What Do You Do With Your Life After You've Already Been The World's Youngest Dictator?

The run-down mansion rising above the Freetown slum was the first giveaway, but it got even stranger. As Valentine Strasser’s home came into view, my guide screamed in Krio, “I go scared!” then yanked open the car door and bolted.

He emerged 50 meters away, behind a tangle of banana trees. Fair enough. Yusuf Dumbuya was a lanky 16-year-old from the shantytown of Grafton, and unsurprisingly didn’t want to hang around for what might follow.

I’d been lucky to get him to take me this far. In a neighborhood with no street names, nobody wanted to take me to Strasser’s house. Older residents recalled cheering in the streets when he first rode into power over two decades ago, but generally people shuddered when I asked about him.

“Everybody is scared of him here. Even if you say hello to him in the street, he will get angry with you,” Dumbuya had informed me cheerfully. He’d made the mistake of waving at Strasser a few weeks earlier. The former president of Sierra Leone felt the greeting showed a lack of respect.

“I don’t want to use abusive language, so let me just say he got very, very angry,” he continued, crossing his arms protectively. “He was shouting, 'Who are you and who am I?' He said, 'Why you didn’t call me capay [captain]?” Strasser lunged, so Dumbuya scampered.

I'd found Dumbuya outside a youth computer center that Strasser ran, though a thick layer of dust suggested it hadn’t been used for months. A knot of teenagers were loitering around, though, and Dumbuya, wearing a beret tipped at a jaunty angle, offered to show me the way to Strasser's home. He strode to my car with a swagger that implied he wasn’t afraid. That initial bullishness gave way to silence as we drove up the hill to where he said Strasser lived. Rice fields tumbled down to a river in the valley, where a group of boys were splashing about. “He go fight, maybe small, maybe big,” Dumbuya said, staring wistfully at them.

In a neighborhood with no street names, nobody wanted to take me to Strasser’s house.

Then he looked up, noticed suddenly how far up the hill we’d gone, and let out a piercing scream. And that was pretty much the last I saw of him.

At least I was still with my driver, I thought. Cheikh Kabal had been my constant companion over the weeks. Tattoos snaked down his biceps and disappeared into the leather driving gloves he wore permanently as protection against Ebola, eschewing the blue surgical ones everyone else chose.

Officially I was in Sierra Leone to report on the country’s Ebola epidemic and ensuing international panic. It was the summer of 2014 and land borders had long since shut, but when a British nurse in the capital, Freetown, caught the virus that August, international flights were also canceled. I was stranded in the country.

To stop myself from sinking into a spiral of paranoia that I was going to die of Ebola, alone, in a deserted foreign hotel, I’d come up with another plan: I’d busy myself looking for the country's former dictator.

Kabal accepted pretty much everything I wanted to do — watch an Ebola burial in an isolated village, find a volatile ex-dictator — without asking questions. His sentences were never longer than necessary. “If you scream, I’ll come get you,” he said. He waited for me to climb out, then firmly locked the car doors behind me.

I took a deep breath and began walking toward the crumbling white house. Its porticoed front beamed majestically over the ramshackle tin roofs below. But the sweeping driveway was empty of the kind of flashy cars that typically announce a big man in these parts, and instead an elderly man — I later found out he was Strasser’s brother — was sweeping the dusty ground. Closer up, the columns were crawling with green mold, and the windowpanes were missing. The whole setup looked like an abandoned fairground attraction.

A thought occurred to me, and I turned back and tapped on the window of the car. Kabal rolled it down a couple of inches. Might Strasser have a gun?

“He’s an army man. If he doesn’t have a gun, he will have one of these,” Kabal said, rummaging around the glove compartment. He pulled out a chopping knife. The blade glinted in the sunlight. Now wasn’t the time to think about why Kabal kept a meat cleaver in the glove compartment.

Since being deposed and exiled in 1994, Strasser's legend has become more of a mystery. About the only thing that was known about him was his penchant for drinking and his explosive temper. I wanted to dive deeper, but on more neutral ground — not in a deserted house in the hills with a knife-wielding Kabal as my only protection.

Valentine Strasser at 25 when he was the leader of the Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) and head of state, Sierra Leone, July 1992.

Alamy

On April 29, 1992, Valentine Esegragbo Melvin Strasser accidentally seized power in Sierra Leone, a small, diamond-rich country tucked into Africa’s western coast. Until that day, Strasser had been an unknown army captain whose closest brush with fame came when he won a couple of dance-offs in a nightclub in Allen Town, a Freetown slum. At the age of 25, he found himself newly installed as the leader of a nation of 4 million people, and the commander-in-chief of a fractious, impoverished army.

