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Stephanie Horton
The Confessions of General Butt Naked
Trading Priesthood for Priesthood: A Testimonial Account Of A Liberian Brutal War General And A Traditional Priest That Dramatically Met Christ And Is Now Christ’s Ambassador. By Joshua Milton Blahyi. Copyright © 2006 Gee-Bee Productions. Click here for more book information.
I wish now to review in memory my past wickedness and the carnal corruptions of my soul . . . Woe, woe, by what steps I was dragged down to “the depths of hell” . . . Let the proud laugh at me, and those who have not yet been savingly cast down and stricken by thee, O my God . . . Nevertheless, I would confess to thee my shame to thy glory. And now I will tell and confess unto thy name, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer, how thou didst deliver me . . . Many different people desire to know, both those who know me and those who do not know me. Some have heard about me or from me . . . They have the desire to hear me confess what I am within, where they can neither extend eye nor ear nor mind . . . I would therefore confess what I know about myself . . .
— Saint Augustine (354-430)
I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose
accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself . . . I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge . . . and loudly proclaim, “Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues . . . Such as I was, I have declared myself . . . Power Eternal! Assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble . . . let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1728)
Black people never annihilate evil. They don’t run it out of their neighborhoods, chop it up or burn it up. They don’t have witch hangings. They accept it. It’s almost like a fourth dimension in their lives. They try to protect themselves from evil, of course, but they don’t have that puritanical thing which says if you see a witch, then burn it, or if you see something, then kill it. I’m not saying that black people don’t kill each other. I’m talking about the way they perceive evil and how they act on that perception. They don’t destroy evil. It is as though God has four faces for them—not just the Trinity, but four. I know instinctively we do not regard evil the same way as white people do. We have never done that. White people’s reaction to something that is alien to them is to destroy it. That’s why they have to say black people are worthless and ugly. They need all the psychological “do” in order to do something simple like ripping some people off. That’s why they behave the way they do.
— Toni Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison, 1994
I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside . . . touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.
— Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
That dreaded name, Butt Naked, was never merely satirical. We all knew that the devouring energy inside the mystery of Blahyi’s nakedness was spirit. But the epic of the man now known as Joshua Blahyi who carried the war name General Butt Naked is in the gravity of his confessions. He who once preyed completely nude now strips himself again, this time to bare his soul, in print.
Trading Priesthood for Priesthood, Joshua Milton Bouye Blahyi’s confessional memoir is a story of entangled histories, ancient kinship schisms, myths and migrations, mysticism and mystery, blood covenants, predatory magic, torture, deathly power struggles, human sacrifices, divine miracles, spiritual atonement, and Christian redemption. And it is not only its confessional revelations, its ethnography, its traditional religiosity, its prophetic articulation, that compel attention. Its tone of authenticity is piercing. Its violence is intimate. Its scope spans centuries. It is wholly atypical for its demystifying truth-telling. It individualizes a ‘cannibal.’
We Liberians can say that the spirit of war is the epic communal narrative inscribing the violent convulsions of our times. Prophets, philosophers, historians, theologists, seers, and artists speak in symbolic language of ‘the spirit of an age’ to describe a subjective quality suffusing a given time period that is at once measurable, metaphysical, and metaphorical. It is a spirit that one who succumbs to its power inhales like air through the nostrils, and soaks in like oil through the pores of the skin. Each era’s triumphs or ruptures can be mapped by that spirit that animates the dominant collective experience. Out of our bloody chaos, that we ourselves must strive to make coherent, Blahyi’s book is unlike any other Liberian narrative I’ve ever read. This is a story that stirs the bruised blood clots of unhealed scarring and pries open deep cracks in the psyche through which terrible shadows glide. It creeps the skin, repels the spirit, disturbs the soul. No Euro-American epic drama or Greco-Roman myth approaches for me the power of its metaphysical leap from the spirit underworld into the blood-soaked concrete.
The story arches to end with reverence for human life and divine deliverance. Finding meaning above and below the narrative, the book is important for its exploration of an aspect of the Liberian psyche in a manner that has never before been publicly aired.
In Gerald Barclay’s documentary, Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here,1 his interview with Joshua Blahyi gave those of us in the Diaspora a telegraphed look at the human face of the former Brigadier General Butt Naked, king of the menacing Butt Naked Brigades. They were ferocious fighters. Their war paint was blood. They ate people. Naked, they prowled the empty streets with cutlasses and guns while people hid and shivered, and not a bird or any other animal breathed to open its mouth during their blood curdling war chants. Then we heard that General Butt Naked had been to Israel, where Jesus walked, where Jesus was baptized and tortured, where Jesus conquered death; and he was back in Monrovia, speaking about his miraculous Christian conversion at “public confession meetings” and on the radio. He had a ministry. He drew crowds. He saved souls. Lincoln Brownell, my former classmate who was at home through the war, now a minister of the gospel, said Blahyi was genuine. Lincoln has always had a radiance and gentle beauty about him, even in high school, reflecting the unconditional righteous love of a merciful higher power; not to mention, he always held a place at the top of the class – smart. I respect him.
