Top Quotes: “Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf” - Helene Cooper

Introduction

“On February 6, 1820, 88 American blacks and freed slaves and three white men boarded the ship Elizabeth in New York Harbor, their destination West Africa. The white men were agents of the American Colonization Society, sent to acquire land that American blacks would be encouraged to settle in America’s sole effort at colonization. Eventually, these men and women ended up in what would become Liberia.

One of them was my great-great-great-great grandfather, Elijah Johnson.

Many of Liberia’s 28 tribes, belonging to 16 ethnic-linguistic groups and led by the Dey tribe, fought the new colonists. They lost, and the American settlers asserted their control over the country, establishing in Liberia an antebellum way of life similar to that in the American South from which they had fled, except that in Liberia, the American blacks were the rulers and the native Liberians became the ruled.

On July 26, 1847, Liberia declared its independence from America. For almost a century after that, Liberia, along with Ethiopia, could proudly claim that it was one of only two African countries not ruled by whites.

But descendants of the freed American slaves who ruled Liberia behaved, in many ways, like the white colonists who ruled other African countries, setting up a two-tiered system with two very distinct classes. On April 12, 1980, a military coup led by men from the Krahn, Gio, and Vai ethnic groups left Liberia’s rulers dead or on the run.

Nine years after that coup, on December 24, 1989, a civil war erupted. It was a war that introduced the world to the child soldiers of West Africa, as young children were drafted to fight. More than 200,000 people died in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire. Thousands of women and girls were raped.

In August 2003, the Civil War in Liberia finally ended. But there was no electricity or running water. Schools that had been shuttered for years remained closed. The capital city of Monrovia had no infrastructure. Social norms had disintegrated. An entire generation had seen nothing but war.”

“While I was writing about America’s first black President as one of four New York Times reporters assigned to cover his first term aboard Air Force One, the women in my home country were staging their own power play, one just as dramatic as the toppling of the racial barrier to the U.S. presidency I was chronicling.

On October 11, 2005, Liberians went to the polls to choose the man who would take on the task of resuscitating the country. Voter turnout was 75% of 1.35 million registered voters.

On November 23, 2005, after a runoff, the National Electoral Commission declared the winner of Liberia’s elections. Not a man. A woman.

Her name: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, the market women of Liberia, along with thousands of other Liberian women, had allied themselves with Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global bureaucrat, to upend centuries of male political domination in one of Africa’s most devastated places. The women in my native country had managed something that still eluded their female counterparts in my adopted country. Then, those women had simply returned to their tables and stalls and oranges and kola nuts and gone about their business making market, except that now they were a force in politics.”

Family History

“In the early 19th century, America found itself with a growing class of freed blacks, many of them the children of slaves who had somehow found themselves freed, for reasons ranging from happenstance to, in many cases, interracial rape. White slave owners had impregnated their slaves, who then had mixed-race children whose skin color was a daily reminder of the hypocrisy that infused antebellum life. Many of these mixed-race children were eventually freed.

The rising number of freed blacks worried the white slave owners, who believed they served as a beacon to enslaved blacks who might rebel and seek their own freedom. And so began the ‘back to Africa’ movement, centered around the thought that the best way to prevent slave rebellions was to send free blacks back to Africa.

In 1820 the first of many shiploads of mixed-race freed slaves and blacks headed to West Africa. Mulatto, Quadroon, Quintoon, Octaroon — these new colonists were, for the most part, lighter-skinned than the native Liberian population; they could read and write; and hey were ostentatiously Christian. The colonists were met by locals who suspected — rightly — that their land and way of life (many of them still actively engaged in the slave trade themselves) were under threat. This was not as morally complicated as it sounds. The Europeans did have to purchase their human cargo from someone, and that someone was usually Africans who had caught and enslaved other Africans. So, many locals in Liberia were worried that this practice would be stopped by the newly arrived former slaves.

And thus was born Liberia, a country of almost impossible social, religious, and political complexity.”

“The American Colonization Society, a group made up of an unholy combination of white antislavery Quakers and evangelicals and slave owners who wanted to rid their South of freed blacks, purchased land from the native Africans. The Society did this at gunpoint and named the new country Liberia. The freed slaves who colonized Liberia were now the ruling class, and the native Africans largely became the laborers, household help, and underclass.

Liberia is 3,000 miles from the Congo, but the black American settlers became known derisively as ‘Congo people’ because native Liberians associated the Congo River with the slave trade. The Congo people controlled the government and owned most of the land. They quickly outlawed the slave trade that had provided income to many of the natives, whom the Congo people referred to insultingly as ‘country people.’

To the American colonists, the ‘country people’ were an unvariegated mass, with their elaborate beaded jewelry, Fanti clothing, and incomprehensible language. But these were complicated people, from 28 different ethnic groups, with individual beliefs, practices, and centuries-old enmities.”

“When baby Ellen was born, it was to two deeply divided societies that were linked by religion. Yet she, like few others, would not need religion to straddle both groups.

On the outside, Ellen looked like a Congo baby, but she did not have a single drop of Congo blood. She was a native Liberian, a point that would become hugely significant in the coming decades, when the Congo people were finally brought low. Her father’s father was a Gola chief named Jahmale. He had eight wives ensconced in the picturesque village of Julejuah. He and one wife did what so many Liberians do routinely: they sent one of their sons — Ellens’ father, Karnley — to Monrovia to become a ward of a Congo family. There Karnley could go to school and acquire the refinement that, in early 20th century Liberia, was becoming acknowledged as necessary to make something of yourself. Karnley’s name was Westernized to Carney Johnson, beginning the slow Congoization of the family.

Ellen’s mother’s mother was a Kru market woman from Greenville named Juah Sarwee, who fell for a white man, a German trader named Heinz Kruger, who was living in Liberia. The two married in 1913 and had a daughter, Martha.

