La France est un vieux pays fier de ses traditions et de son histoire. Sans son apport sur le plan de la philosophie, de la culture, de l’art et de l’esthétique, notre monde serait sans doute plus pauvre en esprit et en humanité. Voilà le côté limpide, presque cristallin de son identité.

My friend Yvonne once told me that it was only when she lived in my country’s capital that she understood which city Nairobi was going to be when it grew up. Harare in the 1990s was funky and groovy and uncluttered and happening. Zimbabwe in the 1990s was a country in which people still dreamed and planned with the reasonable expectation that their dreams would come true, and if they didn’t, they could downgrade them to less ambitious, but still acceptable versions.

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One can argue that great literary works are rarely about good sentences or syntax. Given a good literary mind, these are insignificances that will normally sort themselves out. More often than not, it is the pulse of the mind behind a piece of work that either turns it into a shoddy bundle of words, or a creation that will find resonance across cultures and connect peoples experiences in ways unenvisaged before. Such minds have been seen in geographically disparate corners of the world: Nawal el Saadawi in Egypt; Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay; Abdullah Hussein in Pakistan; Ngugi Wa Thiongo in Kenya; Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Union; Steve Biko in South Africa; the list is endless.

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The film is a contemporary recount of the daughter of Credo Mutwa of the burning of their house in 1976, on how she has carried the burden that is either a falsity or a truth for the past thirty years and her opening a can of worms, as if to exorcise a ghost, through searching for some semblance of the truth in her immediate community, and ultimately through a confrontation with her father.

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