And so I watched a man whose bloodlust had made me weep and shudder in my sleep, and hang my head in shame straight through one decade into another. My dreams were crowded with vivid spectacles of the slaughtered, the tortured, murdered babies, wild-eyed young boys, young girls impaled, covered with blood and sperm and feces, old men and old women bleeding and paralyzed, stricken with disbelief. But Blahyi’s devilries gave ammunition of a different kind to spirits of a different kind (though in the same league) that swell and puff themselves up in the western world. Those spirits bellowed, hissed and shrieked through all those years that we Liberians were savage, cruel nonpeople with no humane traditions of justice, ethics, moral philosophy, or spiritual healing. Look at the animals! Look at the animals! Those spirits never stopped screeching about our ugly side—‘separatist settlers,’ ‘predatory pioneers’—and the ‘wild African’ side that Brigadier General Butt Naked the ‘Dark Lord’ of Liberia and his Butt Naked Brigades personified in flesh. The voyeuristic obsession with the nature of the violence above and beyond the plight of the victims was in itself pathological territory.
Look at the animals! Look at the animals! They mocked us. They roused and clacked dead bones to psychoanalyze us. And we believed them. Those western spirits tormented us on top of all the miseries and sorrows weighing us down through years of blood. It was outrageous, spirits spitting from countries founded on centuries of bloodshed, torture, and genocide while those histories yet undead were swept away forgotten. “No one is more dangerous,” James Baldwin wrote, “than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” There was something so hurtful and absurd that we believed that we in all the world were “les nouveaux babares,”2 the eternal barbarians, and that the spirits chanting about our ‘beastly’ natures were pure. We were measured against “true humanity” and in all ways found lacking. I’d made the same judgment about Butt Naked, the sociopath. Could somebody who ate people really have any humane consciousness at all? Living outside of Africa with access to non-corporate human-over-profit-centered media reportage, imbibing alternative independent news that doesn't put a pro-power public relations gloss on facts, I often asked myself the same question about those Westerners who chew and swallow human life and whole peoples, or profit by it, with icy detachment and mind-conflating maneuvers.
The Barclay interview with Blahyi shattered some assumptions, but the book, its mythical history, its catastrophic events and its violent descriptions seized and bludgeoned my soul, sending my imagination staggering through African cosmic space and time.
Each time I had to go to the battlefront, I would have to prepare myself by performing human sacrifices . . . I held the two legs of the baby and burst his head against the wall. The brain and everything in the baby was used to speedily prepare me . . . Everyday my quest for blood rose when the cease fire was declared by ECOMOG . . . I had no easy access to blood. The sharp fall in my sacrificial lambs made me yearn for blood . . . I was like a hungry lion.
He was possessed, Blahyi writes, by the “ancient deceiver of [his] tribe,” the “oracle” whom he now knows to be evil. It is an entity called “Nya-na-o-weh,” a “fallen angel” who “imposed itself” on his Sarpo forefathers as their god. Blahyi describes it as a twelve-foot tall, night flying, broken-winged, foot-dragging, extremely fast-moving ancient demon spirit thing from hell living under a rock in Kabadeh, Sinoe. Born into the Julukon lineage of the Sarpo priesthood, in obedience to his cultural religious tradition, he served this principality, who is “amongst the first three high-ranking deities” that head the “black-witch covens” of land, sea and forest along the Gulf of Guinea’s coastline, and “whose control and influence has spread all over the entire Kwa-speaking regions of Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire.”
Blahyi claims that the black stone-studded knives used by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe to ritually slaughter President William Richard Tolbert, Jr. were the altar knives of his Sarpo priesthood. It’s important to add that Blahyi asserts that the priesthood knives have disappeared since that day. Given the mysteries still surrounding President Tolbert’s murder, perhaps, as someone has suggested, the knives are in a “private museum” somewhere next to Lumumba’s teeth, Biko’s backbone, the scalp of Crazy Horse, and other like “mementos” of the dominant I/We and the subordinate Other/They inferno.
As a priest over the biggest god from the entire Krahn tribe, and the late President Samuel K. Doe being a member of the very tribe, automatically placed him under my jurisdiction . . . [President Doe] was the seventh in rank amongst the three thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine priests under my control . . . almost all of his cabinet and other strategic officials under his time were initiated and summated to Nya-na-o-weh from the President’s Executive coven. We also asked the late President [Doe] to bring the nation under the control of Nya-na-o-weh . . . I used the office of the late President to promote our Southeastern craft (the Gias), and silence the two major crafts in the nation, namely, the Masonic and the Poro and Sande crafts . . . We asked him [Doe] to officially turn over the nation to us by literally giving us the flag and the seal of the Republic of Liberia. He did, and we programmed them through the lineage of the Krahn tribe and had them planted in the Gedeh Mountain, which is the powerhouse of our tribe . . . The death of the President came about when he desired to satisfy his political contemporaries and the international community . . . He went as far as going to be initiated into other cults such as the Poro Society, the Masonic craft . . . These were the very spiritual powers we asked him to break down . . . The zoes gave him the name Tarnue, one of the highest ranks among the Poro to entrap him . . . After that time, I lost the full spiritual control I had over the President . . . General Johnson seized this time to arrest and kill the late President Doe . . . The General repeatedly asked the late President for the meaning of the initial ‘K’ in the middle of his names. On several occasions, the President whispered “Kanyon” in response, and that was what everybody in the nation knew the ‘K’ meant. The General then refused and insisted on the meaning of the name and the President finally said “Kwetii,” which traditionally means, “the interest of the gods.” The secret was revealed by the elders to the General because they hated the President for the way he had allowed the traditional leaders and the spirits from the Southeast to overshadow and control the political and spiritual atmosphere of the nation.
