Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
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Reports of forced labor began circulating in the 1920s and concluded in a commission organized by the League of Nations in 1930. The report stated that slavery did not exist, but the report did raise the practice of “pawning” as an issue of concern. Pawning occurred primarily in the rural areas, where families pawned a child or relative as payment for a debt. In addition, wealthy families in Monrovia practiced their own system in which they took children from rural families into their homes as servants or wards. This latter practice both depended on the inequalities between the settlers and other Liberians and also paradoxically helped expand the Americo-Liberian elite. As one author put it, “The acceptance of tribal children as wards has long been considered a Christian duty by Americo-Liberians.” In the 1960s, “a great many of the educated Monrovians today . . . were taken into Americo-Liberian families during this period.”4
Sirleaf was born into precisely that milieu: both her parents had been fostered into Americo-Liberian families. Her paternal grandfather was a chief in Bomi County, just to the north of Monrovia. As was the common practice among rural families, he sent his son Karnley, Sirleaf’s father, to Monrovia to live with a Congo family so he could learn English and participate in life there. Sirleaf’s father went on to become the first indigenous person to sit in the House of Representatives. Sirleaf’s maternal grandfather was a German, who returned to Germany during the First World War. He left his daughter Martha with her mother, Juah Sarwee, a farmer in Sinoe County in the south of the country. Like Sirleaf’s father, Sirleaf’s mother, Martha, was also sent to Monrovia. Martha became the ward of a family called the Dunbars, who were one of the oldest settler families in Liberia. She changed her name to Martha Dunbar.
These family connections meant that although Sirleaf grew up in the 1940s and early 1950s in the only really big town in Liberia, she spent the summers of her childhood in the rural areas and thus had intense contact with her indigenous roots. In the summers she would go to the home of her paternal grandmother north of Monrovia. There she learned to speak some of the local language, Gola, and to experience life with no running water. She spent time collecting both water and food and socializing with other people in the village.
When Sirleaf was growing up, Monrovia was a small town, dominated by churches and the social life of the Americo-Liberian elite. It was small enough that people walked to school and the shops, and as Sirleaf herself remembers, also traveled by canoe to places further afield. The first census of Monrovia was taken in 1956, a year after Sirleaf graduated from high school. The population was 42,000 then, though three years later it was 53,000. In a survey conducted by Merran Fraenkel in 1959, some six out of every ten adults in Monrovia had moved there since 1948. This shows great mobility between the rural areas and the capital in this postwar era. People perceived as Americo-Liberian—that is, born or adopted into the Americo-Liberian elite—accounted for some 16 percent of the population. Businessmen and traders, mostly from the growing Lebanese community, also were by then a key component of Monrovia’s population, and nearly as many Ghanaians also lived in the city (1,193). Government remained a key employer in Monrovia. There was also a growing business sector in construction and commerce, owned primarily by foreigners, which employed nearly as many people as the government.5
Aerial view of downtown Monrovia, Liberia. 1954. Photo by John T. Smith Jr. in A History of Flying and Photography: In the Photogrammetry Division of the National Ocean Survey, 1919–1979.
Sirleaf grew up on Benson Street, one of the major streets in the city. The American Embassy sits at the end of Benson Street on the corner of United Nations Drive. Sirleaf was the third of four children and recalls a very happy childhood, which saw the family becoming increasingly wealthy as her father moved up in the Tubman government. Her mother opened an elementary school, which Sirleaf and her sister Jennie attended, and also became a Presbyterian preacher. By the 1940s and ’50s, churches proliferated in Monrovia. By far the largest number of Monrovians attended the Methodist Episcopal Church. The next-largest denomination was Roman Catholic, followed by smaller numbers of the other denominations, including the Liberian Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention, the National Baptist Mission USA, AME and AME Zion churches, and the Presbyterians. In this era a relatively small number of people in Monrovia were Muslim, though the numbers grew with the movement of rural people into the city. The 1959 survey undertaken by Fraenkel showed some 13 percent of adults interviewed identified themselves as Muslim and 59 percent as Christian.6
Christianity was a marker of civilized status and upward mobility in the Monrovia in which Sirleaf grew up. Discrimination against Muslims, who were not allowed to hold government posts, contributed to the movement of young people to Christianity. During this era, most Muslims in Monrovia were uneducated. Conversion to Christianity and education happened at the same time in schools. Although Christianity was an essential ingredient for being part of the Americo-Liberian or “civilized” community, it was membership in particular churches that was crucial. Most of the key Christian denominations had a church in the center of town and a smaller building in the suburbs. The Protestant Episcopal Church was the “favoured church of the elite,”7 although Sirleaf’s parents were Presbyterians.
