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General Butt Naked from Liberia kills children and drinks their blood
In previous episodes of The Vice Guide to Travel, we road-tripped through North Korea, shopped for dirty bombs in Bulgaria, and hunted mutant wild boars in Chernobyl. Little did we know that all of our harrowing journeys would leave us only semi-prepared for a recent trip to war-ravaged, godforsaken Liberia.
Since 1989, a series of brutal civil wars — primarily fought by drug-addicted, prepubescent orphans — has rendered
Liberia one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Everyone has heard the stories of abject poverty, ubiquitous substance
abuse and wanton violence taking place there, but we don’t really believe anything that we don’t see for ourselves.
So, stomachs firmly knotted, off we went.
We arrived in Liberia with a small crew of three and quickly rendezvoused with a local journalist who would be our fixer and guide. Our first shooting location was the West Point slum, home to 80,000 people living in conditions that redefine squalor. Miles of rotting garbage surround the slum, which has no sewage system. Pretty much everyone — even the local government officials — defecates and urinates in the open. Drugs, prostitution and armed robbery are the main industries. We got to know some of the residents of West Point, who told us their stories as they smoked heroin and cocaine and begged us for money.
Next we visited
a local brothel. The women who lived there talked with us about the U.N. soldiers who have sex with the 
child prostitutes and beat the older women, and then leave without paying.
Watch episode 2 from the Vice Guide to Liberia on VBS.TV
But perhaps the most revelatory portions of our trip to Liberia came from meeting the major warlords of the nation’s civil wars. There’s a tradition in Liberian militias of taking on extravagant noms de guerre. Hence, our subjects were named General Bin Laden, General Rambo and General Butt Naked. The latter, in particular, was one of the most notorious Liberian warlords. He claims to have personally killed 20,000 people including babies, and to have sometimes cannibalized his victims.
Today, General Butt Naked goes by his birth name, which is Joshua. During our time together, he told us that Liberia will surely implode into civil war again when the U.N. leaves next year. But in the meantime, Joshua wants to redeem himself. He offered us a glimpse of the Liberia that he wants to forge, and we found ourselves growing to like him. He took us to his church, where he rehabilitates child soldiers. We watched as he preached his way through Monrovia on a Sunday.
Is there a chance that his mission will succeed, and further civil war can be averted in this desperate country? That’s one of the many questions that we came away with upon our safe return from Liberia. Watch our documentary about our time there and see what you think.
Joshua Blahyi (born ca. 1970), also known as General Butt Naked, was originally a tribal priest before becoming a Liberian warlord-turned-preacher. He was a fiercely violent and eccentric leader on the side of Roosevelt Johnson in the First Liberian Civil War in the first half of the 1990s.
Blahyi is a member of the Sarpo clan, which make up 20% of the Krahn tribe in Liberia. At age 11, he claims, the Devil called him on the telephone, commanding him to his later excesses. The Krahn elders later appointed him as high priest, a position that would later lead him to become the spiritual advisor to Liberian President Samuel Doe. Blahyi adhered to a complex traditional belief system as a Krahn Priest, and like many in Africa he has mixed those beliefs fluidly with Christianity. Blahyi himself explains: "I was a high priest for the biggest god under the Krahn tribe, and the late Samuel K. Doe being a fellow tribesman, was automatically placed under my jurisdiction... I also placed nyanbe-a-weh amongst the first three high ranking deities in the West Africa’s black-witch coastal line division." Nyanbe-a-weh was Blahyi’s protecting deity who (according to Blahyi) demanded ritual sacrifice; Blahyi would later replace Nyanbe-a-weh with the devil. He explains that the Krahn tribe selects leaders based upon physical prowess rather than birthright. The selection process takes place through an annual fight: "The traditional fight was a no holds barred affair. The eventual victor was allowed to kill and maim to show his strength and bravery. The strongest or last man standing after the bloody contest will take over the birthright and the headship of the tribe."
In battle
Blahyi has said he led his troops naked except for shoes and a gun. Apparently, he believed that his nakedness was a source of protection from bullets. Blahyi now claims he would regularly sacrifice a victim before battle, saying, "Usually it was a small child, someone whose fresh blood would satisfy the devil." He explained to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Sometimes I would enter under the water where children were playing. I would dive under the water, grab one, carry him under and break his neck. Sometimes I'd cause accidents. Sometimes I'd just slaughter them."
Blahyi got his nickname — General Butt Naked — from his nakedness, supposedly demanded by the Devil. He claimed to a South African Star reporter that he "met Satan regularly and talked to him" and that from the age of 11 to 25 he took part in monthly human sacrifices (Ellis 268). In his account of a typical battle Blahyi claimed, "So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people — so many I lost count." Blahyi also purported that during that period he had "magical powers that made him invisible" and a "special power" to capture a town singlehandedly, then call in his troops afterwards to "clean up".
Some of Blahyi's soldiers — often teenage boys — would enter battle naked; others would wear women's clothes. In June 2006 Blahyi published his autobiography including pictures of him fighting with a rifle, wearing nothing but sneakers. In January 2008, Milton Blahyi confessed to taking part in human sacrifices which "included the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat." He fought against Charles Taylor's militia.
Conversion
Blahyi's rampage ended in 1996, when the civil war in Liberia was coming to an end. In 1997 Blahyi traveled to the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana. It was at the camp, he recounts, that he made confession at a Church for his sins and had his life saved. When he goes out to preach now, he says he sometimes encounters relatives of his victims. "I feel very bad, so bad", he said, but he insists it was satanic powers that possessed him in the past and he cannot be held responsible.
Blahyi is now the President of the End Time Train Evangelistic Ministries Inc., with Headquarters in Liberia. He is married to Pastor Mrs. Josie and has three children: Michaela, Joshua Milton Junior, and Janice. In 2004 Liberian-American director Gerald Barclay traveled to Buduburam to shoot a documentary which included interviews with Joshua Blahyi. In January 2008 Blahyi returned to Liberia from Ghana and claimed before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia that between c. 1980 and 1996 he and his men were responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people.
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