No public audience anywhere, in my lifetime memory, has ever witnessed a Brigadier General (or any other military person for that matter) speak such self-incriminating truths. No other Liberian leader or public figure—warlord, preacher, prophet, zoe or politician—has been as forthright on all they know, have experienced, and participated in, about that which is hidden from our uninitiated eyes in the manifold deeps. This, above all, sets Blahyi apart.
The Guardians of Lineage Inviolate may shout against Blahyi’s unveiling of ancestral mysteries and secrets, as if the evil side of human nature screeches to a halt outside the boundaries of the traditional domain. The literati and academics may scoff at Blahyi’s oral, self-mythologizing, ecclesiastical style. There are those who will say he has no right to say anything in his own defense, given his past. But the book’s close to the bone emphasis, the first person idiomatic voice and the characters—even those briefly mentioned—are riveting. Among them, Sande Society Zoe Zogboa, a hermaphrodite married to both a man and a woman, the “greatest witch of her time” in Nyakanya, Lofa, who, Blahyi writes, though outside of his Sarpo spiritual tradition, prophesies that he is “born with a destiny that could not be destroyed by any mortal being.” Prophecy and destiny loom large as backstory and denouement, but one cannot ascribe deception and distortion simply based on what some may perceive as Blahyi’s cosmic sense of his own significance. He is someone who has held a high position of authority at one time or another for most of his life from a very young age to the present. In the history of his people, he is “the youngest priest ever enthroned.”
The Howl of Protest
His cruelties are legend. This man Blahyi, some people say, who stalked children to feed on and broke their necks as easily as other men crunch chicken bones between their jawteeth IS A FRAUD.
A young man that sold petrol by the roadside listened to me preach . . . he walked from his selling spot and said, “You expect me to listen or believe you, after you killed my family and tried to kill me? The very God you are blaspheming saved me, now you are hiding under him.”
Blahyi himself confesses that the murders on his head began long before the war started. And so a hurt, horrified and vengeful chorus chant his crimes: He drank the blood of babies. He ate the hearts of men. He chewed through women’s bellies. He carved small children up into raw ribbons to feed his roaring hunger for human flesh. He hung conscious people from iron hooks and drained their white blood cells to drink in diabolic rituals. He is a heartless, vicious murderer who swallowed the slow death agonies of his victims with fiendish glee. And every other preacherman in Liberia this time (these days) was a wartime killer.
While some may place Blahyi’s confessions of cultist practice within the cosmology of African religion, it must be said that there exists a great gulf between traditional African spirituality and African cults.3 I’ve spoken with some Christians who say God can do anything, God can forgive anyone, but Blahyi is “a special case” because the things he did were so wicked—satanic—he may be beyond redemption—unregenerative. These Christians say Blahyi’s “so-called” conversion is a trick of the devil for evil purposes: He was too deep inside to come out. Bodioh Siapoe says, “Joshua Blahyi is suffering from a chronic psychosis. People don’t practice any of that craft in the southeastern region from where I come. When he gets through preaching, he will become a senator like Prince Johnson.”4 Another Southeasterner, who asked to remain anonymous, told me, “Blahyi has to be psychotic. I believe it could have happened like he tells it about becoming a priest at that young age, but if I had to go through the kind of initiation he talks about at that age, I would have gone crazy from the fear and trauma. Something is wrong with somebody who can go through those kinds of things at such a young age and no kind of emotional harm affects them.” Blahyi’s close cousin, Marcus Pyne, is sickened by his confessions, though what Pyne has to say does lend validity to Blahyi’s story:
I was upset when I saw and heard what he is narrating. Sarpo people don’t eat human beings. Our people are not known. The history was written in such a way that we were left out. We are not Krahn. We are Sarpo. We are not from Grand Gedeh. We are from Sinoe. Our people have wisdom and culture to stop bullets and make people disappear, but I don’t buy that other thing he’s talking. Myths hold society together. That’s what we live by. We revere that but it doesn’t mean they’re infallible. I’ve been there when the grand devil comes out. When it comes to town, nothing moves. When the grand devil is coming to perform, all the women go in, and the day goes dark. But I never saw any human sacrifice. He went too far with that type of exposure. If he was tired with it, let him leave it alone, but it’s not called for, for him to go out there and tell the outside world.
They were killing our people—the Krahn, the Gio, the Mano, Taylor—were killing our people. The elders gave him some powers but he betrayed our people. He is lying. He’s only trying to make money. He’s flying all over Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, preaching. Why can’t he go home to our place if he says the Almighty God—the Father, Jesus Christ the Son and the Holy Ghost—is on his side? If demons can’t touch him, let him go home and visit his people. Why can’t he go home to drive away the demons? It’s because he knows what will happen to him for demonizing his people.5
Pyne admits that he was never privy to the inner doings of the Sarpo priestly power circle as Blahyi was, but it’s clear he agrees with these lines in the book, spoken by the elders and warriors sent to reason with Blahyi after his public renunciations against “the ancient deceiver”: “‘Deh Blahyi ah nu ahn! Ou mo ah kor le o! That is, ‘what is Blahyi doing? He has actually planned to destroy our entire heritage’.”
