Creating A Paradigm Shift One Reel At A Time: Liberia’s First Female Movie Producer Aims To Rewrite the Script in A Male-dominated African Movie Scene
By Moco McCaulay
In a nation that boasts Africa’s first democratically-elected female president, it probably wouldn’t be such a stretch if one were to assume that women had already traversed the pinnacle of every profession, and that the Presidency was after all, that final prize that had eluded them until Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected President of Liberia in 2005.
But that apparently is not the case. At least, not in the fledgling Liberian movie landscape that is emerging as Liberians now try to make an imprint in the pulsating African movie kaleidoscope that is beaming across the continent and the world, after their country’s devastating 14-year civil war.
With Nollywood, as the Nigerian film industry is known, now the second largest film industry in the world in terms of number of films produced annually, filmmaking has evolved as a viable medium for Africans to tell their own stories and share them with the world.
Sadly, during Nollywood’s exponential growth in the 1990s, for the most part, the only portrayal of Liberia on film was consigned to mesmeric war documentaries and newsreels showing drugged up child soldiers with AK-47’s almost the length of their bodies, decaying bodies littered on the streets for dogs to feast on, and clips of rebel fighters boasting about their sadistic acts of cannibalism.
But the tragic story of the Liberian Civil War is most certainly not the only one that Liberians want to be known for enacting on film. Therefore, notwithstanding being left behind as Nigerian and other African filmmakers made headways in the film industry, up-and-coming Liberian film producers are determined to carve a place for themselves on Africa’s pulsating film stage.
Spearheading An African Rap Music Revolution: Mr. Smith Leads A Hip Co Assault To Shine A Global Spotlight On The Stark Realities Of Life For The African Masses
By Moco McCaulay
REVOLUTION is a word that has been bandied about by more than its fair share of malevolent interlopers so much so that nowadays, besides provoking a dismissive shrug of the eyebrows, it stirs nary an attention when it is mentioned.
And, in Africa especially, revolution has meant nothing more than the violent usurping of one corrupt regime for another without any improvement in the lives of the continent’s poverty-stricken masses.
That notwithstanding – and whether you’re ready or not – Rokenzy G. Smith is bent on inciting another African revolution!

But, before you be tempted to also give him an eyebrow shrug, his is a different kind of revolution. It is an African Music Revolution channeling the struggles and aspirations, and joys and pains of a generation of disenfranchised young Africans who have literally been caught between a rock and a hard place: war on the one hand and peace reeking with the vile stench of pervasively corrupt governments on the other.
‘Everyone Is Capable of Change’: A Former Child Soldier Believes There Is Hope For A Generation of War-Affected Liberian Youth
By Moco McCaulay
It was sometime in 2008, in New York City, at Lava Gina, a divvy international bar I used to frequent in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when I met Ishmael Beah, the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier. Beah’s book about his years as a child soldier during Sierra Leone’s atrocious civil war had just been published and he was touring to promote it.
As I sat listening to Beah talk about his experiences as a child solider and how he had been given the chance and support to overcome the trauma of those turbulent years and turn his life around, I found it inspiring to see how far removed from his brutal past Beah had obviously come.
And, having almost being forcefully conscripted into a rebel army as a child soldier during Liberia’s civil war, but was only spared the fiendish deflowering of my childhood innocence by the unwavering intervention of my Aunt, I was extremely interested in Beah’s story. So I asked him a few questions and talked to him briefly after the event.
Beah came across as quite an intelligent young man and there was nothing about him that stood out as someone with the heinous past which he writes about in his riveting book.
But, if ever I harbored any lingering doubts about the possibility for complete transformation in the life of someone like Beah who’s childhood had been so grotesquely desecrated by the coarse brutalities of war, that all evaporated when I met Morlee Gugu Zawoo, Sr.
‘I Am A Walking Shooting Star’: Atlanta-based Liberian Hip Hop Artist Serves Notice to His War-torn Nation and the World
By Moco McCaulay
If the saying: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” is one that always holds constant, then it may only be a matter of time before Dieze Ivan Sahn, a 20-year-old up and coming Liberian-born hip hop artist, strikes his luck in the hip hop game.
