She majored in journalism and minored in English, and was a founding mother of the University’s first African American sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. Even though I had no idea how I was going to do it.”Īs a URI undergraduate, Webb was a basketball player and track star on a full athletic scholarship. I heard a definitive voice, not even mine: You’re going to make a film. “I instantly needed to know this little girl’s story, how it would feel to lose your innocence in that way. “I had trouble processing it,” Webb says. More disturbing was how recently the photograph had been taken: 1958, only ten years before Webb was born.
After seeing the black-and-white photograph posted on the internet, she was shaken by the realization that human zoos-ethnographic displays of Eskimos, Native Americans, Asians, Africans, or other “human curiosities,” especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries-had existed. “I knew the story needed to be told,” says Webb. Thus begins the short film Zoo (Volkerschau) by first-time filmmaker Monda Raquel Webb ’90, inspired by a real-life photograph of an African child on display in the “Negro Village” at Expo ’58, the first World’s Fair following the end of World War II.
In the worlds I create, women are visible, women are heard.”
Her upcoming movie Red Clay Dirt is adapted from a book of her short stories, drawing from her family history. Monda Raquel Webb lives in Rockville, Maryland. The groundskeeper stakes a sign into the dirt: live feeding. Inside the hut, an African girl waits with her mother. In a small dirt corral, a groundskeeper sweeps leaves from the dirt of one of the day’s exhibitions, a replica of a Congolese hut. Cut to fairgrounds: popcorn tumbles from a kettle, a ticket booth opens. 1958: A young girl twirls in front of her bedroom mirror, picking out a party dress for her birthday trip to the World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium.