The trial of Charles Taylor has been paradoxical on many levels. He is being held to account not for running a brutal dictatorship in his own country, Liberia, but for involvement in civil war and the trading of blood diamonds in Sierra Leone. He is the first African leader to be tried for war crimes under international law - no small moment in the history of a continent littered with allegations - but was thrown under the media spotlight following the revelation of a tenuous link with a supermodel. I ask Tim Butcher, author and former Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph if this is indicative of Western attitudes to Africa. He relents that "it is slightly odd that the paparazzi only move in when a hissy fit super model swans into court. But if people who weren’t aware of the issue have been made aware, then I have to accept it’s a good thing - although it’s not good for justice."

Butcher worked as a journalist in Africa, in addition to the Middle East and Balkans from 1990 to 2009. Despite having covered some of the continent’s most pivotal events of recent times, not least the election of Robert Mugabe and wars in the Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia, he says he never fully understood the region. He likens witnessing events as a journalist to "watching a boxing match happen right in front of you - you’re in Row A, but it doesn’t give you the wider picture." Troubled in particular by civil wars in West Africa, during which a rebel ambush claimed the lives of two fellow journalists and friends, he set out to gain a clearer picture. His device was a 350 mile trek across Sierra Leone and Liberia - a journey through rainforest, swamp, sea and two countries struggling to confront brutally violent pasts, which he recounts in his latest book Chasing the Devil.

Haunting parallels can be drawn between the histories of Sierra Leone and Liberia, both set up by outsiders in missions dressed up as philanthropic. Sierra Leone was the site of a British experiment in social engineering which took place at the end of the eighteenth century, moving poverty-stricken blacks from the streets of London so they could govern themselves. The Liberian project entailed the foundation of a country in 1847 where freed American slaves and their descendants could move to escape racism. Butcher dismisses claims to altruism: "Most people that did the sending out were deep racists who didn’t want black people on the streets of London and the northern cities of America because that was a focus for anti-slavery sentiments. There’s not much philanthropy there." It is the legacies of this to which he attributes, in part, the eruption of civil war in both countries - the settling of old scores between outsiders and insiders, the friction, elitism and jealousy that has run through their histories.

The route which Butcher chose to take was one paved by author Graham Greene in 1935. Immortalised in the book Journey Without Maps, the impetus behind Greene’s journey was a mission on behalf of the Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in London to investigate concern that contrary to international belief, Liberian elites (descendants of freed slaves) had failed to cease the practice of selling their compatriots into slavery. Asked why he chose this route, Butcher says it was less about hero worship than the scarcity of literature on West Africa: "I was in Monrovia in 2003 when Charles Taylor’s regime was at its end. There were dead bodies in the street - he was at his most aggresive, detentioning and torturing people. There were horrific scenes and I was reading Graham Greene - in a way he made sense of the chaos. When I was troubled by West Africa and wanted to understand it better, I wanted to find someone who had been there before and written about it. That gave me a focus so I could clarify this murky, swirling contemporary picture."

So what insight did this journey give him into the troubled history of West Africa? More striking than anything else, he says, was the power of the witch doctor figure or ‘devil’ in rural society. In Chasing the Devil, Butcher describes how the power of the Poro bush society in Liberia is such that stumbling upon a secret initiation ceremony could still result in death. It is this understanding of the spiritual element of where power lies, he says, that sheds light on where such brutality has come from, how "one uses magic power to settle scores with another, dehumanising your enemy. This is what allows you to cut off the arms of children, rape women on a systemic scale and burn out villages." Is this an old-fashioned, imperialist conclusion? Butcher maintains that "I would be delighted to go along with this if I hadn’t seen communities where people were murdered for ritual sacrifice."

Indeed, he argues this failure to recognise the importance of the spirit - largely stemming from political correctness - is a fundamental part of the difficulty the West has understanding events in Africa. At the heart of this is the tendency to classify issues by standards we can recognise - terming conflicts as mercantile or in the interest of trade, in the same way that during the Cold War countries were capitalist or communist. Butcher terms this as "insane categorisation" that very rarely applies to Africa’s tough, unique reality: "We spend all our time worrying about an election. There have been elections in Sierra Leone, Liberia - what has fundamentally changed? Nothing."

He doesn’t hesitate to admit that media coverage of events in Africa is part of the problem: "We [journalists] look at terrible things such as the Rwandan genocide, terrible incidents in Zimbabwe, and we focus on the explosion. We don’t look at the ingredients that go together to make that volatile mix. The attention span of your readers doesn’t allow you to." Taking the Congo as an example, Butcher explains how a country now ill served by the media, hardly ever referred to in isolation from Heart of Darkness, was the place to be as a journalist in the 1960s. What has changed since then? Very little, simply the fact that the West has become more inured to it.

Continuing to ignore this, he says, and trying to make the old system better will continue to hinder the stability of peace: "I don’t think power in West Africa [currently] lies in democratically elected governments, because they struggle. Real power lies in societies which are very traditional. However, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t change. It did in Europe, Polynesia, Micronesia and Latin America. The way it will change is through accountability and transparency - discussing it." He is more hopeful when speaking of younger Africans, saying that "They mock the old devil societies, and use modern vices such as mobile phones to film ceremonies. They show them to people in Freetown and Monrovia and people laugh because it’s so quaint and backward looking. I am optimistic that by making people aware of it, it just becomes unsustainable."

Does any one story stand out in all his time as a correspondent in Africa, I ask? No - for Tim Butcher the memory that is dominant is the ability of it’s people to survive, despite being "put under pressure that most people would fold under. They have an astonishing spirit to survive and that’s the thing I find utterly inspiring. It’s kind of humbling, and that’s the common theme between the stories I really enjoyed."