Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
OHIO SHORT HISTORIES OF AFRICA
This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.
Steve Biko
by Lindy Wilson
Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto weSizwe): South Africa’s Liberation Army, 1960s–1990s
by Janet Cherry
Epidemics: The Story of South Africa’s Five Most Lethal Human Diseases
by Howard Phillips
South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights
by Saul Dubow
San Rock Art
by J.D. Lewis-Williams
Ingrid Jonker: Poet under Apartheid
by Louise Viljoen
The ANC Youth League
by Clive Glaser
Govan Mbeki
by Colin Bundy
The Idea of the ANC
by Anthony Butler
Emperor Haile Selassie
by Bereket Habte Selassie
Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary
by Ernest Harsch
Patrice Lumumba
by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Short-changed? South Africa since Apartheid
by Colin Bundy
The ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender and Politics
by Shireen Hassim
The Soweto Uprising
by Noor Nieftagodien
Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
by Christopher J. Lee
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
by Pamela Scully
Ken Saro-Wiwa
by Roy Doron and Toyin Falola
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Pamela Scully
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scully, Pamela, author.
Title: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf / Pamela Scully.
Other titles: Ohio short histories of Africa.
Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Series: Ohio short histories of Africa | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042165| ISBN 9780821422212 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445600 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Johnson-Sirleaf, Ellen, 1938–| Women presidents—Liberia—Biography. | Presidents—Liberia—Biography. | Liberia—Politics and government—1980–| Liberia—Biography.
Classification: LCC DT636.53.J64 .S38 2016 | DDC 966.62031092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042165
ISBN 9780821445600 (e-book)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Growing Up in Two Worlds
2. Scholar and Government Employee: The 1960s and 1970s
3. Liberian Opportunities and International Perils
4. Women and Postconflict Liberia
5. President Sirleaf
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Figures
Aerial view of downtown Monrovia, Liberia, 1954
A daily news chalkboard in Monrovia, 2008
Daily Talk newsstand in Monrovia, 2005
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf waves to the audience at her inauguration in Monrovia, 2006
Women’s Council, National Council of Elders and Chiefs at International Women’s Day, Monrovia, 2008
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2009
Maps
Liberia, Map No. 3775
Monrovia, Map No. 3939, 1996
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Gill Berchowitz of Ohio University Press for her support of this project. I also very much appreciate the guidance of the two anonymous reviewers. Olivia Hendricks did sterling work on the copyediting, as did Ingrid Meintjes, who helped prepare the manuscript. The Institute for Developing Nations at Emory University and the Carter Center facilitated my engagement with Liberia over the years. I am very grateful. I appreciate all I have learned from friends and colleagues in Liberia and who work on Liberia. Special thanks to Deborah Harding for her kindness. This book is in honor of all who are working to build a strong and peaceful Liberia.
Abbreviations
ACDL Association for Constitutional Democracy
ECOMOG ECOWAS Monitoring Group
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
INGO international nongovernmental organization
INPFL Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia
LAP Liberian Action Party
LNP Liberia National Police
LURD Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
MODEL Movement for Democracy in Liberia
MOJA Movement for Justice in Africa
NDPL National Democratic Party of Liberia
NGO nongovernmental organization
NPFL National Patriotic Front of Liberia
PAL Progressive Alliance of Liberia
TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia
ULIMO United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women
UNMIL United Nations Mission in Liberia
WIPNET Women in Peacebuilding Network
WLMAP Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
WONGOSOL Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia
Introduction
On Friday, October 7, 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize committee took a step into history by awarding the prize to three women from Africa, two of them relatively unknown activists at the time. The committee presented the award to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (president of Liberia), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia), and Tawakkol Karman (Yemen) “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”1 The previous time that the Nobel committee had made the award to three individuals was nearly twenty years earlier, in 1994, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three high-profile leaders in Middle East politics: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin. With the 2011 award, the prize committee affirmed the growing international commitment to women’s participation in peace building, exemplified by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000, on women, war, and peace.2
In its official statement, the Nobel committee said, “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.” The most famous of these new laureates was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, then campaigning for her second term as president of Liberia. The Nobel committee said of her: “Sirleaf is Africa’s first democratically elected female president. Since her inauguration in
2006, she has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women.”