After more than two decades of corrupt governments, most Sierra Leoneans welcomed the coup-makers, and Strasser was catapulted to messiah status. Print shops churned out calendars embossed with his childlike face. Graffiti artists splashed Freetown with his portrait and those of his fellow junta members, who called themselves the National Provisional Ruling Council.

The party’s inner circle was made up of equally young men, including a vice chairman who was barely 22 years old. From the outset, their rule was marked with the kind of eccentricities you’d expect if you walked into a college bar and handed over a country to a bunch of students.

Meetings were often presided over by young men trailing the scent of weed. Strasser at one point sought to make the disco classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” the national anthem, and Valentine’s Day and Bob Marley’s birthday were both celebrated with official festivities. Kabasa Lodge, the presidential residence, doubled up as a private disco; on the side, officials also sold fake passports there.

Coups are hardly unique to Africa, but no continent has been so defined by them in the public imagination, and no other region has experienced as many — both successful and failed — as West Africa. Strasser’s own rags-to-riches-to-rags tale shows, in the starkest way possible, why so many leaders in Africa cling to power long after their turn has passed.

Strasser’s own rags-to-riches-to-rags tale shows, in the starkest way possible, why so many leaders in Africa cling to power long after their turn has passed.

His coup came at the tail end of two decades that saw young soldiers, often in their twenties, dominate the continent’s political arena. Dictatorships have since dwindled, but a clique of autocrats, relics of that period, cling to power, tinkering with constitutional terms or holding outright sway in places like Eritrea, Cameroon, Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Congo, and the Republic of Congo. Three successful coups in the last four years show the playbook hasn’t entirely been closed in West Africa.

Strasser's time in the sunshine didn't last long, nor did it end well. Four years after taking over, he was overthrown by his number two, who literally held a gun to his head. Though his path to power had followed the rulebook of African strongmen, the former captain did not take the well-trodden route of fallen dictators, banished to a life of gilded exile or pulling strings from afar.

His downfall was followed by a brief resurfacing in the English countryside, two years of sofa-hopping in London, and then, for all intents and purposes, the world’s youngest head of state disappeared into obscurity. In 1998, he appeared, too broke to afford a taxi, on the doorstep of a former journalist he had once imprisoned. Another time, acquaintances were shocked to hear he was apparently drifting through Senegal, wearing the ragged clothes of a beggar. But his appearances were scarce, his fate largely unknown.

Grafton, the town where Strasser now lives.

Aurelie Marrier d'Unienville for BuzzFeed News

Residents of Freetown initially didn’t know what to think when a convoy of military trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns rumbled into the capital in the spring of 1992. Supposedly protesting unpaid salaries and a lack of equipment, the soldiers were marching toward the presidential palace. Among them was Strasser, then a young captain.

Meeting little resistance, the soldiers raided weapons depots before looting corrupt officials’ homes. They caused a brief spike in car accidents by driving seized cars wildly through the city’s serpentine roads.

When the mutineers made it into the presidential palace, they found President Joseph Momoh cowering in the bathroom in his dressing gown. By midday, he was on a helicopter out of the country. If the coup had come as a shock to Momoh, the young officers seemed equally surprised at the ease of their takeover.

Later, it would transpire that although the officers were planning a coup, they hadn’t necessarily meant to do so on that day. Fate had simply handed them a chance.

“We saw them in their nice uniforms, and they were young, and they said all the right things, how they’d sweep away the corrupt regime that had paralyzed the country. We were very, very happy,” said Lansana Gberie, an author and historian, who rushed to join thousands of his compatriots cheering in the streets.

If nothing else, they all agreed, a fresh-faced lad could inject youthful optimism into a weary nation.

Sierra Leone had been rolling toward the political cliff edge since the ascension to power in 1968 of Siaka Stevens, a prime minister whose destructive rule became known as the “17-year plague of locusts.” His successor, Momoh — otherwise known as Dandogo, meaning “fool” in his Limba language — dragged the economy down to the point where civil servants went unpaid, gas shortages were the norm, and water supplies often dried up as hungry citizens stole pipelines to sell for scrap.

Worse, a war raging in neighboring Liberia had spilled into eastern border towns in 1991, forcing Momoh to depend on an army so ill-equipped that it was little more than ceremonial. Strasser was unable to get even basic medical attention after being injured on the frontline.

The coup leaders were so unprepared that they hadn’t designated a new leader. Eventually Strasser was chosen, not because of his leadership, or martial authority — but because, as one of the few who’d completed secondary school, his English was good enough to read the junta’s declaration on the radio. If nothing else, they all agreed, a fresh-faced lad could inject youthful optimism into a weary nation.