No one who has had “access to the most sacred coven within the council of elders” has ever before revealed its secrets. Such betrayers are “tried traditionally and killed by their traditional tribunal” as Pyne insinuates. Can one then conclude that Joshua Blahyi has put his life at risk to expose things that no ordinary sane person would dare reveal, and not only about his own people, but also about political figures, and other spiritual traditions? Asked the direct question, “Are you in danger from your own people?”, Blahyi responds:
I am, but I feel more endangered if I don’t confess; I feel more afraid, more enslaved. The fear I have of God is real. Jesus’ blood has made a difference. The more evil is revealed, the less it becomes. The tribe has tried to discredit my story. I have been threatened. With all of that, I still honor and respect the tribe; the history of the tribe. The tribe has many good values. God has an interest in the tribe. The typical Sarpo-Krahn is very softhearted. This sense of weakness makes them submit to wherever the power comes from. They live by the dictation of those powers. Even Marcus’ father will not know as much as I know. I was the priest. Once you are only a worshipper, you don’t know these things I’m exposing. They say I’m betraying the tribe. I’m not betraying the tribe. I’m exposing what I did.6
The One Enthroned Priest After a Sixty-one Year Gap
The umbilical cord that bound Joshua Blahyi to the Sarpo priesthood is buried in the history of a people divided by philosophical differences. Blahyi’s episodic revelations begin in oral history with the origins of that division, when the founding father of the Sarpo, rejecting warfare and inter-ethnic rivalry, broke away from the Krahn nation, leaving the Grand Gedeh homeland to settle in Sinoe on the other side of Mt. Putu. Between the mountains and the ocean, a reign of peace ensued while the Sarpo multiplied, forming quarters and sub-clans. Escaped slaves and others fleeing tribal wars and oppressive customs found protection and the freedom to live how ever they chose within the peaceful Sarpo territory. Then came missionaries on ships from across the ocean to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. They lived among the Sarpo, learned their language, and won converts. At the missionaries’ departure, the Sarpo journeyed back to Grand Gedeh to reunite with their people and share the “Good News.” Upon arrival, they are slaughtered in large numbers for failing to respond with the traditional Krahn greetings, which are based on war shouts, self-praise and fighting gestures.
The Sarpo survivors escape into the bush, nurse their wounds, and regroup to return to Sinoe. On that portentous journey home, they stop at nightfall to sleep on the top of a very large rock. Heard by only one man, an unearthly voice begins with praise and ends by promising to bestow supernatural powers on the Sarpo to avenge the bloodshed if it is worshipped and obeyed:
“You are going to walk on their blood.”
“I must be talking with a god!” Saydee whispered.
“You have rested under the shelter that will remain until your last generation.”
Led by the hearer Saydee, thirteen chosen Sarpo men endowed with “unusual” strength return to Grand Gedeh and exact a bloody revenge. The remaining Krahn fathers then recognize the Sarpo conquerors as kin after the Sarpo chronicle their shared history in victory speeches. A truce is reached and they agree to live in peace, separated by the mountain, to honor the blood spilled. The Krahn elders request permission to worship the new god:
. . . we want to know the god you worship, the god that has given you such powers, though we are not denouncing our fathers’ gods . . .
The entity under the rock now has Sarpo and Krahn devotees. Saydee, of the Julukon quarter, is appointed chief priest. The pact requires the blood of four female babies, nine virgin young men, and one live infant. In succession after Saydee, only a firstborn male born into the Julukon quarter can assume the priesthood.
Blahyi, a Julukon son, had another seed planted deep in his lineage. The arrival of Liberian government officials in the Sarpo homeland captured the imagination of young Nnawyilee, the oldest brother of Blahyi’s paternal grandfather. Overprotected by his parents who had lost six sons before him (all mauled to death together by a lioness), Nnawyilee grew up being teased and taunted by his age mates for not being allowed to roam and hunt. When the government officials speak of peace and an end to the ongoing Sarpo/Kru war (at some point, the govt. armed the Kru with guns), and of the benefits of book learning, Nnawyilee is fascinated. Seduced by the officials’ style of dress, speech, and comportment, he runs away to Sasstown, the seat of the Liberian government in that area, where he goes to school until tuition is required. He then returns home only to be ridiculed by the warriors (as his education gave him no access to guns to fight the Kru), and banished by the chief priest on the oracle’s decree for attempting to spread a foreign culture and tradition. Nnawyilee, however, “felt no loss.”
