The Sassywood Ordeal
This is a traditional African trial that has been practiced in Liberia for thousands of years to get a confession out of a murderer. First, the suspect is given a poisonous drink made from the bark of a sassywood tree, and a machete is heated over a fire. The red hot metal is then pressed against the person’s legs, burning them until they agree to talk. Other times, hot oil is dripped on the suspect. This is basically just using torture to coerce a confession. In the western world, we now know that torturing people to get information or even just blackmailing them can often lead to a false confession. This is not a good way to test innocence or guilt at all, but sometimes, tradition trumps logic.
This practice was used all the way until 2009, when it was finally outlawed by the Liberian government after several innocent women died from the poison sassywood drink and torture after being accused of witchcraft. However, this has been part of tribal Liberian culture for so long, there are people who are not willing to give it up, because they truly believe it is a better method for finding guilty people than taking them to court.
In 2010, a group of young Liberian men went out to the bush, and when they returned home, one of them was missing. They refused to explain what had happened, and the man’s parents could not find a body. If there had been some kind of accident, they would have found him, or his friends would have carried him back to the village. So they pretty had already assumed that the man had been murdered. All of the men were forced to drink the sassywood poison, and they all eventually confessed to murder. The chief of the traditional counsel, Chief Zanzan Kanwor, was forced to meet with the Liberian counsel to defend breaking the new law. He gave a speech, saying that the ancient practice of sassywood works really well, so there should be no need to change it to a more humane criminal proceeding. After he gave his speech, the crowd applauded him, proving that the members of the government have a long way to go in improving humane trial practices.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Asian Review. 1895. East India Trading Association.
Laura Wright. The Virginia Creeper. 2007
Sassywood or Not? Cabinet Retreat in Buchanan. Dr. Abdoulaye Dukule’. The Liberian Journal.
Sotah. Ishay Rosen-Zvi. The Jewish Women’s Archive.
Trial By Ordeal. The Albany Law Journal, Volume 1. 1871.
Big, Bad Botany: Calabar Bean (Physostigma venenosum), the Lie Detector. Michael Largo. Slate. 2014.
Medieval Trial by Ordeal. L. Kip. Wheeler. Carson-Newman University.
Was Trial By Combat Ever Actually a Thing? Melissa. TodayIFoundOut.