Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Pamela Scully

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780821445600
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this timely addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Pamela Scully takes us from the 1938 birth of Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson through the Ebola epidemic of 2014–15. Charting her childhood and adolescence, the book covers Sirleaf's relationship with her indigenous grandmother and urban parents, her early marriage, her years studying in the United States, and her career in international development and finance, where she developed her skill as a technocrat. The later chapters cover her years in and out of formal Liberian politics, her support for women's rights, and the Ebola outbreak.

Sirleaf's story speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is an astute examination of the life of a pioneering feminist politician.

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 Frontier 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.

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 were 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 ...