Nnawyilee began secretly recruiting Sarpo boys to leave home for schooling in Sasstown. He educates Charlie, his younger brother by his father’s second wife, who becomes a Messenger Clerk in government service: “Messenger was a very big post at the time.” After Nnawyilee dies, Charlie takes over the education recruitment drive, urging Sarpo boys to bring their farm produce to Sasstown to sell for school fees. Blahyi’s grandfather has four more children by a third wife. The eldest, Kwetii, Blahyi’s father, deeply loved his younger brother, who was named after Nnawyilee the elder departed. Kwetii sends Nnawyilee the younger to Charlie in Sasstown and pays his tuition through twelfth grade, and so it was that Nnawyilee the younger became the first high school graduate out of Sarpoland. Tragedy strikes and another momentous episode unfolds when Nnawyilee is murdered mysteriously on the day he returned home to celebrate his graduation at a grand party organized by Kwetii. Devastated by his younger brother’s death, Kwetii, a firstborn male in line for the priesthood, shuns traditional gatherings and, “to please the spirit of his brother,” leaves for school in Sasstown, and later moves to Monrovia. Trained from birth for the priesthood, Kwetii had already accomplished “powerful” feats, but “the death . . . hurt him so much that nothing in the town interested him anymore . . . he counted it against the traditionalists.”
Grandfather Blahyi suffered scorn, economic decline and social ostracism for Kwetii’s refusal to return to Kabadeh. The old man visited his son in Monrovia, but his pleas failed to persuade him. When the old stand-in priest died (installed following the death of the chief priest), the elders decreed that Grandfather Blahyi must leave the homeland forever, “to join his son wherever he is living,” if Kwetii does not come back to Kabadeh and present himself to Nya-na-o-weh along with the other firstborn sons. Before the old man and Charlie reached Monrovia to deliver the message, “the priestly mantle fell” on Kwetii in his office by a terrifying visitation from Nya-na-o-weh. Grandfather Blahyi returned home without Kwetii but with the news of the visitation, and with Kwetii’s pledge that he would give up his firstborn son “to study the tradition from infancy,” since he himself had been polluted in Monrovia with thoughts and influences which “posed a threat to the traditional priestly throne.” The proposal was accepted, and again, Kwetii evaded his fate.
In Monrovia, Kwetii married a Lorma woman, Ma Saybah, who held a prominent position in the Sande. Their first child was a son, and though Ma Saybah wanted him to fill his father’s priestly role, she had the baby initiated first into the Poro, at six months old, so that he would primarily identify with her tradition. When Kwetii returned home to give his son over, the boy was rejected by the oracle for bearing “the mark” of the Poro. The oracle then chose a woman to bear a son for Kwetii, Duweh, who was already married with two children and was also Kwetii’s blood relative. All objections to the “close family relationship” were overruled in favor of “the wishes of the gods.”
One of the elders observed that my father’s passion . . . was relatively weak . . . they assigned his paternal uncle Tweleh Falleh to him . . . to hypnotize my father, so as to create a sudden burning desire for my mother . . .
Duweh accompanied Kwetii to Monrovia, and, despite Ma Saybah’s spiritualist attempts to disrupt what was in motion, Milton Bouye Blahyi a.k.a. General Butt Naked was subsequently conceived and born in St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital, with an astounding birth weight of eighteen pounds.
Once again, Kwetii tried to circumvent the oracle’s control and intrusion in his life. The remarkable intelligence of his son, Milton Bouye, his deep love for him, and his fears about what the priesthood would make of him, made Kwetii reluctant to give him up. Kwetii asked Duweh to bear him a second child, and it was this son he carried home to present to the oracle. That boy was also rejected like his other brother before him, and another terrifying and threatening nightmarish visitation from Nya-na-o-weh finally convinced Kwetii to relinquish “the chosen one.” In tears, shivering, and with a heavy heart, Kwetii obeyed.
Blahyi was initiated into the priesthood as high priest at eleven years old. It had been sixty-one years since the oracle had last found a worthy priest. To prepare him for his initiation, his uncle Charlie told him that the oracle would make him into “a powerful warrior.” Having grown up in Monrovia watching television, Blahyi wanted to be like his TV hero, the American fighter, Vic Morrow. He was then in the third grade and could read and write.
. . . my father told me that Nya-na-o-weh would be sending his warriors to me . . .
“Did you say warriors? Do they have guns?”
“No son, don’t be afraid . . .They will not come to harm you” . . .
“I want to get to him quick so he will make me a warrior like Vic Morrow.”
I will never forget the instant my father handed me over to those men. I expected to see them in army uniforms with guns in their hands, but muscular and bare-naked men who had spears and big daggers in their hands saluted me. I was not afraid from the beginning. Even while they were penetrating thick forests with me . . . they were absolutely mute as culture demands that the priest is to be related to with due respect. The only sounds I could hear from them were woofing, barking and groaning with their mouths closed, like hun-hun, hun . . . woo! . . . woooo, and the shouting of Nya-na-o-weh’s masquerade that was behind us. (The non-insiders consider the masquerade as Nya-na-o-weh itself) . . . because access to Nya-na-o-weh is limited to the priest . . . women . . . and children that are not first male . . . do not even see the masquerade . . . as the warriors held me, the group of Nya-na-o-weh’s masquerade bearers passed us . . . the warriors stopped. They intensified their jubilation . . . chanting war songs round about me until the council of elders got to where we were.