During WWI, Liberia, eager to show the U.S. its loyalty, declared war on Germany and expelled all Germans, including Heinz. He left his family behind and was never heard from again. But thanks to Heinz Kruger and Juah Sarwee, Ellen’s mother, Martha, would go through life with what was then the ultimate symbol of beauty and status in a country with so many hang-ups about race: long hair and light skin. She could almost pass for white. The Congo families soon started offering to take her into their homes — common practice in Liberia, where better-off families often took in poorer children who served as playmates (and sometimes servants) for the children of the house in exchange for room, board, and schooling. Eventually Juah Sarwee, who was poor, illiterate, and abandoned by the white man she had married, agreed to give her daughter away.

The first Congo family Martha lived with made her sleep on the kitchen table, or sometimes under it with the family animals. Early 20th century Liberian society might accept that fate for a native, dark-skinned child, but Monrovia wouldn’t tolerate such treatment of a light-skinned half-white girl. So another Congo couple, Cecilia and Charles Dunbar, stepped in to right the wrong.

Martha took the Dunbar name, went to the best schools in Liberia, then headed abroad for a year to acquire even more refinement. She came back and was in the yard of the Dunbar house when Ellen’s father spotted her.

‘Oh,’ he said, taking in the hair, figure, and flushed high-yellow skin. ‘Oh. I like you.’”

“Martha and Carney’s four children — first Charles, then Jennie, Ellen, and Carney — would grow up with the gift of camouflage in a fractured country. Among the Congo people they could easily fit in, yet their Gola roots also gave them an entree, should they ever want to use it, into native Liberian culture. Ellen, the third child, in particular had the ability to use the gift with which she was born.”

“It was 1956, and the once-prosperous family had had a change of fortune. Carney Johnson had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. ‘I have been witched,’ he informed his family. ‘Someone has put juju on me.’ In Liberia it is still common for people to reach for ominous explanations for otherwise scientifically explicable phenomena. His wife also eschewed the scientific for the less tangible. ‘Pray for healing and for the forgiveness of your sins,’ Martha advised her husband.

Carney’s speech and movement were compromised by the stroke, and with that, his hopes of becoming the first native Liberian speaker of the House died. His past closeness to the ruling class wasn’t enough to insulate his family from the results of his vanished income. Martha quickly turned to the Liberian woman’s standard for survival, marketing, and began making baked goods to sell. She also took over the all-encompassing care and feeding of her now-homebound husband, rising early to bathe, dress, and feed him before helping him to the chair on the porch where he spent his days staring out at the street.”

Early Adulthood

“At 16 Ellen was nearing the end of high school, hoping that she would follow her sister and go abroad to college. Most of her friends were going to America or Europe to acquire finishing, including her best friend. But Carney’s stroke destroyed those hopes. The money Martha was making selling bread out of the house was not going to get Ellen a ticket on an ocean liner anywhere, let alone school tuition.

Over the warnings of her sister, Ellen chose the next best option: marriage to the handsome James ‘Doc’ Sirleaf, who had just returned from the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Doc was 24, Ellen 17.

To this naive girl, Doc was suave and sophisticated, with the ramrod bearing that Tuskegee had encouraged. He was a ‘been-to,’ a badge of honor in Liberia, designating that you have been to America or Europe and therefore are sophisticated and cultured.

After their first date, at the movies, Doc began pursuing Ellen, escorting her to school dances and assuring her wary parents that his intentions were honorable. Neither Ellen nor Doc let on to her parents that Doc had already seduced the teenager, a huge potential scandal in pious 50s Congo society. Just months after they began dating, the two were married, in 1956. The bride and bridesmaids were so young the Liberian press dubbed the affair a ‘Tom Thumb wedding.’”

“The children kept coming. By the time the third son, Robert, arrived in 1960, the family had moved back to Monrovia. A year after Rob came Adamah, born in 1961.

At the age of 22, Ellen had four sons, all under the age of five. She piled the children into her Beetle every day to do the running around that characterizes daily life in Monrovia: going to church, taking the kids to see their grandmothers, getting gas slips from Doc so she could fill the tank

Her best friend, Clavenda, just back from America, where she’d gone to college, visited Ellen, marveling over her four boys. Clavenda said all the right things, but when she left the house, Ellen was convinced she had seen pity in her eyes.

Watching her drive away, Ellen saw her own life; it seemed stationary, filled with the endless drudgery that was the fate of so many women in Africa. The tending and feeding of men and children, the day-to-day struggle to put food on the table and to find tuition and school fees, all under the hot equatorial sun, knowing that when you are finally boxed up and buried, the only thing that will mark your time on this earth will be the children you leave behind.

Surely there was more for her than this?

When her husband applied for a scholarship to pursue a master’s in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, Ellen drove to the Liberian Department of Education and made her own application for a scholarship, to study business at nearby Madison Business College. She hadn’t thought it through completely — what she would do with her boys if she got the scholarship, how she would feel separating from them to go to America. She would figure that out later. She just needed to do something to change the trajectory she was on.

Doc and Ellen knew people in the government, and that was how people got government scholarships: they both lobbied the people they knew. In 1962 they both got their scholarships. And suddenly Ellen was faced with a seminal choice: Children or career?

She could stay in Liberia while Doc went to America, take care of the boys. She would have her children and would be the maternal presence they needed. She would be a good wife.

But that would be all. With a high school diploma, that would be all.

Or, at the ripe age of 22, she could miss out on the childhood of her four sons. She would not be there when the youngest took his first steps or when Rob lost his first tooth. But she could shoot for the moon.

Ellen chose the moon.

That is not to say that leaving her four young boys was easy — it was, in fact, a gut-wrenching decision that would forever create a hairline fracture in the relationship with her youngest son. Neither of them knew it at the time, but this was to be the first of many separations, and Adamah would face a childhood filled with aunts, uncles, and in-laws, but no mother.”