During her early life Sirleaf had the opportunity to learn about the different religious traditions of the country. In Monrovia she attended church, but back in Bomi County many people in her father’s village were Muslim. People also practiced indigenous religions. Sirleaf’s mother was a preacher in the Presbyterian Church, and her children went with her as she preached around Liberia. Sirleaf’s childhood experiences of diversity in income, religion, and geography in some ways prepared her more than some other Liberians whose experiences were limited to Monrovia. As she writes in her autobiography, “My feet are in two worlds—the world of poor rural women with no respite from hardship and the world of accomplished Liberian professionals, for whom the United States is a second and beloved home. I draw strength from both.”8
Sirleaf did well at school and attended the prestigious College of West Africa in Monrovia from 1948 to 1955, graduating with a diploma in economics and accounting. This Methodist high school, founded in 1904, was a product of mission education in the nineteenth century. The school’s prestige remains. In 2011, the Liberia Annual Conference approved the CWA as a United Methodist Historic Site, one of only six sites outside the United States.9 At school, Sirleaf excelled in academics as well as sports. But during her high school years, her father had a stroke, which changed the family’s fortunes and led to Sirleaf feeling that her educational opportunities after school were now limited. However, Sirleaf was fortunate to come of age at the time when women were gaining political rights in Liberia.
One of President Tubman’s achievements was to open up opportunities for women. In 1947, one hundred years after the official founding of the country of Liberia, women received the vote. Women soon started organizing to champion further rights. Under the leadership of the newly formed National Liberian Social and Political Movement, the act was amended to allow women to hold any political office. Americo-Liberian women in particular were able to take advantage of these new opportunities and soon held many posts in both government and civil society. For example, in an article published in 1968, Angie E. Brooks, then president of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations, listed a number of women in high government positions at the time. These included roles such as Under Secretary for Public Works and Utilities, Assistant Secretary for Information, Secretary of the Liberian Senate, Director of American and European Affairs in the Department of State.10 That so many women were able to get positions in government speaks mostly to the smallness of the Liberian elite, where everyone knew everyone and where relationships between key families anchored politics.
Sirleaf was thus part of a cohort of women who could aspire to participate fully as Liberian citizens as well as enter government. However, when Sirleaf was growing up, young women we
re expected to start a family, and that is what she did. She married at seventeen, in 1956. According to her autobiography, while her wealthier friends went off to college in the United States, Sirleaf wondered how she was going to fare. In this context, marriage seemed a way to a secure future, and it presented itself in the form of James (“Doc”) Sirleaf. He was seven years older than Ellen Johnson and had already been to the Tuskegee Institute, the famous historically black college in the United States. Ellen married James, and they had two boys, James T. and Charles Sirleaf, only some nine months apart.11As her autobiography recounts, for the first few years, they lived with Doc’s mother, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf worked as a secretary and later as an accountant. Then Doc got a job teaching at a school outside of Monrovia, and the family settled on a farm. Two more boys arrived before Ellen and Doc returned to Monrovia, where Doc took up the always coveted government job. Robert Sirleaf was born in 1960, and James H., known as Adamah, in 1962. For many women of the Liberian elite, the rest of their life would have been the story of working, bringing up the children, and nurturing the family. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf decided to lead a different kind of life focused on work, leadership, and nationbuilding.
2
Scholar and Government Employee
The 1960s and 1970s
In 1962, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf went to the United States to study. The catalyst for her going was the scholarship that Doc had received to study at the University of Wisconsin. Sirleaf saw that her school friends were faring better with higher educational opportunities. Sirleaf decided that she too needed to study in the United States. It is hard to know exactly what drives individuals, but clearly Sirleaf believed in herself from a young age and was driven to achieve. She overcame the kinds of obstacles (domestic violence, imprisonment, exile) that would have derailed a more timid personality. With perhaps only a hint of irony, Sirleaf’s autobiography is titled This Child Will Be Great, evidence of a strong ego. Indeed, the book is framed to show how “the path of greatness unfolded.”1
In order to study, Sirleaf had to leave her children behind. Having to choose between taking up educational or job opportunities and staying with one’s children was a common dilemma for many women across West Africa. In Sirleaf’s case, going to the United States offered a number of advantages: furthering her education, thus helping the family’s future, and staying with her husband. Like many Africans, Sirleaf and Doc left their children, including baby Adamah, in the care of relatives: two sons went to Doc’s mother and two to Ellen’s. But such separations did not come without cost: Sirleaf says while she had to do this, it did cause a “hairline fracture” in the relationship with her children, although as we will see, three of her sons have helped support her presidency in one way or another.
In moving to the United States for further study, Sirleaf joined a new wave of young Liberians who looked to the United States as a land of opportunities. The number of Liberians in the United States at that time was, however, much smaller than it would later become: only some two thousand students made their way in these years to the United States. While Doc Sirleaf studied at the University of Wisconsin, a leading state school, Sirleaf attended Madison Business College, a much smaller and less prestigious institution. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, the college went through at least five name changes before finally closing its doors in 1998. Sirleaf received her accounting degree from the college in 1964 and continued to be a good student, attending the University of Colorado and finally receiving a master’s in public administration from Harvard in 1971.
