A year after Charles Taylor launched his rebellion from deep in the Liberian forest sparking war across the region, his mother said he had always been a stubborn child.
”Among all my children, Charles’s attitude is just different. He is a very stubborn person — since his childhood days,” Taylor’s mother, Yassa Zoe Taylor, said in 1990.
Taylor, charismatic and charming; a showman with a zeal for costume and dramatic effect, was born on January 28 1948 in the small riverbank town of Arthington, about 25km outside the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
The poor boy was educated in the United States, studying economics at Bentley College in Boston, Massachusetts. While there, Taylor joined the Union of Liberian Associations in The Americas and was highly critical of the Liberian government, in which current Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was finance minister.
Taylor returned to Liberia in the late 1970s, shortly after the country’s first bloody military coup d’état, staged by semi-literate Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe.
Doe appointed Taylor director general of the General Services Agency — essentially the leader’s logistics man. But three years on, Taylor was accused of stealing $1-million of government money and he bolted to the US.
Despite his bloody military background, Doe was a frequent White House guest under US president Ronald Reagan and the Liberian leader filed an extradition suit for Taylor’s arrest and deportation.
The US arrested and detained Taylor, but after 15 months he escaped under circumstances that remain murky. While in prison, Taylor turned to former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, who is currently leading the defence of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Taylor resurfaced in Libya, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire where he mustered financial support to launch his rebel movement.
Taylor’s rise and fall