The initiation rites proceed with Blahyi descending underground for eleven days beneath the rock “where dwells the demon”:
They left me behind with the elders who bathed me . . . When I stepped out of the elders’ court into the midst of the people, their accolades got me swollen . . . I entered the sacred fenced court . . . When I entered the thick and heavy presence of Nya-na-o-weh, I barely walked upright . . . After some time, my ears opened to the spirit world and I heard strange laughter . . . a domineering voice . . . I stood before the big rock for three days and nights . . . At midnight of the third day . . . an angle of the rock had risen up . . . a strange audible voice directed me . . . everywhere went completely dark . . . I began to see as far as my eyes could view . . . I saw a calabash . . . with flesh soaked in fresh blood. I then heard his voice from afar echoing in my ears, “get down and eat your lonely meal” . . . When I finished eating . . . I stood up and continued the war dance in response to the praises of the fathers from the land of the dead . . . Then Nya-na-o-weh appeared . . . With his face in my face and pulling me to himself with his right hand stuffing me under his left crank broken wing and flying all over the place . . . saying, “My hero . . . I will make you my greatest priest ever . . . I will make you greater than other men in your time . . . lion, tiger, eagle, elephant, bush cow, wolves . . . all nothing compared to what I want you to be in your time.”
After meeting the ancestors, swallowing various shells and being given precise instructions on taboos, and how to perform human sacrifices at the new moon along with other witcheries to evoke spirits, capture souls, sow hatred, confusion, fear, and insanity, hypnotize and manipulate people, plant evil spells and wicked charms, steal virtues, pollute wells and market foods, infiltrate dreams, summon and bind the sleeping, recruit witches, establish covens and build altars, prey on those who came to him with spiritualist requests, transform objects into blood-sucking snakes, and deflect harm against himself, the boy priest ascended aboveground, shrieking, to begin his reign in Monrovia, which in time would take him sloshing through rivers of blood into the very center of power in the land. Before then, he “dreamt about blood” with the “desire to hurt”: “Sometimes at night I would have this strange urge to leave the house and sit in the market square alone. Physically, I was alone, but I would feel the presence of many others around me.”
Taylor’s 1989 NPFL offensive intensified the battle for spiritual supremacy raging between the caucus of traditional priests behind the scenes.
As a tribal priest I did everything to see the elevation of my tribal men . . . The strategies left the tribe very unpopular until we could hardly attract sympathy from any other tribe in the nation . . . The sons and daughters of the tribe did not want to be identified as one of us because a household could be exterminated if a single Krahn man was found in their midst . . . The President sent for other traditional rulers . . . Old man Jay Swen . . . Nyenplu Taylor . . . Juezeo Barway . . . Old man Tarnue . . . Old man Ghee . . . We asked the other traditional leaders from the other regions to operate by themselves in order to avoid a mixture of powers . . . Old man Swen . . . was consulting for Charles Taylor. His defection to the camp of Mr. Taylor was not strange to us, because he was already known as a commercial and inconsistent, selfish priest. He used the tribal power for financial gain and to empower his children. His son, J. Apollo Swen, Jr. set one of the most unusual fighting records in the crisis by the power his father gave him. Swen, Jr. fought for the government and displayed the same inconsistency as his father by fighting for several warring factions . . . Old man Swen was powerful and experienced in playing the craft . . . he started revealing our secret codes to others to access our spheres . . . As a result of his betrayal, we had to continuously upgrade . . . to fortify the entry . . .The reason why . . . Nyenplu Taylor and Juezeo Barway did a lot of killing that the nation could not understand was all the upgrading and fortifying of our spheres required human sacrifices.
There are parts of this book that make you tremble and other parts that make you feel the slash of the cutlass under the words. The internecine hatred and animosity that “required human sacrifices” was about nothing more than power supremacy, and never before has the borderlessness of the spiritual and political realms in our country been made clearer.
After President Doe was killed, the tribe got frustrated and burnt down houses in the nation. Most members of our tribe fled . . . The national influence of our priesthood was threatened . . . We entered as ULIMO (United Liberian Movement for Democracy), which was predominantly Mandingo . . . I did not wholeheartedly give my support to ULIMO because it was dominated by the Mandingos and they were Muslim . . . each time I made an attempt on them, I met with an impediment that could only be negotiated with their priest. This means that the deity they worship would ask you to pay a special homage if you wanted to spiritually exploit them . . .
In 1993 when there was a split in the group and once again the tribe was brutally murdered . . . as a priest, I had to take off my priestly garments and reduce my status by putting on a warrior’s garments . . . I requested that I should be given free course to make as many sacrifices as I deemed necessary. This decision was pleasing to the military leaders but not to the political leaders because my numerous killings would hinder their political ambitions. It was then decided that I come to the battlefront when it was necessary. I came on missions . . . for certain tribal members who were held captive by ULIMO-K . . . this is how I was loosed from the cage . . .
Blahyi goes on to relate his bloody confrontations with the ECOMOG forces, the blood history of the Yolo/Taylor alliance, the April 6 fracas, the Roosevelt Johnson deal, Nya-na-o-weh’s deal with General Mosquito’s deity, the Battles of the Barracks and the Battles of the Bridges, until . . .