Once Strasser was sitting in Momoh's chair, it dawned on him that the next step was winning international recognition. He decided to summon Joe Opala, a well-known American historian and lecturer who’d lived in Sierra Leone on and off since the 1970s.

Opala was famous for his work showing that the Gullah language in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina is a cousin of Sierra Leone’s own Krio vernacular, and he was often stopped in the streets by people who recognized him. These days Opala lives in a cabin in Massanutten, a ski resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and over the phone, he still sounded incredulous when he recalled those early heady days.

“There was no one in the streets, because the soldiers would take your car if they saw it. They actually marched me into the State House — I had never even seen the State House gates open,” he said.

Once inside, Opala was pushed down onto a seat in front of the “big chairman.” Stoned soldiers sat around cleaning their Kalashnikovs. Bullets and spare parts were scattered everywhere.

Momoh’s terrified staff were gathered in a corner. “They were shaking like leaves. All of them were convinced that in a few moments they were going to be shot dead,” Opala said. “I was scared to death.”

Strasser leaned forward and told Opala he had a question: Would America accept the junta as the legitimate government? Opala was too stunned to speak, but eventually managed a reply: “You should probably put that question to the US ambassador.”

“Well, I talk with him, but him big English he speak, I no understand nothing,” Opala recalled Strasser replying in Krio, the language spoken across Sierra Leone. Secondary school in a crumbling education system had left Strasser with only a shaky grip on formal English.

As the conversation unfolded, Opala remembered a young soldier circling around, casting his eye on anything shiny. At one point he opened an ornate box and peered inside, before slowly lifting out a medal — it was the former president’s highest-ever military medal, draped in ribbons. “Na Momoh, him grand commander,” he recalled the soldier saying, before gently putting it back.

Opala eventually left carrying a wish list from Strasser to the US Embassy. Number one, Strasser declared, was “to create a government like Jerry Rawlings, but I don’t think the Americans will let me.” Then-president of Ghana, Flight Lt. Rawlings began a trend that other regional coup leaders would later use to cement their positions. After seizing power just over a decade ago at the age of 31, Rawlings successfully swapped military uniform for civilian garb.

Diplomats on the ground were in a tricky position over how to handle the situation. A week after the coup, Karl Prinz, the ambassador for Germany, met Strasser. By then, a song called “Tiger Come Down to Town” — after the junta’s tiger battalion — was dominating radio airwaves. Yet the newly installed president seemed nervous, and the two men smoked steadily through a packet of Marlboros in a single sitting.

“I was around 43 years and the youngest of the Western diplomats, but still 18 years older than Strasser. I felt sympathy for Strasser,” said Prinz, who is now retired and living in Bonn.

“Strasser made Jeb Bush
look like a tough guy.”

Prinz pushed for democratic elections to be held quickly and advised that Strasser keep on four ministers from the previous government in order to win some international credibility. “He was a nice [man] but ... there was obviously a big distance — already on the level of skin color.”

Perhaps acutely aware of this, Strasser initially heeded the popular older diplomat’s advice, then sacked all the ministers. Within a couple of years, Strasser would make another costly miscalculation in disregarding Prinz’s advice. For now, though, citizens were snapping up calendars decorated with “Strasser, Our Redeemer.” Few realized then that the soft-spoken and easily intimidated captain — “Strasser made Jeb Bush look like a tough guy,” Opala told me — controlled neither his officers nor his cabinet members.

There’s a video of a journalist interviewing Strasser shortly after the coup. The new president can be seen sitting behind a desk, decked in full military uniform, eyes lowered shyly. “You have a lot of support,” the journalist says, almost breathlessly.

“Yes,” Strasser mumbles unconvincingly, “because we know what the people want.”

Whether or not Strasser or his cronies really knew what the people wanted, they certainly put on a show. They attended dreary government meetings in sunglasses and sharply cut suits. Once, Strasser addressed a state funeral in the national cathedral while wearing aviator sunglasses. On another occasion, he turned up to a Commonwealth summit in Cyprus — during which Sierra Leone’s return to democracy was a key discussion point — wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Sunny Days in Cyprus.” While there, he was reportedly too shy to attend a proposed meeting with the Queen.

There were grand plans to install a functioning democracy. The soldiers launched a cleanup campaign to rid the streets of mountains of trash, often joining in themselves. The economy was on the up; gas and electricity were once again available. Ambulances, which had all but disappeared from Freetown, were imported and put to use again.

Optimistic once again, young people splashed downtown Freetown with murals of inspiring slogans and national heroes. There was talk of a long-awaited revolution finally bursting into flower.

Strasser on a sightseeing trip to Paphos, Cyprus, while attending a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in October 1993.

Martin Cleaver / AP Photo