When donor organisations appeal for money to the global community on behalf of Africa, there are images that they present that will get them the dollars of the meanest of misers.
Few are not moved by the child with runny snort, a few green and black flies buzzing around their face as the camera moves to the swollen ill-clad belly.
Self-exiled South African-based, Zimbabwean award winning film maker, Tapiwa Chipfupa had this in mind when she made her documentary, The bag on my back.
Chipfupa is currently completing her Masters Degree in Fine Arts in Motion Picture Medium, she says.
She produced and co-directed two documentaries currently screening at festivals in Europe, and has won the Best Student Award at Tampere International Film Festival in 2010.
The bag on my back by Chipfupa has been aired on Al Jazeera’s Witness programme.
The film begins with 35-year-old Tapiwa leaving South Africa to come home after almost seven years.
Her parents are in England with her siblings, but try as she might, she cannot get the British government to grant her a visa.
Her father, who is described as a land loving person, is ‘confined’ to urban England where he ‘farms potatoes in a flower vase’.
The scenario is meant to draw pity for this former farm manager who never tried to get a piece of land to work for himself, but chose to follow his former masters to England.
But the message that is portrayed is that the Chipfupa family is stuck in England and cannot come back home.
Her bitterness in the film is misdirected instead of being angry at the British for not allowing her to be reunited with her family in the diaspora, she is instead angry with the Zimbabwean government for letting her stay in ‘exile’.
All she gets is a ‘teary’ hello and updates via skype.
The film maker journeys back to Zimbabwe and goes down memory lane nostalgically remembering the 80s when Rhodesians still controlled the country’s prime land and the economy.
“Why do you want something when you cannot take care of it,” she says in reference to the black masses that took over the production of the nation.
Her argument against blacks having land is that Government has no money to lend to the farmers to work the land.
If Tapiwa had done her research she would have noted that the government was overwhelmed by the new farmers because the institutions that used to fund the white farmers refused to do the same with the blacks.
She journeys on to her family home in Vainona, Borrowdale, Harare and when she arrives dramatically collapses in tears.
The Chipfupa home which they have not rented out in the hope of a family reunion is run down and dilapidated due to neglect.
It has not been inhabited for the last decade.
On the premises is the rundown family pride, a 1977 Ford Corsair, rusted, windowless and a colourless shell.
There Tapiwa spends a considerable time mourning the heyday.
Pining for Rhodesia and its ‘good’ times she wants to resuscitate the relic and Tapiwa goes to a junkyard to find parts for the 30-something-year-old car.
There she is met with the hostility she deserves which she attributes to fear and jealousy of the citizens.
She then proceeds to her fathers’ former work stations in Murambinda, Mhangura and Chegutu.
There she exhibits a queer fascination with flowers, swimming pools and tennis courts.
The film maker goes to the homes she stayed that have since been occupied by new owners, through photos she shows how they were once ‘glorious’.
On one farm she tells the ‘new’ family that where their farm storage is, used to be a tennis court, “you can see the fence here and the poles where the net used to be”, she says to the seemingly puzzled farmers.
In Chegutu again we are shown a swimming pool that is no longer functional and she sheds a few tears as she recounts how each time she stood by the balcony she would hear the sound of farm activity, harvesters and tractors and now she only hears cow bells.
She then sits in the car crying blaming the blacks for taking on something they could not manage.
It was race that first decided on land allocation from 1890 to 1980 and it had to be race that corrected and inspired the second reform in 1999-2001.
“That doesn’t matter you are African because you are born on the continent not because of your race,” the teary Tapiwa says to the camera.
The film concludes with the film maker sitting in her father’s rusty car where she starts ‘driving’ the car and peeping through the junk’s glassless window.
What makes the whole documentary false is that it is simply a black person narrating a white experience.
Tapiwa through her documentary is insinuating that despite being third class citizens in their own land and labelled ‘natives’, blacks were happy under the Smith regime.
This is not true Tapiwa.
Rhodesia will never return.

2 COMMENTS

  1. I liked Tapiwa’s documentary. Revisiting the past is worthwhile because it highlights the successes and failures within – the latter of which Zimbabwe has many of and the trend continues. It may be true that Rhodesia will never return and I could not see where Tapiwa was advocating that, but she was advocating education and government support. The rule of law is needed for anyone to actively produce. That is absent and while that is the case, the country will continue to decline.

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