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.
Sirleaf went to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1970 for the summer to brush up her credentials, and then on to Harvard. Sirleaf’s time at Harvard was transformational in her life and politics. As we have seen, Sirleaf’s childhood had helped create a bridge between the two worlds of Liberia, urban and rural, the world of Americo-Liberia and the world of indigenous Liberia. She credits her time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with educating her about the unequal history of Liberia and its connections not just with the United States but also with historical and contemporary West Africa. She returned to Monrovia in July 1971 armed with new expertise in administration and a new appreciation for the history of West Africa and its economic challenges and opportunities. She arrived just after the death of President Tubman in London from complications from surgery.
Tubman had governed Liberia for nearly thirty years. His death came at a time when revolutions were sweeping through the remaining settler colonies of Africa, including the rise of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, and anticolonial movements in other parts of Southern Africa. Tubman had tried to move the country forward by crafting his Open Door Policy and the Unification Policy and by relying on the new young class of educated Liberians, many of whom had traveled abroad for educational opportunities. William R. Tolbert Jr., who had served as Tubman’s vice president since 1952, succeeded him in 1971 and continued to rely on the talents of the Diaspora to staff his administration.
The 1970s were the decade in which the Diaspora became a force in Liberian politics.7 New political movements were emerging in Liberia. Sirleaf always gravitated to the mainstream, attached to government rather than revolution, an orientation that would later shape her approach as president. She was friendly, however, with activist colleagues who wanted radical reform. Faculty who had been educated overseas started the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA). They wanted to pursue socialist policies of redistribution to address the inequalities they saw in Liberia. Amos Sawyer, with a PhD from Northwestern University in the United States, who later was a professor of political science and dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Liberia, and president of the Interim Government of National Unity after the end of the civil war in the 2000s, was a founding member along with Togba Nah Roberts, an economics professor at UL. This movement was in alignment with the anticolonial movements sweeping Southern Africa at the time: The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the Movement for the National Independence of Angola (MPLA), for example. As Sirleaf said, “MOJA played a pivotal role in radicalizing the urban and rural poor of Liberia, raising the issues of government corruption, advocating for the nationalization of Liberia’s major businesses.”8
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