In the bush, they battled for control of diamond fields and gold mines in Monrovia, they fought gun battles in the streets. Then, in 1999, another rebel group invaded from Guinea, sparking a second conflict, which lasted until Taylor was ousted, in 2003.ĭuring the nineties, most of Liberia was controlled by rival militias. There was a ceasefire in 1996, and Taylor was elected the next year. (Doe also used more mundane methods, such as burning his opponents’ ballots.) On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor, a former Liberian government official, invaded from Ivory Coast with a hundred soldiers, and the country plunged into civil war. Blahyi claims that he later became Doe’s spiritual adviser, and that he used witchcraft to help Doe win a second term. ![]() In 1980, Samuel Doe seized the Presidency of Liberia in a coup. “Hallelujah! It can happen to you!” A slip of paper fell from his Bible, and a worshipper hurried to pick it up. “In South Africa I was privileged to preach to parliament,” he told his congregation. He has delivered sermons across West Africa about the power of forgiveness and the perfidy of Liberian politicians, but one of his favorite topics is himself. A burly forty-five-year-old with a head shaped like a cannon shell, Blahyi took the stage wearing black dress pants and a cream-colored shirt. ![]() His name is Joshua Milton Blahyi, but most Liberians still know him by his nom de guerre from the nineteen-nineties: General Butt Naked. On a recent Sunday morning in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a few dozen people gathered in a tin-roofed church to hear a former warlord preach.
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