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 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
