Samuel Doe
The nation of Liberia is something of an African curiosity. It was founded in 1822 as a colony for the repatriation of freed slaves from the United States, and it existed for more than a century under the government of an elite society of ‘Americo-Liberians‘. These were men owing their origins to antebellum United States, and they pursued a vigorous policy of excluding indigenous Liberians from both the political and economic life of the nation. The usual methods of nepotism and corruption ensured the continuation of this elite, until, in 1980, the lid blew off the pressure cooker in a violent and bloody military coup.
At the head of that coup was a group of senior military NCOs calling itself the People’s Redemption Council, and at the head of that stood a mumbling, incoherent and virtually illiterate twenty-one-year-old Master Sergeant by the name of Samuel Doe.
Doe was the original, overawed, paranoid and instinctively violent dictator, who seized power in a coup, and who held power because he was friendly to the United States, and because Liberia was of strategic interest to the United States.
One of Doe’s first acts in power was to gather the key members of the ousted regime, stake them out on a beach just outside the capital Monrovia, and riddle them with bullets. This was a crude public execution that somewhat set the tone for the decade to follow.
Liberia was never a particularly well-governed or wealthy country, but it was at least moderate, and government, although anachronistic, was never excessively violent. Samuel Doe changed all of that. Almost overnight, Liberia morphed into the definitive kleptocracy, governed by an utterly incompetent, and many would say, sub-intelligent psychopath. Buoyed up by American money, and kept in power by a tribally loyal military, Doe survived until 1990, after which things took a very ugly turn for him.
Enter Charles Taylor, an ambitious young Americo-Liberian warlord, who, supported by Colonel Gadhafi, began a rebellion late in 1989. By September 1990, Samuel Doe was besieged in his presidential palace, deluded in believing that Uncle Sam was on his way to rescue him. In the end, however, he was left to face a very nasty fate all alone. He was picked up by rebel leader Prince Johnston, and tortured to death on camera. The subsequent video, filmed by a Palestinian news reporter, circulated widely throughout West Africa, and can still be purchased in street markets just about anywhere.
Samuel Doe certainly ruined his country, and in the end, suffered precisely the fate that he inflicted on tens of thousands of his countrymen. The body count of Doe’s ten-year regime is incalculable, and the damage that he did to the psyche of a nation no less. During the 1990s, Liberia descended into levels of violence almost unimaginable, ghoulish and macabre. In fairness, however, Doe was probably the effect rather than the cause, and one might have to look deeper than he to find an explanation for the murderous psychosis that seemed to grip Liberia in the 1990s.