“One night Doc came home after drinking but didn’t get out of the car for two hours, beset by demons. Ellen stood at the window, watching him. Would he hit her again? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he would just toy with her this time, like when he put the gun to her head and said, ‘Move, and I’ll blow your head off.’

Clarity would come soon.

Ellen arrived home late one night to find Doc, drunk and angry, waiting for her with his gun out. He pointed it at her.

Just as Ellen was bracing herself for another fight, she noticed a movement to the side. To her horror, she saw their 8-year-old son Charles watching from the doorway. The boy ran into the room with a can of mosquito repellant and began spraying his father’s face. ‘Stop!’ Charles screamed.

He couldn’t reach Doc’s eyes, but something about the desperation Charles felt must have touched his father’s soul, because Doc put the gun down and stared at his son in shock.

Doc had finally pushed his wife to her limit — her son had seen her about to be shot by his father. After two years away in the U.S., she’d rebuilt her life with her sons, and now her husband was shaming her in front of them. Furious, Ellen told Doc she had had enough. She was leaving him.

‘You can leave,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to take our children.’

She walked out anyway. She wasn’t stupid; she knew how society worked. In Liberia, the disposition of the children after a divorce is never simple. The default position, especially in the 60s, was that a father got to keep the children. After all, the man was the head of household. It is still true that in the immediate aftermath of many divorces, Liberian men often make a big show of taking their children. But inevitably the children end up being sent to their father’s mother to be raised, or to another relative, or to boarding school. If the father gets remarried, the children might stay and live with him and his new wife. The ‘I’m keeping the children’ pledge is often just for show.

Clavenda went with Ellen to the courthouse for the divorce hearing, standing nervously next to her friend, with $100 in her pocket to pay the lawyer. The two were terrified that Doc would make an appearance and end the proceedings. Whether fair or not, they knew that if he showed up and said ‘Dis my wife, she jes lyin’,’ the judge — the male judge — would send Ellen home with Doc and tell her to work out her differences with her husband as a good wife should He would say, ‘Y’all go fix your palaver.’

The minutes ticked by, and Doc did not walk through the door. The judge called the case, and Ellen and Clavenda nervously looked behind them at the door, still convinced that at any second Doc, in full military uniform, would come storming in.

Doc never did show up to contest the divorce. When it was over, he sent the two oldest boys up country to boarding school. The two youngest would stay with him. But that didn’t last long. Adamah soon went to live with Doc’s brother in Yekepa. Eventually, after Doc remarried, Adamah returned to live with his father and new wife. Rob, meanwhile, refused to stay with either his uncle or father. He wanted to be with this mother. He cried and begged and fought so fiercely that finally a fed-up Doc dropped him and his bags on his pleased ex-wife’s front step. ‘Here’s your son,’ he said. ‘Take him.’”

Career

“Even as her personal life was fragile, Ellen’s professional life was flourishing. Freed from the control of an abusive husband, she was outgrowing her position at the Treasury.

She had a comprehensive view of the Liberian economy, and she enjoyed trying to tease out the numeric answers to the small questions of interest rates and financing that came across her desk. But the pekin who wa’ na easy was not satisifed. She had already started questioning the absurdity of the two-tiered structure of which she had become a part. The Congo elites had embraced her — she was, after all, light-skinned and beautiful and had a white grandfather — but she had not forgotten her Gola roots and moved easily in and out of the different strata of Liberia’s classes, even as she grew uncomfortable at the contradictions.”

Pre-Civil War Economy

“For all of its Western aspirations, Liberia in 1969 was an economic mess. During the 40s, when Ellen was growing up in the family house on Benson Street, and the 50s, when she was attending high school, the country had registered staggeringly high economic growth; from 1954 to 1960, thanks to a rubber boom led by the Firestone Rubber Plantation in Harbel and the rapid exploitation of the country’s iron ore deposits, growth in production and income had shot to 10%. Only Japan performed better during that same period.

Unfortunately those numbers masked a chronic and familiar narrative: the rich were getting steadily richer, and the poor were stuck. This was all quite evident to Papanek. Most of the growth was generated by a handful of foreign firms, like Firestone, that focused on exporting raw materials without building or developing the factories and manufacturing plants that would allow Liberian workers to join the industrial revolution. So all that export profit fled the country along with the iron ore and rubber. In 1951 Firestone Liberia reported profits that were three times the total income of the Liberian Treasury.

President Tubman, the strongman at the helm of the country, paid lip service to improving the country’s dismal literacy rate and building primary and secondary schools. But he didn’t take the simple steps that were standard for countries trying to develop: there was no talk of diversifying the economy. Most of Liberia’s available jobs were low-paid service positions: houseboys and cooks and drivers in the homes of wealthy foreigners or Congo families, rubber tappers on Firestone’s numerous plantations, messengers and hustlers whose daily bread depended on whatever they picked up on the recently paved Tubman Blvd or the dusty side streets of the capital. Or, in the case of the women, making markets on the side of the road — one of the only real entrepreneurial activities in the country.

The hospitals that were built served the foreigners and the Congo people. The native Liberians still made do with home remedies when they got sick, or went to local healers. Tubman touted a new Unification Policy that he said would open the way for native Liberians to get on a professional ladder that largely consisted of landing a job with a government ministry. But the vast majority of high-ranking bureaucrats were still chosen from the ranks of Congo society.

By 1969 the economy was unraveling. Expecting a boom in iron ore and rubber prices that never materialized, the government had borrowed more than $125 million to build grand new government ministries and public buildings, including $6 million to build the Executive Mansion, where Tubman would reside.

