Bob Herbert and Pray the Devil Back to Hell

I was not a fan of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the documentary about how women helped stop the war in Liberia. This probably seems the ultimate contrarian-just-to-be-contrarian opinion. How can you not like a documentary about women’s agency and grassroots mobilization?

The film de-politicized the Liberian war. The directors implicitly praised the women activists for taking a moral argument–just stop fighting–and not a political argument. The film did not attempt to describe the reasons people fighted, like government exclusion and poverty and politically manipulated ideas of ethnicity. Rather it portrayed Liberian men as crazy Africans killing each other.

Bob Herbert, one of the New York Times op-ed columnists, uses his column today to argue that the film shows the “power of ordinary people to intervene in their own fate.” I don’t disagree. But I think the film underestimated the general public’s ability to understand complex dynamics, and still take away a more simple message about commitment and activism.