Published: June 30, 2025
Tears do not age. They fall today as they did decades ago, fresh, bitter, and unanswered. My name is Cephas MMD Flanzamaton, the last son of the late Col. Moses M.D. Flanzamaton, Sr., a man whose life was stolen by tyranny, whose legacy was buried not with honor, but with silence. My father was executed under the brutal regime of President Samuel Kanyon Doe, a man whose hands were soaked in the blood of innocents, yet whose name is now being polished and dignified by the current Liberian leadership.
Let me be clear: Samuel K. Doe was not a victim. He was a villain. A man who rose to power through violence and ruled through fear. He orchestrated massacres, silenced dissent, and left families like mine with no graves to mourn at, no justice to cling to, and no peace to pass on to our children.
My father was accused of plotting against Doe, a claim many knew to be politically motivated. He was paraded on state television, tortured with his arms twisted behind his back at a 45-degree angle, forced to read a list of so-called co-conspirators. It was a spectacle of cruelty, a warning to others, and a lie that cost him his life. He was executed without trial, and to this day, we do not know where his body lies, whether eaten or use for ritualistic powers. Only Jehovah knows what was done to our father.
And he was not alone.
The Lutheran Church massacre. The killings in Boatuo. The public execution of 13 government officials on the beach. These were not acts of war, they were acts of terror. Doe’s regime was a reign of blood, and yet today, we see attempts to rewrite that history, to elevate his memory as though it were equal to those he destroyed.
But the cruelty did not end with my father’s death. It reached into our home. After my father was murdered, every member of the Flanzamaton household was arrested and thrown behind the rusted bars of the Barclays Training Center (BTC) barracks. I was just four months old, a baby when I was jailed alongside my mother, my sisters Cornelia Ada Flanzamaton and Benyea Ziporah Flanzamaton, Flanzamaton Jr. and my uncles who are all alived today to tell the story. I, a four months baby being incarcerated was the first and only time I’ve seen the inside of a prison cell, and I was still in diapers.
Col. Moses Flanzamaton’s family just before his execution
When we were finally released, my mother was treated like a pariah. Not a single taxi would stop for her on United Nations Drive in front of the BTC barracks. We were marked, shunned, and left to carry the weight of a crime we never committed.
I mourn the passing of former First Lady Nancy Doe, a relative of mine from Grand Gedeh County and the same clan I hailed from, Nioa. But I cannot and will not associate with any effort to glorify the man who murdered my father and countless others. No human soul is above another. Not even the soul of a president.
President Joseph Nyumah Boakai’s decision to honor Doe reopens wounds that never healed. It is not reconciliation—it is erasure. It is a betrayal of those who died, and of those of us who still carry their names, their stories, and their pain.
Some will resist this truth. Some will call it divisive. Let them. I speak not for approval, but for remembrance and historical correction. I speak because silence is complicity. And I will not be complicit in the whitewashing of a tyrant’s legacy.
This is my truth. This is my father’s truth. And no matter how many monuments are built, no matter how many speeches are made, that truth will not be buried.
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