Samuel Doe
Samuel Doe was the master sergeant who ended a hundred and thirty-three years of Americo-Liberian rule with a coup one night in April 1980, and whose own end, ten years later, was filmed. He was a Krahn from Grand Gedeh in the interior, one of the indigenous majority the settler descendants of the True Whig Party had governed since 1847, a soldier with a fifth-grade education, and on 12 April 1980 he and sixteen enlisted men climbed the wall of the Executive Mansion, killed President William Tolbert in his bed, and ten days later had thirteen of his ministers shot on a beach in Monrovia in front of the cameras. He was twenty-eight. The People's Redemption Council he headed was popular at first, because the settler oligarchy had been hated. The United States, which had a Voice of America relay, an Omega station and a CIA base in the country, doubled its aid and looked away as the promised civilian rule became a rigged election in 1985 - he won with 50.9 per cent after the count was moved to a secret location - and as the government became a Krahn ethnic machine. An attempted coup by his former comrade Thomas Quiwonkpa in November 1985 was followed by reprisals against the Gio and Mano peoples of Nimba County that killed hundreds. It was into Nimba that Charles Taylor's rebels came from Ivory Coast on Christmas Eve 1989 to begin the Liberian civil war. By the summer of 1990 Doe held only the mansion and part of the capital. On 9 September he went under escort to the headquarters of the West African peacekeeping force at the port, was seized there by Prince Johnson's breakaway faction, and was tortured through the night - his ears cut off, questioned about his bank accounts - while Johnson drank beer and a video camera ran. The tape circulated across West Africa for years. The war he began went on for another thirteen.
- Lived: 1951 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: head_of_state, military, dictator