Liberia. Map No. 3775 Rev. 9, September 2014, United Nations.
For most of Liberia’s history few people outside West Africa even knew about the country. If they had heard of Liberia, they usually knew two things: that African Americans associated with missions colonized the country in the mid-nineteenth century, and that in the 1990s and early 2000s militias in Liberia’s civil war perpetrated terrible human rights abuses involving child soldiers and sexualized violence. However, such associations have receded. In 2008, the rather romantic film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which chronicled women’s role in ending the Liberian war, won the award for Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film received many subsequent awards and was also shown on PBS, introducing a wider audience to the issues of war, peace, and women’s rights in Liberia.
Today Liberia is famous for having two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, head of the women’s peace movement, for having the first elected woman president on the African continent, and for being a hub of experiments making women’s rights part of the agenda for transitional justice and postconflict reconstruction. When this book was being written, Liberia had also become the epicenter of the world’s largest and most critical Ebola epidemic in history. Ebola revealed the limits of governance in Liberia and citizens’ distrust of Sirleaf in her second term, but it also showed the incredible discipline of Liberians who made their country the first in the region to be declared free of Ebola by changing greeting and burial practices, among others. History will remember Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as a landmark and potentially game-changing president of Liberia and a force for women’s rights in the international community. Whether her legacy will be remembered for changing the fundamental tensions and issues that have plagued Liberia is less certain.
For all these reasons there is immense interest in both Liberia and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The UN and virtually every nongovernmental organization in the world have been working in Liberia since 2003, especially on issues of sexual violence and rule of law. These organizations include the International Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, UNIFEM (now UN Women), the Carter Center, Doctors without Borders, and many others. Their presence has helped bring Liberia into international news and has also created a conversation on Liberia that inspires young people to know more about the country.
Sirleaf’s life speaks to many of the key themes facing the twenty-first century: the rise of women as a force to be reckoned with in national and international politics, the challenges of reconciling indigenous rights and experiences with national laws and urban dominance (a particular theme of Liberian history and contemporary life), the rise of ravaging civil wars and sexual violence, and the challenges of transitional justice in building a postconflict society. In 2014 Liberia also became known as the place that the deadly Ebola virus metastasized: Liberia began to implode under the weight of the disease and poor infrastructure. Ebola cast a shadow over Sirleaf’s legacy. The government’s authoritarian and inept handling of the disease revealed the enduring challenges facing this postconflict country and the limits of Sirleaf’s technocratic approach to government in a country where so many had no access to the basic political and economic infrastructure, and where the ongoing divide between elites and other citizens continued to be a marked feature of Liberian life. However, Liberia’s victory over this Ebola outbreak also can be seen as part of Sirleaf’s achievement. As ever, writing history as it happens leaves much room for ambiguity.
Sirleaf’s life and career exemplify the move of women into the highest echelons of international human rights. Her biography also is the story of a woman from a small country in West Africa, whose terrible civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s brought it to international attention, and who navigated her way through complex political terrain for much of her career. Her biography is thus closely linked to the story of Liberia and to the story of women’s rights as international rights. Those are themes I develop in the chapters that follow.
1
Growing Up in Two Worlds
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was born Ellen Johnson, in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on October 29, 1938. Today, Liberia has just over 4 million people and covers 43,000 square miles. On the West Coast of Africa, it shares borders with Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. It has 350 miles of wonderful coastline and a varied environment that includes tropical rain forests, plains, and mountains. It has two major seasons: the dry season (November to April) and the wet season (May to October). The wet season is hot and wet—monsoon-like, making travel difficult. The majority of the population is indigenous (there are some twenty indigenous languages) and lives in rural areas and villages following patrilineal lines of descent. In the North, secret societies for both men and women, the Poro and the Sande, help structure political and social relationships and provide avenues to power. In the South, secret societies do not hold sway, but women have long enjoyed political and social authority.
The Republic of Liberia is one of the oldest independent states in Africa, dating back to 1847. English is the official language, and a patois, Liberian English, is the lingua franca. This is because Liberia was founded through interactions with America. Five percent of Liberia’s population traces its heritage to people of American descent. This Americo-Liberian group includes descendants of freed people from the Caribbean and the Americas who settled in the nineteenth century as well as Africans seized by the British navy from slave ships after the abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade and known as “Congo.”
