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

Harry flies into Monrovia with a name, no contact and no guarantee of a meeting, and finds Joshua Blahi — the former warlord known as General Butt Naked — by asking in the roughest market in Liberia.

Most of the video is the interview: what Blahi says he did, how he says he came to stop, and the rehabilitation programme he runs now. Harry also asks to meet one of his victims, and does.

The last section is deliberately something else — the West Point settlement, a charity providing its water, and a donation.

Obs: the interview content is Blahi’s account of himself. Harry does not verify it and neither do these pages. The video carries an eSIM sponsor and links a charity donation page.

Key moments

• [00:00] The premise, and the questions he intends to ask.
• [00:34] The history: Liberia founded two centuries ago for freed American slaves, who brought both the ideals of liberty and the systems of control they had escaped, and ruled the native population by force for over a century.
• [01:08] 1980 — Samuel Doe, the first leader from outside that elite. Then Charles Taylor, educated in America, and an invasion that tore the country apart.
• [01:45] The warlords who followed — General Mosquito, General Rambo, General Butt Naked — fighting for power, diamonds and revenge. Child soldiers on drugs in the capital.
• [02:15] Around 250,000 dead, and the world stopping watching. Some of the warlords are still alive.
• [02:15] Harry’s framing: Blahi says God forgave him, and he wants to see if that’s true.
• [03:53] Red Light Market — the roughest in the country, per his receptionist, and where somebody will know how to reach him.
• [04:28] His own assessment: a white man with a camera in an African market is a recipe for chaos, and the answer is kindness.
• [05:33] Four separate arguments running at once, all about which Liberian county is most developed, all good-humoured. He concludes people here argue for a living.
• [07:06] Asking directly, and getting an answer: the street named after the alias, and motorcycle riders there who will take him to the house.
• [08:07] What people think of Blahi — not hated, because he never went back to war.
• [09:16] Everything on the stalls comes from China, which he says is what makes a business possible at all.
• [09:49] The population question: the youngest populations in the world, growing fast, and whether infrastructure and jobs can absorb it. Nigeria, DRC, Cameroon.
• [10:24] The safety line: if you stop, you make yourself a target — keep walking.
• [10:56] A confrontation over the camera, defused by staying calm and repeating that he is filming himself.
• [12:09] Off camera, he gets a number. Blahi agrees to meet him in the city centre.
• [12:39] Why the alias: he fought without clothes.
• [13:11] His account of his role — a tribal priest with no military training, providing what he describes as spiritual protection.
• [14:28] Why naked: on his account, faster access to what he calls the spiritual realm.
• [15:05] The waterfront, and diamonds traded at sea for arms, ammunition and drugs. He says he went personally, on three-day trips.
• [16:46] Ritual before battle, and how often — every battle, several times a day during the worst of it.
• [18:28] His unit — at most 78 people, recruited between about eight and fifteen.
• [19:01] The children around him now, from his rehabilitation programme. Harry notes explicitly that they were already there and were not summoned for the camera.
• [19:42] The base building, which he says stands derelict amid development because people believe it is haunted, and in which he says thousands died.
• [21:26] At his compound. The Liberian flag, which looks like the American one.
• [21:26] Taken at seven by his father and handed to traditional warriors.
• [22:35] Blindfolded through every daylight hour for four years, from seven to eleven, as a test of obedience.
• [23:05] Trained on animals first, then on people. He says he was indoctrinated to believe it moved a person into the service of a deity, and did not understand himself to be killing.
• [26:23] The frequency he gives: monthly for fourteen years, and two or three a day during the war.
• [32:21] Thousands, by his own arithmetic.
• [28:36] What stopped him, on his account: a three-year-old he could not bring himself to kill, and then did.
• [29:42] The vision he describes, and being called a slave rather than a king. He says he accepted Christ on his birthday, 30 September.
• [30:45] Why he confessed at all: everyone knew the alias, nobody knew the face, and nobody ever testified against him.
• [31:15] Asked how many he claims responsibility for: about 20,000 (from video – unverified) — including everyone killed by children he armed. The opening montage carries a different figure over the same exchange.
• [32:55] Asked what he’d tell his younger self: that violence is an everlasting prison.
• [32:55] 636 children taken off the street in nearly twenty years.
• [33:25] Asked whether that repays it: no good deeds of my person can make my bad deeds good. He describes it as a life sentence.
• [33:56] Harry, still sceptical, asks to meet a victim — and does. A man whose parents were killed and whose house was destroyed with an RPG in a revenge attack, and who still does not know where his family is.
• [34:32] He says he has forgiven Blahi on Christian grounds, regards him as a father, and attends his church.
• [35:35] West Point — the largest slum in Liberia, 80,000 to 90,000 people, with clean water for all of them provided by a charity because the government doesn’t.
• [36:07] Drugs trivially available near the beach, and the mood changing as they walk in.
• [37:09] Teenagers nodding off in the street, which he deliberately does not film, because they didn’t consent to it.
• [38:18] The beach, badly polluted, and the fishing that everyone lives on.
• [38:48] Water and electricity as things nobody at home thinks about.
• [39:20] A free school for children whose parents are addicted, most of whom have never been to school.
• [39:20] A water pump costs $1,800, and Harry donates it.
• [39:50] His verdict: no question he was a monster, nothing can forgive the crimes — and what is different is that he came back and confessed when silence would have been safer, and that the community work is real. A product of a brutal system, and one of the only ones to own it. He puts the question to the audience.

Extracted pages

• Place: Monrovia
• Country: Liberia
• Person: Joshua Blahi
• Tips: When people don’t want to be filmed, Don’t film private moments