(Photo swiped from the BBC.) Born in 1967, he was a junior military officer in Sierra Leone until a group of his friends almost inadvertently overthrew Joseph Saidu Momoh, and installed him as leader in 1992, when he was only 25. (Too young, as it turns out, to constitutionally run for re-election.) He seemed pretty ineffectual as a leader. He was an unremarkable African dictator. Unable to defeat or make peace with the former corporal Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front, Strasser hired South African mercenary firm Executive Outcomes to do the job for him. Executive Outcome quickly incited a counterrevolution, and proceeded to "loot[] and burn[] their way through RUF territory."
Strasser was overthrown in 1996 by Julius Maada Bio in a bloodless coup, and wound up, at the age of 29, going to school in Warwick, England, under the auspices of the UN (which, apparently, gave him a one-year scholarship). He attended more clubs than classes, though, and, at one point, claimed he was assaulted in an alleged racial incident.
He currently lives with his mother in Sierra Leone, where the government had to urge people to stop making fun of him and throwing rocks at him. Last year, resurfaced as head of the People's Redemption Party in a bid to run for President (now that he was old enough to under the constitution). He didn't win.
There's a novel or a short story in here somewhere.
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