Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel, dirs. The Land beneath Our Feet

This is a well-done documentary on the vexed question of land rights in Liberia. The central question is who owns what in a nation in which the majority still live off the land. The colors are lush and the people disposed to civil debate; one can almost forget that twenty years ago Liberia was the scene of years of bloody civil strife. The Land beneath Our Feet interviews village elders, female bureaucrats, young members of the urban middle class, foreign advisors, and representatives of outside agribusiness. The tedium sometimes produced by a succession of talking heads is avoided by including fascinating footage from a 1926 Harvard expedition to Gbanga in the Liberian interior. The old silent movie runs like a leitmotiv through the film. Watching it brings to life, as perhaps only cinema can, Graham Greene’s description of the Liberian interior in the early 1930s: “Though nearly all the villages at which I stayed had these common properties—a hill, a stream, palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried round at dark, the cows and goats standing between the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters of tall green feathers gathering dust—not one was quite the same” (Greene, Journey without Maps [1978], 79).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Sociology · History · Race, History, and American Society