The poor were the first to feel the impact of new ‘austerity measures’ that Tubman put in place to deal with the debt problem. To limit political dissent, he bought off the men who served as paramount chiefs of Liberia’s many ethnic groups up country. It was a system of political largesse that Tubman had raised to an art form: the chiefs took the money — or the bags of rice, fish, or palm oil — that Tubman ‘donated’ to them, and they, in turn, doled out smaller quantities, much smaller quantities, of the same to their villagers.”

“Ellen was eager to talk about the contradictions she found so vexing in Liberia’s economic structure, surprising Papanek with an independent and critical analysis of her country’s dilemmas. Her business degree, combined with the fact that unlike most of her Congo colleagues she had native Liberian family members, including those in her father’s village who were struggling to make a living, meant she saw things her colleagues missed. Looking at the bright woman before him, Papanek decided he had the perfect midlevel official to speak at his conference, and he invited her on the sopt.

Ellen accepted his invitation — why not? The country was standing on the wrong foot and wobbling, she thought. Someone needed to stand up and say something. Why shouldn’t that someone be her? She banged out a three-page speech on her typewriter.

Traditionally, talks by government officials in Liberia were long, rambling, polysyllabic-word-filled homages to biblical passages, the splendor of this great land of liberty, and the wise counsel of the country’s rulers. Ellen too was learning how to throw around big words. The difference was that the word she used wasn’t one anyone in Liberia had ever invoked when standing before a microphone: kleptocracy.

Standing at the lectern to give her speech, Ellen opened with a technocratic dissertation on the country’s economic stagnation. Then she suggested that one reason for that stagnation was because government officials were stealing money from the public till. Perhaps, she suggested, the decline in revenue had something to do with the kleptocracy.

It was the first time Papanek had ever heard the word. He wasn’t sure she hadn’t made it up.

Ellen made sure her audience knew what she meant, defining kleptocracy as ‘abuses of meager public funds such as payroll padding and outright stealing of public monies.’ When clerks at the Temple of Justice refused to put the court case of a wife seeking divorce on the docket until they were given a bribe, that was kleptocracy. When workers at the Ministry of Education added a little something to the fee high school students had to pay to take their national exams, that was kleptocracy. When immigration officers at Robertsfield Airport greeted arriving Pan Am passengers with a grin and an outstretched palm before stamping their passports, that was kleptocracy.

Heart racing, she ended her speech. A stunned audience stared back at her. She was shaking when she walked off the stage to a quiet room.

Afterward people milled outside, glancing at her furtively. Papanek too kept looking at her; he couldn’t believe what she had just done. He finally pulled her aside. ‘I wonder if it would not be a good idea to leave Liberia for a while, he said, adding, ‘As soon as possible.’

Papanek said he would arrange a fellowship for Ellen at Harvard, where she could study economics more formally. By also enrolling for one summer at the Economics Institute in Boulder, she could skip the bachelor’s degree and go straight to a master’s in public administration from Harvard.”

“Ellen was learning that the settler-African relations in Liberia were vastly more complex than the simple narrative of Christianity’s triumph over paganism that she had been taught.

Here is what she hadn’t been taught about Liberia’s history: that the native village and tribal kings who had sold their land — for the equivalent of $300 — to the freed slaves and the white agents from the American Colonization Society did so at gunpoint; that even so, those kings didn’t realize they were selling their land forever but thought the black colonists were coming to assimilate into their culture and village structures.

At Harvard, Ellen was moved by the anger and euphoria of black Americans as they resisted the white aristocracy. But at the same time, she battled a disconnect in her own psyche. How could she identify with the civil rights movement underway on her radicalized Harvard campus but also identify with the Congo aristocracy back home?”

“At the Ministry of Finance, Ellen had an increasingly familiar relationship with the most powerful men running Liberia. She was now on a first-name basis with the minister of foreign affairs and later his successor. Her ‘kleptocracy’ speech now forgotten, she attended the high-level meetings of the officials deciding the economic future of Liberia. And it didn’t take long for the newly minted Harvard grad to realize that she didn’t like what she was seeing.

For one thing, more and more people were leaving the countryside for the urban areas — Monrovia, Sanniquellie, Buchanan — creating job shortages in those cities. The reason they were leaving could be attributed to economic policy: the government held down prices paid to farmers to subsidize the food bill of the privileged classes living in Monrovia along with their poor native neighbors. But Monrovia and the other cities couldn’t handle the influx, and the repressed prices led to a vicious cycle, as more farmers abandoned the land for urban life, a social dislocation that led to more crime, more slums, and overall demoralization of the poor.

Real estate taxes were collected from businesses, but also from the poor, in the form of an odious ‘hut tax.’ While the Congo elites figured out ways to dodge the tax man, poor people who lived in mud huts up country remained the prey of government tax collection.

In November 1972, a year into her new job, Ellen was invited by her high school alma mater to deliver the commencement. Once again, she unloaded on the powers that employed her. Approaching the podium, she saw the panoply of young faces looking back at her. This was an elite school — one of the best in Liberia. But the student body wasn’t limited to the privileged. In another sign of anemic progress under Tolbert to expand opportunity, some native students were now part of the senior class. These students would be enrolling in the University of Liberia, which was already becoming a seedbed of political activism.

Behind Ellen sat the members of the old guard Congo aristocracy, wearing academic robes. These were some of the most conservative and prominent members of society.

Everyone knew what was meant to happen at grad ceremonies in Liberia: praises should be heaped on the institution, fine opportunities promised the grads if they only reached out and grabbed them. For a deputy minister of finance, the task seemed straightforward. Just stick to the script.

‘It’s time,’ she announced instead, ‘to stand up and speak the truth about who we are as a country.’

Like the U.S., she said, Liberia had failed to extend its founding principles of freedom and liberty to all her citizens. The very symbols of the country — its seal, which depicted that ship headed to the shore and the words ‘The love of liberty brought us here’ — was a symbol of exclusion of native Liberians. While neither she nor the students could change history, they could certainly try to change the future. She told them to read the Liberian constitution and think about how all its high-minded talk had been ‘ruthlessly prostrated.’

