FREETOWN, Sierra Leone
NEXT STOP, THE HAGUE? Charles Taylor bridged two violent chapters in Africa's recent past: the fall of nationalist Big Man politics, and the rise of warlordism.
CHILD SOLDIER Eight-year-olds with automatic rifles were fighting for Charles Taylor in Liberia in 1996.
ON Christmas Eve, 1989, a small force of about 100 men led by an obscure former Liberian government official crossed the border from Ivory Coast into Nimba County in northern Liberia.
According to local legend, recounted by the Africa scholar Stephen Ellis in his book "The Mask of Anarchy," a baby born in Monrovia, Liberia's capital, miraculously spoke English straight from the womb. It told its mother that a rain of death would fall Christmas Day, and that it did not want to live in such a vicious world, and promptly drew its last breath.
On Dec. 25, in a driving rain, the news that Charles Taylor had attacked Liberia reached Monrovia. As the child predicted, a rain of death soon drenched West Africa. It would last 14 years.
On Wednesday, with the apocalyptic deluge at a halt, Mr. Taylor was arrested on the tarmac at Monrovia's airport and whisked immediately here, where he sat in a jail cell at an international court set up to try suspected war criminals in Sierra Leone's brutal, decade-long civil war, which Mr. Taylor is accused of starting and supporting.
In Mr. Taylor's rise and fall, one can glean the story of West Africa, a history of death, turmoil and tragedy. In many ways he was the perfect man to exploit the drawn-out ending of one era — the slow demise of nationalist Big Man politics — and the beginning of another, in which warlords presiding over small, nonideological insurgencies played havoc across much of the region, enriching themselves and laying waste to their homelands.
Indeed, the term Big Man, an overworked cliché of African reportage, seems almost too small in describing Mr. Taylor, and calling him a warlord fails to grasp the breadth of his ambition.
It was his blend of the two roles that proved so diabolical and deadly. By the time he was pushed from power in 2003, more than 300,000 people had died in conflicts he ignited. His forces and allies had looted Liberia and Sierra Leone, and parts of their neighbors, down to the studs. Millions of people had been scattered into half a dozen nations around West Africa. From Liberia alone he is believed to have stolen at least $100 million as president between 1997 and 2003.
"Taylor had a map he carried around with him called Greater Liberia," said Douglas Farah, an analyst and author who has written extensively about Mr. Taylor's links of criminal and terrorist networks. "It included parts of Guinea, diamond fields in Sierra Leone. It wasn't something abstract to him. He had a very clear idea of what he was trying to achieve. He had a grandiose plan, and he almost succeeded."
Mr. Taylor was born outside Monrovia, his mother a housekeeper from the Gola tribe and his father a teacher descended from the returned slaves who founded Liberia.
He was a student activist in the 1970's, railing against the corrupt regime of William Tolbert. Then he went to Bentley College in Massachusetts to study economics. He returned to Liberia in 1980, just in time to see a young army sergeant, Samuel Doe, topple Mr. Tolbert's government, murdering the president.
Mr. Taylor immediately insinuated himself into Mr. Doe's clique, and eventually took control of the government's purchasing arm. He fled back to the United States after falling out with Mr. Doe, taking with him $1 million he allegedly embezzled from the government.
He was jailed in Massachusetts, but escaped in 1985 by sawing through the bars of his jail cell. Once back in Africa, he met with Liberian dissidents in Ghana and then made common cause with revolutionaries in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and, most critically, Libya, where Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi was plotting and supporting a continent-wide revolution. In Libya, he trained in camps that also trained men who would later play starring roles in the great African tragedies of the 1990's; they included Sierra Leone's Foday Sankoh, whose rebel movement would become best known for hacking off the arms and legs of civilians, and the Congo's Laurent Kabila, the central figure in a complex civil war that ultimately killed four million people.
With money and arms from Libya and the political and financial backing of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, he crossed into Liberia in December 1989. He had never been a soldier and had only a small force behind him. Still, he managed to wreak havoc on an almost unprecedented scale and dominate much of the region for more than a decade. How did he do it?
In part, Mr. Taylor was adept at using and even creating the language of his times. He blended a militant pan-Africanism that called for bloody revolutions against neo-colonialism with a muscular vernacular in which might was unapologetically right. The new pose fit well with the region's mood.
