Liberia

Harry spends 48 hours in Monrovia with one objective: to find and interview Joshua Blahi, the former warlord known as General Butt Naked, and to test his claim to have changed.

Obs: the video carries an eSIM sponsor and links a charity donation page. Only the travel and interview content is recorded here.

The history

Harry’s account, given as narration at the top of the video:

• Liberia was founded about two centuries ago as a place for freed American slaves to start new lives.
• They brought the ideals of liberty and the systems of control they had escaped. For over a hundred years the American-born Liberians regarded themselves as superior to native Africans — educated, westernised, in charge — and ruled by force, in a system Harry describes as resembling the one they had fled.
• In 1980, Samuel Doe, the first Liberian leader born outside that elite, took control, and for the first time the native population was in charge.
• Then Charles Taylor — educated in America, armed in Liberia — led an invasion that tore the country apart. His rebels claimed to be liberating people.
• Rival warlords carved out territory. They styled themselves generals: General Mosquito, General Rambo, General Butt Naked. They fought for power, for diamonds and for revenge.
• Child soldiers patrolled the capital, high on drugs.
• By the end, around 250,000 people were dead, and, in Harry’s phrase, the world stopped watching.
• Some of the warlords are still alive.

Observations

From 48 Hours with West Africa’s Most Notorious Warlord 🇱🇷

• The flag looks like the American one, which is the visible remnant of the founding.
• Counties are an identity. Harry walks into what looks like a serious argument in the market and finds four separate ones running, all about which county is the most developed. It’s entirely good-humoured. He concludes people here argue for a living.
• Chinese imports have changed what is possible. Everything on the market stalls comes from China, which Harry says lets anyone start a business — the example being a man selling a thousand toothbrushes.
• The population is the story he keeps returning to. West and Central Africa have the youngest populations in the world and are growing very fast, and his open question is whether the infrastructure and the job market can absorb it. He names Nigeria, the DRC and Cameroon.
• Water and electricity are not assumed. His line, aimed at viewers at home: you don’t think about them because they’re just there. Here they are shared, fought for, and often absent.
• Blahi is widely known and, Harry is told, not widely hated. The man who gives him directions in the market says people regard him as peaceful now because he never returned to war. There is a street named after his alias.
• Nobody ever testified against him. Blahi’s own account: everybody had heard of General Butt Naked, and nobody had a face to attach to it, so his public confession is the only reason anyone knows.

Places

• Monrovia

People

• Joshua Blahi