On the podium Ellen battled mounting feelings of anger and frustration. There was so much potential before her, but the old guard sitting behind her would stamp it out. And that widening economic gulf would breed more tension, until things exploded. She could see what was coming; the students before her could see what was coming. Why couldn’t the old guard?

‘Perhaps,’ she ended, ‘you, like I, may conclude that those who now make empty, sanctimonious claims about rights are worthy only of our deep contempt.’

Behind her the elite sat in silence, their stares hot on her back.

By the end of the day, Ellen’s speech was banned. A Monrovia newspaper printed it anyway.

When Ellen arrived at the Finance Ministry the next morning, she was summoned by the furious minister. He read passages of the speech aloud to her, becoming more and more angry as he read. ‘You don’t say things that will put the public against the government!’ he yelled, ‘We not gonna tolerate that!’

Dismissing her from his office, he went to a cabinet meeting with the president to discuss how she should be punished. The men at the table were furious, using words like ‘saboteur’ and ‘treason.’ A couple called for Ellen to be summarily fired, and one hard-liner suggested prison.

In the end, Ellen wasn’t fired; Steve Tolbert stood up for her at the meeting. But she soon found herself sidelined at work. Underlings who used to ask her approval for projects were suddenly going to other midlevel deputies instead. Bit by bit, her duties were given to others. Soon word spread that she was an outside at the ministry, so much so that critics of the government, from both inside and out, people who would never have approached her if she were in good favor, started coming to her office to complain about government policies and corruption.

Her position was now too precarious for her to say much to her superiors, she felt she was living on sufferance and one wrong step would mean her ouster.

Finally, four months into her professional exile, Ellen had had enough. She telephoned a World Bank official whom she had worked with. ‘I think I’m in trouble here,’ she said.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were two global institutions set up in 1944 at the famous meeting in New Hampshire to launch the rebuilding of Europe after WWII. The Bank was now the preeminent global org for development assistance for middle- and low-income countries. It specialized in giving loans and offering training in both the private and public sectors, and it employed a global army of bureaucrats, who learned and then preached the Bank’s preferred prescriptions for economic growth, from structural adjustment to loosening up trade barriers and cracking down on corruption. With its focus on looking for ways to help countries lift themselves up, the Bank was the perfect spot for a midlevel finance bureaucrat who had found herself in trouble for taking her own government to task for squandering its resources.”

“Ellen was still in a romantic relationship with Chris Maxwell and often spent the night with him. Maxwell had proposed to her, and she had thought about it, but she had seen his lightning-quick temper. One afternoon, he got so mad when his cook burned the rice that he threw the hot pot at him. It was at that moment Ellen knew she would not be marrying anyone ever again.”

The Coup’s Origins

“Early in 1979, President Tolbert set in motion the events that would lead to the explosion of April 14 by doing something unthinkable, incomprehensible, almost apocalyptic. He messed with people’s rice.

At least once a day Liberians eat rice. Monday to Friday they eat rice with palm oil in a stew cooked with either cassava leaves, potato greens, or bitter leaf. On Saturday, they eat fufu — a fermented cassava dumpling — with pepper soup filled with fish heads and goat meat and crawfish and chicken and beef, but on Saturday night they’ll be back to eating their tried-and-true jollof rice. On Sunday — because for some reason Liberians don’t eat palm oil on the weekend — they eat rice at lunch in stews of pumpkin or cabbage or collard greens, with beef, chicken, and smoked or dried fish for those who can afford meat, and salt and pepper sauce for those who can’t.

But rice is the staple. Rice is what you give a village family if you’re visiting and want to bring a present. It’s what every Liberian kitchen will have, first and foremost, before bread, before milk, before eggs.

In 1979, when President Tolbert announced a 50% increase in the price of rice, Ellen was busy at the Ministry of Finance, buried under invoices from contractors who were working on the upcoming Organization for African Unity summit in Monrovia.”

“In 1979, at the same time Tolbert was trying to raise the price of rice, Monrovia was busily preparing for the biggest party the country had ever seen: the 1979 meeting of the Org of African Unity. Liberia held the presidency of the OAU, the umbrella org of African countries (except apartheid South Africa). When it was first founded in 1963, the org was dedicated to opposing colonialism and white minority rule; it also viewed itself as an avenue for emerging African countries, most of them freshly independent after centuries of European colonization, to try to have a united voice on the world stage.

The OAU proclaimed the usual lofty principles about development and betterment, but it was in fact a dictators’ club. The main concern of this all-male club was not universal healthcare but the prevention of coups.

It was in the middle of preparations for the summit that President Tolbert announced a 50% increase in the price of rice. His stated rationale was that if he increased the price of imported rice, then Liberians would be forced to gor their own and therefore learn self-sufficiency.

But the average monthly income of Liberians living in the city was around $80. No one had ever bothered to calculate the income of Liberians living up country, it was so little. The increase would raise the price of a bag of rice to $30. Stories surfaced that years earlier Tolbert’s sprawling family had planted thousands of acres of rice on their private farms, and the price increase would undoubtedly result in increased demand for Tolbert family rice.

Amid the growing furor among native Liberians over the planned price increase, the clueless, cash-strapped Tolbert government embarked on a spending spree to spruce up Monrovia for the upcoming OAU meeting. Giant posters of each OAU head of state lined Tubman Blvd, although six of the posters were blank because those countries were in the middle of a coup or a revolution or functionally leaderless. Liberia purchased forty motorcycles to escort the visiting African heads of state; within three days, half of them had been wrecked by their drivers. At Ellen’s desk at the Ministry of Finance, invoice after invoice came in from both local and foreign contractors for OAU-related projects. Many looked fraudulent; all boasted exorbitant price tags that the government was going further into debt to pay. There was the more than $35 million to build Hotel Africa, the instant white elephant resort that would house the delegations. Each head of state got his own villa. There was the brand-new terminal at Robertsfield Airport and street lights to line the 60km road from it into the city. There were the seven cars provided for each of the 53 delegations attending the summit. There was the ocean liner the government rented to house some of the delegates, complete with a floating casino. The final tally would end up at $101 million — 1/3 of the annual Liberian budget.”