Because, according to Diezie who is based in Atlanta, Georgia, he’s been honing his musical skills since the age of 5, which would mean he’s spent quite a bit of time preparing to shine as a musician.
“As far back as I can remember music has always been a big part of my life. I remember singing in churches since I was the age of 5 until now. So, all my time being on this planet, I’ve been involved in music,” said Diezie, of his years of preparation to share his music with the world.
No Pain, No Blood, No Glory: Liberia’s Rising Mixed Martial Arts Star Sets His Sights On Achieving Glory In The Cage
By Moco McCaulay
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a relative novice to the world of professional combat sports, but that notwithstanding, with a high-powered arsenal stacked with dexterous knockout and submission moves, it has been grappling its way into the hearts of sports fans around the world as the crème de la crème of combat sports, leaving its closest rivals, boxing and wrestling, looking like they have been wielding a knife in a gun fight.
Under the promotional aegis of the Ultimate Fighting Competition (UFC), MMA has emerged as the most exciting professional combat sport in the USA, garnering record pay-per-view (PPV) ratings that dwarf that of boxing and wrestling. And, as the UFC expands its tentacles globally, along with the emergence of other rival promotional MMA companies around the world, MMA certainly seems poised to win the battle for the hearts and minds of fans of professional combat sports.
And Africa is no exception. With the trailblazing continental MMA promotional company like Extreme Fighting Championship (EFC) based in South Africa, which bills itself as “Africa’s Biggest Mixed Martial Arts Championship” and is broadcast in over 107 countries, EFC Africa has also experienced phenomena growth across Africa with viewership reported in the millions.
As Liberia’s Urban Music Artists Countdown to Lift Off, A Precocious Young Australia-based Liberian Ups the Ante
By Moco McCaulay
For a long time now, US hip hop music has found fertile breeding ground in Africa, especially among the continent’s youth. And, it was not uncommon for African youth to know more about Jay Z than the local artist around the corner ingeniously amalgamating the staccato beats of hip hop and the pulsating sounds of Africa into a succulent urban African-flavored musical brew.
But that seems to be changing. Over the last decade or so, urban African music has been steadily gaining popularity across the African continent, especially among young Africans. Now, while young Africans will still bust a move to “In Da Club” by 50 Cents, they’ll also gyrate their bodies into even crazier contortions when “Oleku” by Ice Prince, a Nigerian-born hip hop artist, blares over the speakers.
And with a population of over a billion people, of which about 65% are under the age of 35, the world seems to be taking notice. Major US record labels and artists are now scouring the continent and the Diaspora for talented African musicians to sign them to record deals, something which was almost inconceivable only a few years ago.
Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music has signed D’banj and Don Jazzy, both from Nigeria, while Akon’s Konvict Muzik inked a deal with P-Square, Nigeria’s twin record producers, and more recently, Nicki Minaj reportedly signed Parker Ighile, a London-based Nigerian artist, as the first artist on her record label.
Could A Former Brutal Liberian War General Become A Champion Of Reconciliation In His War-torn Nation?
By Moco McCaulay
Joshua Milton Blahyi, a former Liberian warlord known as “General Butt Naked,” has been called many names – a mass murderer, an occult priest, a cannibal and the list goes on – but could his new life as an evangelist and the director of a program helping to rebuild the lives of former child soldiers and outcast street youth make him a champion of reconciliation in his war-ravaged nation?
The Liberian Civil War, which lasted for 14 years and resulted in the deaths of over 250,000 people, was described by Stephen Ellis in his book, The Mask of Anarchy, as a war which “…topped and surpassed [all other wars] in form and character, in intensity, in depravity, in savagery, in barbarism and in horror.” And if all the superlatives of the grotesque brutality that was on display during Liberia’s Civil War could be personified in one person, that person would have been General Butt Naked.
The Day That Set Liberia On An Irreversible Path to War!