Liberia’s founding was thus similar to that of neighboring Sierra Leone: free people of African descent looked to Africa to realize freedom. In the United States of America, freed people found strange bedfellows with whites who sought to move people of African descent far away from America. Different groups thus had various motivations for settling what would become Liberia: from longing to return to the continent, philanthropic interests, and racism about the increasing presence of emancipated and manumitted people of African descent in the United States. Although missionary societies sponsored the founding of Liberia, the US government backed their efforts; most notably, President James Monroe supported a missionary initiative to settle newly freed slaves. White Southern missionary societies were keen to repatriate people of African descent to Africa so that they did not stay in the United States. The American Colonization Society was the most prominent of these societies.
In the early 1820s, the ACS bought a “36 mile long and 3 mile wide” strip of coastal land for trade goods, supplies, weapons, and rum worth approximately $300, probably at gunpoint, from the Bassa and Dey societies of the West African coast.1 The colonization of the land that was to become Liberia began. Between 1822 and 1892, the society sent 16,000 Americans to places along the coast. From the 1820s through the 1840s, various other branches settled different areas of the coast, including Cape Palmas and Maryland in the South. By 1848, four Christian denominations were established in Monrovia: Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodist Episcopalians.2 The Commonwealth of Liberia, established in 1838 and still under the control of the ACS, derived most of its income from taxes levied on African and British traders. These taxes became a source of tension with the British government. As a result, in 1847, Americo-Liberians voted to be independent. At this time, Liberia consisted of a 45-mile-wide strip of territory with most Americo-Liberians, and Congo, living in Monrovia.
War with indigenous societies continued through much of the nineteenth century, although slowly settlers established control over the societies of the interior. As early as 1869, the Department of the Interior was created to administer affairs of what was known as the “hinterland.” This rule can be thought of as a form of internal colonialism, in which settlers levied taxes on communities in the interior and ruled through force, relying on the Liberian Frontie
r Force. In 1907, this system of government was further developed, in a manner akin to the British policy of “indirect rule.” Chiefs were made responsible for collecting taxes and putting down uprisings. The Liberian government replaced hereditary chiefs and replaced them with government functionaries and created sixteen groups that separated existing political units and affiliations. The intention was “to prevent the formation of alliances that might challenge the government.” Indirect rule also excluded Africans from Liberian citizenship, since they had to renounce their “tribal” affiliation in order to participate in Liberian national political life. The system thereby widened the division between Americo-Liberians and the indigenous peoples.3 The conditions for tension between different Liberian groups, and most markedly between Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians, thus were woven into the very fabric of rule. This tension was a primary source for the civil wars that plagued Liberia from 1980 through 2003, It was one of the greatest challenges inherited by Sirleaf when she became president in 2006.
Up to the 1920s, Liberia’s economy was primarily agricultural. A shipbuilding business in Monrovia flourished up to the late nineteenth century, when competition from steamships ended it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Liberia thus struggled to find its economic footing, but in the 1920s, the solution presented itself, with long-term consequences for the country. In 1926, Firestone, the big rubber company, signed a lease with the government to rent up to a million acres of land at six cents an acre for ninety-nine years, paying a 1 percent tax on the gross value of exported rubber. This put the company in control of about 4 percent of the entire country’s landmass. Firestone also got the rights to any natural resources discovered on its concession and was exempted from taxes, with some exceptions. The government, in its turn, ensured a labor force to work on the plantations.
Since rubber trees take seven years to grow, the agreement did not immediately help the government, but in time, the Firestone agreement became the single most important factor in maintaining the Liberian economy. The terms of the agreement in effect made the Liberian government handmaiden to Firestone: The company, under its subsidiary the Finance Corporation of Liberia, with the support of the US government, forced a loan of $5 million to the Liberian government. This put the Liberian government in debt to the company and vastly hampered the country’s economic independence. In addition, the government was not permitted to sign any new concessionary agreements without the consent of the company. The end result was that Firestone was given carte blanche and the Liberian government became the purveyor of labor to Firestone. The government in effect began to manage forced labor.
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