There’s no polite way to say this, but you wouldn’t think a documentary about Liberia could be uplifting. Not until recently, anyway. That coastal West African nation, founded by freed American slaves halfway through the 19th century, practically bled to death by its own hand at the close of the 20th, while presided over by one of modern Africa’s most horrible despots (and unfortunately that’s really saying something).
Under Liberia’s warlord-tyrant president Charles Taylor, government-sanctioned rape, torture, mutilation and murder were commonplace — propagated mostly through ragtag, street-roaming swarms of drug-addled tweens with Kalashnikovs. When a rebel group, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, rose to oppose Taylor, it too swiftly became an agent of barbarity.
“Nobody can bring war against me. I’m war itself,” Taylor once bragged. And he was right.
So a group of desperate, astonishingly brave Liberian women tried something else. Instead of bringing war, they brought peace. They demonstrated. They withheld sex from their husbands. They left politics and religious differences out of it. They took to the radio, asking, simply, “Are you sick and tired of war?”
Yes, under the circumstances, it sounds preposterous. But the basic idea is at least as old as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which played it for bawdy satirical comedy: Men start wars and women stop them. Gini Reticker’s documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, has the privilege of presenting the idea as more or less a matter of fact.
