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
