Prince Johnson
Prince Johnson was the Liberian warlord who tortured Samuel Doe to death on camera in September 1990, and who then sat in the Senate of the country for eighteen years and helped choose two of its presidents. He was a Gio from Nimba County, born in 1952, an officer in the Armed Forces of Liberia who fled after the failed coup of 1985 and the Krahn reprisals against his people that followed it. He joined Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front when it crossed from Ivory Coast on Christmas Eve 1989, quarrelled with Taylor within months, and broke away in 1990 with his own Independent National Patriotic Front, which reached the outskirts of Monrovia before Taylor did. On 9 September 1990 Doe drove to the headquarters of the West African peacekeeping force at the Freeport, Johnson's men seized him there, and the next hours were filmed: Doe stripped and bleeding, Johnson at a table drinking a Budweiser while an aide fanned him, an ear cut off on his order, questions about bank accounts. Doe was dead by morning and the tape sold across West Africa. Johnson did not take the state. Peacekeepers, Taylor and a dozen factions fought over it for seven more years, and in 1992 he went into exile in Nigeria, where he became an evangelical preacher and said he had been born again. He came home in 2004, after Taylor's fall, and Nimba elected him to the Senate in 2005 by a wide margin, and again in 2014 and 2020. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission named him in 2009 among those who should be barred from office for thirty years; nothing was done, because the men who would have had to do it were on the same list. He ran for president in 2011 and came third, and in 2017 and 2023 his endorsement decided the run-offs, first for George Weah and then for Joseph Boakai. The United States sanctioned him in 2021 for selling his vote and his influence. He opposed the war crimes court the legislature finally voted for in 2024, and died in November that year, at seventy-two, before it could sit.
- Lived: 1952 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: warlord, senator