On one fateful day, as a customary ritual before battle, I negotiated with the mother of a 3-year-old girl to give me her daughter for sacrifice . . . This may seem bizarre for a mother who loves her child so dearly to turn her child over . . . I related with people mainly under the application of contagious fetishes . . . One captivating thing I did to influence and win their hearts was that I provided essential commodities like food and medications that I would have hypnotized. My soldiers and I moved to the frontlines on the new bridge and started the ritual by opening the little girl’s back and plugging out her heart. I shared the little girl’s heart with my soldiers. After we ate, I requested my boys to go to the river and bring some water for me to wash my hands. As I waited for my boys, I heard a voice behind me.
“Ahn ju’deh eh kay’ele wehn,” that is, “My son, why are you enslaving yourself?” I shifted around and there was a very bright light that appeared brighter than the sun, in the form of a man about ten feet tall with a cloud around his feet. I could only look at his feet because the cloud around his feet reduced the intense brightness of the light. . . The rest of his body, which I could not see, was brighter than the sun . . . I said, “Why are you calling me a slave, when I am supposed to be a king?” He said, “You rightly said you are supposed to be a king, but you are living like a slave . . . A king’s servant is at his footstool, but your servant is on your shoulder.”
These words sent a sharp chill through my entire body that I had never experienced before. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You won’t understand anything I AM telling you now, but repent and live, or refuse and die.” . . .
I led my men to the battlefront that day in the shadow of my real self . . . I had no prior knowledge that a group of Christians were on a vigorous campaign to either destroy or rescue me from the powers of darkness . . . The campaigners were reported to the authorities for praying for a man considered a terror to Charles Taylor . . . God miraculously rescued them . . . They re-christened me JOSHUA in one of their prayer sessions—the name that stands today as my redemption name. The campaigners continued with a fifty-four-day fast and prayers to win me over to Christ, though I had no prior knowledge of their actions . . . The Soul-Winning Evangelical Ministries decided on a visit to minister salvation to me . . .
So does General Butt Naked proclaim he became Joshua, and a follower and priest of Jesus Christ. His wife Josie, Pastor John Kun-Kun, Reverend David Nehemiah Greene, Musu Kawah, Mrs. Jean Seah Jabbal, Harris T. Warner, Mother and Elder Charles C. Kennedy, the late Mother Hazz, Evan Ceebee C. D. Barshell and other brave souls are counted among his Christian guides.
When I crossed the road to attend the fellowship . . . Nya-na-o-weh appeared . . . and began to speak in a weak and powerless tone . . . “Hero, where are you going?” I was astonished at the sudden loss of his oratorical skills . . . “I am going up there!” I pointed to where the Soul-Winning were fellowshipping. Nya-na-o-weh instantly trembled and fell as I spoke those words. Despite his consistent effort to stand aloof, he fell backward as if something heavy was pushing him down as he cried, “Hero, do you realize what you are turning our bond into?” . . . After my bold utterance to the ancient god of my forefathers, and the humiliation he suffered in my hands, I became afraid, and ran up to the fellowship for protection from any reinforcement by Nya-na-o-weh. As I was about to enter the venue of the fellowship, at my immediate right I saw an Angel standing at the right side of the door . . . And because I knew the difference between spirit being and human being, I bowed to worship as a sign of my allegiance to the Angel, with the conception that the Angel was their God. But the Angel refused my worship . . . He then pointed to Pastor Kun-Kun and said, “that is the man that will lead you to the One you are supposed to worship” . . . uncountable Angels usually come around me whenever Nya-na-o-weh tries to conjure me.
Is Blahyi promoting westernization and detribalization? Is there credibility to his miraculous Christian conversion? Does the Mercy Seat of Jesus Christ exempt him from the Hot Seat of Legal Justice? And if so, what if he were a “born again pagan,” or had converted to Islam? In our homeland of everlasting warfare between ‘the blessed’ and ‘the damned,’ where as everywhere, some churchgoers commit atrocities that many ‘pagan’ non-Christians would never, these are weighty questions fraught with such polarizing epiphanies that readers and witnesses must decide for themselves where they stand. Blahyi writes in his preface:
This book is written to reveal the abundant grace, love and mercy of our Father in heaven . . . I feel so privileged to be called a child of the Most High God . . . Words cannot express my gratitude to God the Father of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ . . . I am dedicating this book to the people victimized in my days of ignorance when I was blindly running the devil’s errands. Those that died and those that have become orphans . . . to my kinsman that died in their ignorant service to Nya-na-o-weh . . . Christians worldwide are by this piece admonished to stand in the gap to intercede for God to touch the hearts of world, national and policy makers to revisit their imprisonment laws . . . in the wake of the sincere truth that many prison inmates come to their senses very few minutes to when they were thrown into the gaol . . . if somebody like me was remanded somewhere indefinitely, what would have become of this eye-opening exposure of the kingdom of darkness . . .