By Moco McCaulay
When the account of the beginning of Liberia’s notoriously cannibalistic civil war is told, it starts with how a small band of Libyan-trained guerrillas attacked the Liberian border outpost of Butuo on December 24, 1989, plunging the country into a 14-year internecine war.
But the stage for Liberia’s descent into a fratricidal civil conflict, fueled in large measure by festering tribal animosity, was almost certainly set on this day twenty-seven years ago. If December 24, 1989 is the day that Liberia’s civil war began, then November 12, 1985 is the day the battle lines were indelibly etched in blood, catapulting Liberia on an inexorably path to war.
On November 12, 1985, General Thomas Quiwonkpa, a former Commander in Chief of the Liberian Army, staged a coup against President Samuel Doe, which initially appeared to be successful, but was crushed only a few hours later during the day.
Quiwonkpa, who was from Nimba County, was killed that day and President Doe would go on to exact brutal retribution on Quiwonkpa’s tribesmen. Thousands were killed, inflaming tribal animosity and igniting the flames of war that would consume the whole nation some 4 years later.
The story of that day could be told in so many ways, but the most poignant are the personal stories of those whose lives were impacted by the violent events of that day. One such person is Liberia’s President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Buried Under The Wretched Debris of War: [A Short Movie]
By Moco McCaulay
Notwithstanding 9 years of peace, Liberia is a nation still struggling to recover from 14 years of a brutal civil war, which ended in 2003. Over 250,000 persons died in the country’s brutal civil war, which gained international notoriety for the pervasive use of child soldiers by all sides involved in the conflict.
As the Liberian people now struggle to find meaningful reconciliation and to overcome their nation’s bloody fratricidal past, this is a story about one former Liberian warlord personal efforts to build up lives after destroying so many others, as he attempts to reconcile his brutal past in his poverty-stricken nation.
Click on the image below to watch a short movie about his efforts to do some good in his nation.
![Buried Under The Wretched Debris of War: [A Short Movie]](http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m86mpjtV5n1r9ugrv.jpg)
Buried Under the Wretched Debris of War: Outcast War-affected Liberian Youths Plea for A Chance to Forge Better Lives for Themselves
By Moco McCaulay
When most people hear of West Point, the first place that probably comes to mind is the prestigious United States Military Academy at West Point in New York, which, over its 200 year history, has been churning out elite military cadets for the United States Military, some of whom have gone on to become US presidents, renowned generals in the US Army, and senators and statesmen whose patriotic service to their nation remains unparalleled.
But that’s not the same story in Liberia. In that small West African nation, with its freakishly barbaric recent war past where marauding wig-adorned rebel fighters used human entrails to set up checkpoints, when one thinks of the underworld abode for the most violent and despised criminal elements in society, almost without fail, the first place that is conjured up in the minds of Liberians is West Point.
Described as the worst slum in the world in an unflattering documentary called Vice Guide to Liberia, West Point is a precariously densely populated, poverty-gangrened and crime-afflicted township burrowed under the condescending hill where the capital city of Monrovia is proudly perched. But, notwithstanding it being so intimately coupled with the capital city, you would think it was some faraway place when you hear the city dwellers, many of whom have never dared to enter the township, turn their sneering noses in the air as they talk about West Point as if it were a place where even angels fear to tread.
And truth be told, for someone who has no business there, West Point does appear to be just such a place. With only one narrow paved road audaciously slithering its way into West Point, whose entry point seems not unlike a hidden driveway clandestinely cutting through the Waterside Market, Liberia’s most populous marketplace, where vendors have invaded the sidewalks to set up their market stalls, forcing shoppers to spill out onto the streets, the drive into West Point is a slow and deliberate one, requiring one’s undivided attention.