“Here native Liberians were being told the price of their daily staple was increasing to an unbearable 40% of their monthly income, a rise that would literally take rice off most family tables. And the government was spending money on OAU amenities and gift bags for bloated delegations?

On Saturday morning, April 14, 1979, encouraged by the political movement of students and professors and by the Progressive Alliance of Liberia, the first part in 100 years to oppose the ruling True Whig party, thousands of people showed up for a protest march. They began assembling in front of PAL headquarters, near the Ministry of Finance, at dawn, although the march wasn’t scheduled to start until 3pm — a march Tolbert had preemptively declared illegal.

Ellen lived in a building across the street. Padding over to her window early that morning, she saw the young people gathering. A large banner hung across the street. ‘Our eyes are open,’ it said, ‘The time of the people has come.’

Nothing like this had ever happened in politically somnolent Liberia. By midmorning 2,000 had gathered; by late morning, there were 10,000. When the march began they moved en masse to the Executive Mansion. Peering out the window at the burgeoning crowd, Ellen felt a mounting sense of trepidation. Something was coming; she could feel it. Everyone in Monrovia, really, could feel it.

Tolbert had deployed police and soldiers along the main march route and placed army tanks at the intersections. The soldiers didn’t fire on the unarmed protesters. But the Monrovia police did. They quickly dispensed with the tear gas they were supposed to be using and started firing bullets indiscriminately into the crowd. People screamed and ran in every direction to escape. The planned demonstration quickly degenerated into a full-fledged riot. By the end of the day, more than fifty protesters were dead; hundreds more were injured. Uncontrolled looting continued over the next two days.

Ellen spent those two days in her apartment. Because she lived close to the epicenter, her phone was constantly ringing with people checking on her. She didn’t go outside; this was not a time to show that red-pumpkin complexion out on the streets.

Tolbert was hysterical; he called a number of the leaders of the protests to the Mansion on that first afternoon and screamed at them, calling them ‘ungrateful,’ ‘agitants’ undeserving of all the benevolence he had shown them. He ordered his justice minister to arrested the ringleaders, which included the minister’s own adopted son. As henchmen were making the arrests, Tolbert called for reinforcements from neighboring Guinea. The Guinean president sent fighter planes to make low passes over Monrovia, terrifying the city.

But Tolbert also found himself on the defensive. The police killing of unarmed protesters drained him of whatever moral authority he might have possessed.”

The Coup

“‘They will kill those people?’ Throughout Congo Monrovia, that question dominated the conversation.

The military trials of Ellen’s colleagues had begun, with highlights broadcast every night. The accused were all well-known familiar men. The thirteen facing the military tribunal were powerful and influential figures from the Tolbert cabinet.

The trials were in a second-floor conference room with bare cement walls. The accused men, most of them shirtless, wore trousers or, in some cases, only their underpants. They sat before a five-member military tribunal.

There were no details of specific charges — the thirteen men were simply accused of treason, ‘rampant corruption,’ and ‘gross violation of human rights.’

Most of the men on trial delivered similar statements. They said the system they had been a part of — that they had established — was unfair. They pleaded not guilty.

Tuesday, April 22, 1980, dawned hazy, hot, and humid. Monrovia was nearing the end of dry season, and the rains that would saturate the earth for the next seven months were on the horizon. The new minister of information called a press conference at the Executive Mansion. ‘Gentlemen of the press,’ he announced, ‘you are all invited to some executions at the Barclay Training Center.’”

Asked who would be executed, he replied, ‘Enemies of the people.’

At BTC, hundreds of people stood or danced on the beach near the four execution poles. Then two large mechanical hole diggers and five additional poles were brought to the site.

Now there were nine execution poles.”

“In Liberia in 1980, women were to be raped, not killed. So many of Ellen’s female friends and relatives were sexually assaulted. Daughters were gang-raped on the beach by drunken soldiers; sisters were assaulted with gun butts; wives were forcibly violated in front of their husbands. The way to best a woman, in those days, was to demean her, not to kill her.

So on April 22, 1980, when Tolbert’s condemned cabinet were packed into a white VW bus and driven to the beach, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not among them. The female minister of finance would spend that afternoon in her mother’s house, uneasily watching the steadily darkening sky as heavy clouds moved in.

Inside the bus, the 13 men huddled and watched the execution poles go up. Close to 100 drunken soldiers clapped each other on the back and waved their machine guns toward the bus. A crowd jostled around the bus and yelled at the 13 inside. They pounded on the windows and kicked at the doors.

Then the soldiers opened the door of the bus and pulled out nine men. They marched them to the poles and tied each to one, their backs facing the ocean, using a single long green rope. From inside the bus, the remaining four men watched.

Soldiers milled around the executions posts jeering at the men, who were tied by their waist. It took half an hour for their commander to get them to move far back enough to make room for the firing squad.

Two of the men fainted before shots were fired. Two of them stared defiantly at the soliders.

The order was given, and a volley of shots rang out. The condemned men, save one, had collapsed onto their poles, dead or dying. One was still standing, looking at the soldiers. Finally, one solider walked up to him and shot him in the face.

The crowd cheered and the soldiers dragged the bodies from the poles, then returned to the bus and collected the remaining four. Shots rang out again.

The soldiers then sprayed all 13 bodies with automatic fire, emptying, and then replacing, their ammunition clips.

That night, Liberians, including Ellen, watched the executions on TV news.”

