Growing up as the daughter of Liberian immigrants, wartime horror stories served as cautionary testimonies, not only about the endless suffering that refugees managed to survive, but also about the power of witchcraft and pure evil that evolved over the course of the conflict. Liberia’s infamous civil war is often framed by the West as a power struggle over resources between cannibal warlords who smoked crack cocaine and weaponized child soldiers. But to understand the flames of violence that engulfed Liberia between 1989 and 2004, and how to move forward from this era, Liberia’s history of superstition and neocolonialism must be addressed.

Liberia was founded in 1847 by formerly enslaved Africans from the United States, who also brought their master’s religion along with them. The Americo-Liberian ruling class constructed a state that prioritized Western Christianity and Western standards of “civilization.” Thus, indigenous Liberian forms of spirituality were regarded as primitive. Poro and Sande societies and similar traditions persisted, but through increasingly secretive means, and were treated with suspicion. Rather than integrating these traditions as a shared piece of Liberia’s culture, the budding government instead maintained a dual system in which Evangelism’s power was consolidated, and African spirituality was pushed into the “bush”.

The domination of the Church functioned alongside economic and political exclusion. Indigenous Liberians were denied full participation in the state; their access to land and capital was weakened, and their faiths were degraded. When a society is taught that its ancestral knowledge is inferior or harmful, cultural alienation becomes normalized. Over time, that alienation chipped away at social cohesion amongst the Liberian people. Before colonization, spiritual ordinances in Liberian communities were not just metaphysical beliefs. They were mechanisms to govern by. These beliefs regulated land usage, mediated conflict, assigned accountability, and were grounded in communal ethics. To call them “demonic” was not merely just theological arrogance and white supremacy; it was institutional sabotage.

When the civil war erupted, this long history of spiritual denigration shaped both the war’s perception and practice. Rebel fighters wearing amulets. Sacrifices appealing to deities. Bodies painted in white clay. Warlords claiming bullets could not pierce their skin. Decapitations. Spiritual invincibility. Cannibalism. The moral architecture that once upheld concrete customs and values dissolved alongside any semblance of political order. Armed groups quickly realized that fear could be weaponized. Ritual symbolism transformed into psychological warfare. Fighters claimed immunity and placed curses upon their opponents. Some commanders even staged elaborate and horrific ceremonies before battle. Others spread rumors that they possessed occult powers and could commit harm beyond the physical realm. Whether these claims were believed literally or were strategically placed did not matter. What mattered was the atmosphere of chaos that they created. 

For young recruits, many of them just children, initiation into armed rebel groups often included oaths and rites meant to bind them to the faction. These rituals created a sense of spiritual ownership and a fear of defection. If a child soldier believed that leaving the group would trigger supernatural punishment, that belief now functioned as a leash, tying them to a terrifying secret. It served as mental bondage, not religious practice, and they were now primed for the manipulation necessary to commit atrocities. Many of these child soldiers consistently numbed themselves with drugs to cope with the traumas of the war and internalized shame.

  Then the cameras from the West zoomed in, hungry for the images that confirmed colonial fantasies. African witchcraft became the headline, and the story was not about decades of exclusion and capital capture of the state. The story became “tribal chaos” and “primitive violence.” The war was culturalized in this manner so that its structural roots could be ignored. The media reduced Liberia’s internal conflict into spectacles of savagery, reinforcing racist narratives that framed the war as evidence of cultural backwardness rather than as the inevitable outcome of elite corruption and external interference. It was easier to caricaturize the violence this way instead of interrogating power.

Liberia’s civil war was fundamentally economic in origin. Decades of inequality, unfair employment, land dispossession, lack of opportunity, and centralized control of resources created combustible circumstances. Yet the weakening of indigenous religions may have removed the stabilizing structures that might have mitigated this collapse. Traditional authorities historically arbitrated disputes and delegated personal liability. As their jurisdiction eroded under missionary condemnation and social marginalization over the course of time, their ability to serve as anchors during a crisis diminished. 

The true violence, which was actually just colonialism, began to reveal itself during the civil war. When people are taught for generations that their ancestral worldview is flawed, what had once been transcendent becomes theatrical. Symbols detach from ethics, and power detaches from responsibility. This was not the failure of African spirituality itself. It was the consequence of a long process of cultural subordination. The demonization of African spirituality in Liberia was not simply religious intolerance. It was a part of a broader system of control that solidified class hierarchy and cultural dependency. The war effectively started when Liberians began to believe that legitimacy flows only from imported institutions and beliefs, and they distanced themselves from the very sources of communal resilience that sustained them for centuries.

Post-war reconstruction reflected similar imbalances. National healing initiatives leaned heavily on Christian frameworks of confession and forgiveness. Warlords and commanders were now pastors and preachers, able to renounce their heinous deeds through the purity of Christ. A warped version of religion began to appear in Liberia, straddling the duality of a white savior and Black witch or wizard. Despite being a predominantly Christian nation, everyone was now capable of practicing witchcraft, and only for the sole purpose of evil. Superstition precedes most interactions between Liberians, even to this day.  This is what remains of a society that perceives its own traditions with lingering contradictions due to embedded distrust, forged in times of extreme trauma, rape, death, famine, betrayal, and societal collapse. The justifications of evil through witchcraft redirects the unresolved frustrations of the war inward, rather than toward the political and economic forces that precipitated the war and the current state of the country.

Liberia’s long-term stability requires a cultural restoration. Reclaiming African spiritual traditions as complex, ethical systems rooted in community and our history before colonization is essential to rebuilding confidence and trust amongst Liberian people. Witchcraft is possibly real, yes. But what is more real and more tangible is evil people doing evil deeds, and it is our duty as a society to hold them accountable to the standards of our ancestors. Peace is not sustained solely by disillusionment and conspiracy; it is sustained by a people’s ability to stand firmly within their own history, values, and sense of the sacred.

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