Abducted, Forcefully Conscripted, Trained to Kill, Mortally Wounded and Narrow Escape to Forge a New Life: A former Child Soldier’s Harrowing Account of Survival and Ultimate Redemption
By Moco McCaulay
The sound of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade ferociously sliced through the air, shattering the calm of the humdrum morning. It was August 1990 and the town of Tubmanburg, in Bomi County, one of Liberia’s provincial districts, was under attack from the invading rebel forces of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), the defunct rebel army headed by Charles Taylor, who was recently convicted and sentenced to a 50-year jail term for “aiding and abetting” the commission of war crimes during the civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
Morlee Gugu Zawoo, Sr., who was just 15 years old at the time, along with his twin brother, Alex, and the rest of his family were hunkered down in their house as bullets and rocket-propelled grenades flew helter-skelter over their heads. Fearful and gasping from the suffocating uncertainty about the fate that awaited them, they stayed indoors all day and night, waiting for the fighting to subside.
Providing a Lifeline for Liberia’s Teenage Mothers: A Former Teenage Mother Returns from the US to Support Poverty-stricken Young Mothers in her Post-war Nation
By Moco McCaulay
In 1982, when Pauline became pregnant at the age of 18, right after graduating from high school, the Liberia of those days was a society still strongly overshadowed by the puritanical values passed down from the former slaves from America who founded the country and entrenched their predominantly antebellum Southern religious beliefs and customs in the fabric of the Liberian nation.
Pauline’s pregnancy, therefore, was viewed as a taboo to society and a disgrace, especially for her parents, who expected their children to conduct themselves in a morally upright manner. Consequently, so devastated and ashamed by her pregnancy, Pauline would stay indoors for days to avoid the mockery she knew she would attract if she was seen in public.
From Refugee Boy to Rising Star: Mr. Smith Battles Against the Odds To Take Liberian Hip Hop To the World Stage and Use His Music to Heal The Wounds of Youths in His War-ravaged Nation
By Moco McCaulay
When the scrawny country lad from the village of Nine Mile and his friends formed their band which they called The Wailers, no one could have envisioned that they would spark a global musical revolution with their patois-laced music from their small island country of Jamaica. But as the saying goes, the rest is history. That scrawny lad, Bob Marley, would become one of the world’s most renowned superstars, transforming reggae music and Jamaican culture into a global phenomenon.
Mr. Smith too is scrawny, and his music too is laced with a kind of patois locally referred to as “Liberian English”; and he too is driven to take his country’s music to the world stage, but it seems that’s where the similarities end. Born Rokenzy G. Smith on March 28, 1978 in the small West African nation of Liberia, a country where the smoldering embers of war are yet to be completely extinguished, it is hard not to feel that Mr. Smith faces an even greater uphill challenge as he struggles to ply his musical skills in his poverty-stricken nation with a fledgling music industry which is only beginning to claw out of its morass of extinction, after experiencing a debilitating dormancy during the country’s 14 year civil war.
My Encounter With The World’s First Twin Child Soldiers and General Butt-Naked, the Notorious Liberian Warlord
By Moco McCaulay
Liberia is a nation of many firsts, some admirable and some anything but. The first independent country in Africa, the first democratically-elected female president in Africa, and most recently, the first country in Africa to have its former head of state convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Another first that Liberia may have recorded during its bloody civil war, which was marked by the use of children as combatants, may be the case of Emmett and Eugene Gray, identical twins who were conscripted into a murderous rebel army at the age of 11, violently snatching away the sanctity of their childhood and casting them into the middle of the turbulent wave of ferocious violence that swept over their country.
“You Are Lucky, I will Not Kill You Because I Just Killed Someone Else”: My First Day of War
By Moco McCaulay
The first dead body I saw was that of a rebel. His chest was pockmarked with scarlet blotches and he was sprawled out on the tarmac with his bullet belt still crisscrossed over his shoulders, but there was no gun around him. Apparently, someone had taken care to retrieve his gun but not his body.
It was early afternoon, maybe around 10 or 11 am. I, along with one of my foster brothers and others from our neighborhood had just hit the Redlight Market Junction, a major hub connecting the capital city of Monrovia with the outer counties. On any other day, the market would have been buzzing with the sound of vendors competing with each other by screaming at the top of their lungs to attract the attention of shoppers.