“The execution of the 13 men had ignited international protest and seemed to have sated the quest for vengeance among Doe’s soldiers. Congo people were lining up at the Interior Ministry to get exit passes, a bureaucratic innovation of the new regime, to leave the country. Many of Ellen’s friends and family were fleeing, including her sister, Jennie, whose husband would have been killed with the 13 if he hadn’t been in Ghana at the time of the coup.

But Ellen wasn’t ready to give up on Liberia. Doe seemed to feel that he had spilled enough blood for the moment. Now, Ellen thought perhaps he would focus on providing opportunities for native Liberians that they had not previously had. Appearing at the Mansion for her session with Doe, she told herself that she could do more to help the new government from the inside than if she ran back to her World Bank cocoon in America.”

“Doe called himself the new head of state, and it would be four more years before he set elections for a new president.

In the meantime, he got to work trying to collect revenue from a tax base where the vast majority didn’t have an income to tax. Doe ordered his new finance minister to print up more money. When the new Liberian dollar arrived on the scene, it featured Doe’s face. The currency, which had been pegged to the U.S. dollar since 1847, took a nosedive, dipping from 1–1 to 25–1. The country stopped paying its international postal dues, so Liberians stopped using the mail. When they wanted to send mail, they found people who were traveling out of the country to hand-carry their letters.”

“Doe went on the radio and announced that plotters to overthrow his rule, led by ‘my dear friend, Thomas Weh-Syen,’ wanted him dead. Weh-Syen wept and professed his innocence: ‘If I die, I will die for nothing. I will never kill Doe.’

Doe chose not to promise the same restraint. After two days of what everyone in Monrovia had assumed were pretrial hearings, Weh-Syen and four others were executed at midnight by firing squad.

The next year, Doe arrested, and then released, several university students who he said were disobeying a ban on political activities.

Still, the outside world was becoming adjusted to Doe and his peculiarities; after all, Africa was populated by strongmen who locked up political enemies. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Seoul and, thus anointed, started referring to himself as Dr. Doe. He continued following the American cold war line, and aid from the U.S. continued to flow, far surpassing the amount sent to Liberia during the Tolbert years. But the economy struggled as the most educated Liberians continued to flee.”

A Political Prisoner

“In Liberia a woman’s place is in the market, selling oranges and potato greens and kola nuts. It is in the hot outdoor kitchen, sweating as she bends over a mortar to pound fermented cassava for fufu. It is in the field, baby strapped to her back as she hacks at the sugarcane stalks that will fetch the money that will pay for this semester’s school fees for her children. And it is on her back in the dirt as one, two, three, four drunk soldiers rape her in front of her crying children.

It is in her lover’s bedroom, sitting on the mattress, shivering in the AC and trying to block out the image of her colleagues who were executed by firing squad on the beach days before. It is in the cabinet room of the Executive Mansion as she tries to stem the nausea that rises when she sees those same executioners discussing the budget she put together as they look for loopholes from which they can extract money.

In Liberia a woman’s place is not in a jail cell.

There are many things Liberian women will tolerate. They accept that it is their burden to shoulder all of the responsibility for keeping their family fed, whether that means farming alone all day or submitting to gang rape as the price that must be paid to keep their children alive. But jail, for some reason, is a step too far.

Before Doe threw Ellen into a jail cell at the Barclay Training Center, she was, to the developing world, just one of many promising, ambitious West African government bureaucrats. But Doe changed all that when he locked her in the post stockade and charged her with sedition. He turned her from a bureaucrat into a global hero.”

“When word spread that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Citibank VP, the former World Bank bureaucrat, the former finance minister of Liberia, and, above all, a woman was now in a Liberian jail cell on political charges, the reaction was swift.

The New York Times began running news stories and editorials about the political prisoners in Liberia. Other newspapers followed suit. Citibank demanded Ellen’s release. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution to block all foreign assistance to Liberia if Doe failed to release all political prisoners. The Reagan administration, under pressure from Congress, temporarily suspended approximately $25 million in aid and made the release of Ellen a requirement to lift the ban.

But it was the women of Liberia whose mobilization would prove most effective. It is ironic, given the epidemic of gang rapes and sexual assaults by drunken soldiers since the 1980 coup, that it took an arrest, not a rape, to bring a storm of female protest. But the refrain on the streets quickly became, ‘No, no, they can’t keep that woman in BTC.’

It is true that in the days after the coup, a handful of women with connections to the Tolbert government had been arrested and taken to BTC. Beyond those initial arrests, the many other atrocities committed against Liberian women usually took place out of the public eye. When the 13-year-old daughters of former Tolbert government ministers were hauled out of their homes, taken to the beach, and gang-raped by Doe’s drunken soldiers, those crimes were not reported; no mother was going to broadcast that her daughter had been raped. When 9-year-old Gio and Mano girls were sodomized in their village by newly promoted generals, the people didn’t run to the police. Why bring additional shame to an already brutalized young girl?

But if Liberian women seemed willing to accept that violent sexual crimes would be committed against them every day, they couldn’t stomach the public crimes.”

“Ellen tried not to appear defiant — this was hard for her — but she was also determined not to be apologetic. She wasn’t really worried yet. During the trial, she had known that she would be found guilty; Doe would have lost face otherwise. But she also believed that once she was found guilty, she would get a slap on the wrist and be sent home.

Then the judge read the sentence: ten years of hard labor at a maximum security prison.

Ellen swallowed. Not a slap on the wrist, then. This was a place so notorious that parents had long used it as a threat to misbehaving children. Deep in the bush and accessible only by air or on foot, it had always been, in essence, a death sentence disguised as a hard labor camp. Prisoners sent there rarely came back. The few visitors allowed over the years reported prisoners so physically disfigured by their treatment they resembled people from the Stone Age.

Stunned, Ellen stared at the judges. She knew that if she went there, she would die.