Sirleaf attended college in the 1960s, the era of civil rights, including the rise of Black Consciousness and the second wave of the feminist movement. In many ways, her career embodied the promise offered by both movements: the rights of people of African descent to lay public claim to their rights and the expansion of opportunities for women. But in both the public sphere and the private, this also was a time of tensions: Sirleaf was in the United States when President Kennedy was assassinated and when his brother Bobby was gunned down. In the private sphere of Sirleaf’s life, violence also reigned. For Sirleaf these were years of increasing violence in her home, as her husband succumbed to drinking and jealousy and started attacking her. Sirleaf’s personal experiences with domestic violence perhaps helped propel her later into the public sphere to address women’s rights, and particularly women’s rights to be free of sexual violence both in war and in peacetime, as we will see in later chapters.
Colleges and universities were the site of ferment and debate about America’s role in the Vietnam War and in internationalization more generally. Students from Liberia also began to participate in politics. In the late 1960s they organized the Liberian Student Union. According to one author, Liberian students in the United States generally supported the government of William V. S. Tubman because they benefited from his financial support for education.2 While a student, Sirleaf did not participate in these early movements; instead, she concentrated on her studies, holding her difficult marriage together, and working after school in a menial job to put food on the table. At Harvard too she focused on her studies. But once she entered the business world in later years, she began to have more interaction with the politics of the Diaspora. In 1974, Gabriel Baccus Matthews founded the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL), which leaned toward socialist and Pan-Africanist policies. Sirleaf has called him the “Godfather of Liberian Democracy.” Sirleaf never became a member of PAL, but she did participate in meetings when she was in the United States working for the World Bank.
Back in Liberia in the 1960s, the government was becoming enmeshed in the politics of the Cold War. Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 to 1971, which included a long stretch of the Cold War. During that era, the United States looked to countries around the world to shore up its position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Liberia was just such a place. The United States had long been interested in Liberia, as evidenced by the Firestone agreement in 1926, which the US government had monitored closely. The United States signed a defense pact with Liberia as early as 1942 and built the Roberts airport to support military activity during World War I. The Voice of America’s main relay station was near Monrovia, and the US Embassy compound housed the CIA’s main African station.3
Tubman was a very popular president in Monrovia. A song popular in the 1950s, celebrating the occasion of his second inauguration, suggests that at least some residents of Monrovia were encouraged by his leadership: “Inauguration, President Tubman, Inauguration is a time for rejoicing. He give me a house. He give me good water. President Tubman, thank you for your kindness. He give me good roads. He give me good food. President Tubman, thank you for your kindness.”4 Some of Tubman’s support derived from his forging of close relations with the United States and other countries in the West, which was a mark of his presidency, along with encouraging foreign investment in Liberia through his Open Door Policy. President Tubman inaugurated the Open Door Policy in the first year of his presidency, thinking that virtually unfettered access to Liberia’s natural resources and low taxes on foreign companies would stimulate investment. Foreign companies did take advantage of these options, with companies such as the Republic Steel Corporation and LAMCO building railways to their concessions in Bomi and Nimba counties. In the 1950s, Liberia had the second-highest increase in gross national product, second only to Japan’s.5 While the companies employed thousands of Liberians, well-paying jobs went to expatriates, and little was done to invest in the education or promotion of Liberian workers.6 In her first term as president Sirleaf sought to address the unequal terms of foreign companies’ relations with Liberia.
Tubman also initiated a new relationship with the interior under what he called the Unification Policy. The aim of this approach was to lessen the divide between the Americo-Liberian coast and the indigenous interior. In 1964 the old hinterland provinces, which had been ruled through indirect rule, were given the status of counties, thus creating, at least in bureau
cratic terms, an equal relationship between all people to the state. By his death in 1971, Tubman had achieved better integration of Liberia. However, property qualifications undermined the extension of the vote to indigenous citizens, and persistent inequality remained between urban elites and the majority of Liberians, who lived in the rural areas.
On returning to Liberia, Sirleaf started work in the Treasury Department in 1965. This position gave her a very good, but not very optimistic, view of the economy, which was laden with debt and dependence on foreign companies such as Firestone. During her time in the Treasury her marriage continued to crumble, and ultimately Sirleaf and her husband divorced. Two of her sons went to school; one stayed with his paternal uncle, but Rob, the third child, insisted on staying with Sirleaf. He traveled with her to the United States when she decided to continue her education. He lived with friends in South Dakota and finished high school there. This time with his mother consolidated a close relationship between the two of them. When she became president, he returned to Liberia, serving as her adviser and becoming the first head of the National Oil Company of Liberia and later chair of the First National Bank.