It must be noted that Blahyi now exhorts his former comrades of war to conduct themselves with a visible spirit of humility:
Since the nation has been so sympathetic to us, so willing to forgive us, we must live differently. We who have killed must adapt a simple lifestyle. We must show our repentance. What does it look like for us to be driving around in big cars and jeeps, passing by somebody standing on the side of the road whose wife or child or husband one of us killed? We are in a time of grace. We must be respectful.7
The paramount question for many may still remain: is Blahyi really telling the truth? And if he is, what version of the truth is he telling? Blahyi’s confessions are . . . a fabulist’s creation? An exaggeration? The exhibitionism of a psychopath? Superstitious drivel? Pretentious dramatics? A myth retold? Self-idolization? Extreme narcissism? Demagoguery? An incredulous excuse? A desperate tactical move to dodge paying for his crimes? A transparent strategy? Blasphemous hypocrisy? Stereotypical white supremacist regurgitated poison about Deepest Darkest Blackest Devilish Africa? The raw naked truth . . . ?
THUNDERFLASH: At an early 2006 speaking event in Monrovia at the university (LU), Evangelist Joshua M. B. Blahyi was silenced and quickly ushered off stage for identifying government officials that he declared to be occult practitioners. The reason given for his silencing was defamation of character.
Some may say Blahyi was muzzled because those who operate in public with powers bestowed from barely concealed realms and “principalities in high and low places” fear the glare, and dare, from certain individuals, that give rise to a particular kind of public revelation.
For others, Blahyi becomes archetypally heroic, fulfilling the ancient epic quest of the African hero who enters the underworld, faces the beast—sometimes within, the subconscious, sometimes a spirit-being, a monster, sometimes failing, succumbing, overpowered, but always emerging
victorious—ultimately transcending the abyss illumined to help his people by imparting the wisdom he's gained. That Blahyi’s enlightenment came through an encounter with Jesus Christ makes it no less African. Churches for Jesus appeared in Africa before Europeans even knew that the Americas existed. It was Egypt that sheltered the baby Jesus when his life was threatened, the same pre-Islamic Pharaonic Egypt that W. E. B. DuBois describes as “the motherland of human culture.”
Psalm 68:31: Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall hurry to stretch out her hands to God.
Matthew 2:13-15: And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.
DuBois was writing in the early twentieth century – not about redemption but about Black identity, the shape-shifting place of Africa and Africans in the world imagination; the rape and domination of a continent:
Africa is at once the most romantic and tragic of continents. Its very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence. It is the “Ethiopia” of the Greek, the “Kush” and “Punt” of the Egyptian, and the Arabian “Land of the Blacks.” To modern Europe it is the “Dark Continent” . . . in commerce it is the slave mart and the source of ivory, ebony, rubber, gold, and diamonds. What other continent can rival in interest this Ancient of Days?8
Blahyi inserts himself into this vast panoply, laying bare the personal history that dictated his cultural practice and circumscribed his existence. He is not the first to interrogate that part of identity that weakens, corrodes and breaks the self. “In the cultures of peoples, there is shadow and there is light . . . And worse: light and shadow mingle in bodies,”9 as Patrick Chamoiseau reminds us in his brilliant novel, Texaco, about the dark side of cultural conditioning, even of those cultures that claim to be more human and superior. To fully explore the streams chasmal and convergent in Blahyi’s confessions would require an essay twice or thrice the length of this one. One can only hope that others find in his epic dramatic testimony compelling enough for further inquiry and explication. His history is ours. No moral high ground can obfuscate our shared national identity. Blahyi offers a lot for us to think about the implosive clash of spirit energies and cultural values; what we must take from the cultures that shaped us; what we must suffer to let go of; what we must uproot and surrender to save ourselves and love each other. These are lessons that can only deepen our humanity and broaden our human understanding.
II Corinthians 13:8: For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.
Endnotes
1. Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here (2004) is a post-war documentary film produced and directed by Gerald K. Barclay. See
clip at http://geebeeproductions.com/ and interview with Gerald Barclay at http://archives-one.liberiaseabreeze.com/gerald-k-barclay-gee-bee-barclay.html
2. The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War by Stephen Ellis. New York: New York University Press, 2001. p. 20.
3. See John S. Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (second edition). Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990.
4. Quoted with permission from telephone talk with Bodioh Siapoe of Radio Free Liberia and COPLA (Coalition of Progressive Liberians in the Americas, copla.org), August 9, 2006. Prince Yormie Johnson is the warlord turned Christian preacher on whose orders President Samuel K. Doe was tortured in 1990. Doe’s torture was video taped on Johnson’s orders and broadcast around the world. Johnson played the guitar and sang Christian gospel songs during torture sessions. He won the senior senatorial seat for Nimba County in the 2005 elections. See Theodore T. Hodge’s “Prince Yormie Johnson For Senator, For President?” March 27, 2004.
The Perspective.
http://www.theperspective.org/2004/mar/princejohnson.html
5. Quoted with permission from telephone interview with Marcus Pyne, August 10, 2006. Pyne is closely related to Joshua Blahyi.
6. Quoted from telephone interview with Evangelist Joshua Blahyi, October 5, 2006.
7. Quoted from telephone interview with Evangelist Joshua Blahyi, October 5, 2006.
8. From The Negro by W. E. Burghardt DuBois. University of Pennsylvania Press, Mar. 2, 2001. Originally published 1915 by Henry Holt & Co.
9. From the novel Texaco by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau. Vintage International, 1997.
Copyright © November 2006 Gee-Bee Productions
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