But the harshness of the sentence would prove to be Doe’s undoing. As soon as the news hit the radio that afternoon, the women’s groups announced they would protest in the streets of Monrovia. Young girls who had never heard of Ellen now began singing songs demanding her freedom. The international pressure increased, and newspaper editorial pages, nongovernmental orgs, and Western governments called on Doe to release her.”

“Ten days after the verdict, the door to her cell opened and a soldier appeared. Doe had caved. Just like that, she was free to go.

But her freedom came at a price. Before releasing Ellen, Doe met with the members of her fledgling political party. ‘Y’all gotta expel her,’ he told them. In exchange for dropping Ellen from the ticket on which she had planned to run as VP, Doe allowed the LAP to register for the upcoming elections. The party leaders quickly acquiesced, releasing a statement condemning her ‘seditious’ activities. The irony is that they abandoned her just as quickly as she had abandoned her Tolbert colleagues after the 1980 coup.

An angry Ellen left BTC on the day of her release. On the same day she got out of prison and found out that she had been dropped from the LAP ticket, Ellen announced that she was going to run anyway — for the Senate.\

Released from jail just three weeks before the elections, Ellen didn’t have a lot of time to campaign. In any case, Doe wasn’t making campaigning easy for opposition candidates. Those not on his ticket were routinely harassed and beaten up by soldiers and subjected to extortion.”

“Two weeks after the elections, Doe was announced the winner. His Special Elections Commission said he eked out 50.9% of the vote. Most Africand despots who stage elections and then declare themselves winners did so by announcing that they had won 90% of the vote. In an uncharacteristic flash of sophistication, Doe knew no one would believe that, so he took only 50.9% — enough for him to win without needing a runoff, but not so excessive that his benefactors in the Reagan administration would cut off aid.

In the parliamentary elections, Doe’s commission announced that his party had taken 51 of the 64 seats in the House. In the Senate, Doe’s party had won all but five seats. One was Ellen’s.

Sitting with some of her friends at home as they listened to the announcement on the radio, Ellen felt her stomach tighten at the news. A few hours later, an election official came by with an even more stark number: Ellen was the highest vote-getter in the Senate.

Having inadvertently turned her into a cult hero, Doe knew that a win for Ellen, with her international finance bona fides, would give his fraudulent elections a sheen of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, Ellen refused to cooperate. She would not her Senate seat, she announced, because the election results were fraudulent. She and the other four opposition candidates who won Senate seats would boycott.

Doe was furious. So was the Reagan administration, which, eager to move on now that the elections were over, urged Ellen to get on board as well. The assistant secretary of state told a skeptical U.S. congressional subcommittee that the Liberian elections hadn’t been so bad. He even praised Doe for claiming only 50.9% of the vote, adding that such a modest win was ‘unheard of in the rest of Africa, where incumbent rulers normally claim victories of 95–10%.’”

“27 days after the election, on the morning of November 27, 1985, Thomas Quiwonkpa returned home to Liberia. The popular former army chief and famous ‘conscience’ of Doe had fled the country two years before, but recently rumors claimed he had flown to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he was planning to mount a coup against the Doe regime.

Quiwonkpa had reportedly expressed outrage that Doe had put Ellen in jail. ‘Why de man go jail de woman? I wi free her.’ Although Doe himself was forced to free Ellen, Quiwonkpa’s words would come back to haunt her.

Early that November morning, Quiwonkpa and 24 heavily armed men slipped over the Sierra Leonean border into Liberia, where their operation immediately ran into trouble when, in an exchange of fire with Liberian border guards, Quiwonkpa’s logistics officer was shot and killed. The rest of Quiwonkpa’s men continued on to Monrovia, but now they were launching their coup without a map of the operation or one of their most important generals.

In Monrovia they seized the ELBC radio station and began urging soldiers to join them against Doe. Residents woke up that morning to a friendly male voice on the radio announcing that ‘patriotic forces under the command of General Quiwonkpa had toppled the Doe regime’: ‘Our forces have completely surrounded the city.’ What the voice didn’t say was that those forces were very small in number and were counting on the Liberian Army to abandon Doe and join their former commanding general.

‘We decided to take the ultimate gamble in the tasks of national liberation,’ Quiwonkpa said at one point. ‘You shall have free and fair elections and a democratic society. You shall regain your self-respect and human dignity, which have been abused by Samuel Doe.’ The radio voice even read a list of names to whom Quiwonkpa would soon be turning over control of the country.

On hearing that Doe had been toppled, the city erupted, with people dancing and cheering in the streets in unrestrained jubilation. Pictures of Doe were stripped from walls, and demonstrators carried huge posters with photos of Quiwonkpa.

The mood quickly soured when, a few hours later, a different male voice was heard on the radio. Doe was broadcasting from the Executive Mansion.

‘The coup has failed.’

Ellen had been careening around the streets of Monrovia celebrating with a friend, happily trying to figure out what was going on, when the second announcement came over the car radio. ‘Quiwonkpa is not man enough to enter the Mansion,’ Doe declared, ‘I am still the commander in chief of the armed forces and the head of state.’

Ellen and her friend looked at each other in horror. ‘They see us on the road, they wi kill us,’ she said. Quickly, the two concocted a scheme. A former police director had just died; they would go to his house and pretend they were there to comfort the grieving family. Then they’d go home, and if anyone stopped them to ask what they were about, they’d say they had come out to offer their condolences to that family. It worked, and Ellen made it home.

Late in the evening, a Jeep roared into her mother’s yard and Doe’s soldiers poured out and surrounded the house, shooting wildly.

Looking at her frail mother, who had dropped to her knees and started praying, Ellen knew she couldn’t let the soldiers enter the house. Quickly, she walked out into the yard. ‘I know y’all came for me,’ she told the soldiers, ‘I wi go wi you if you leave my ma lone.’ And she got in the Jeep.

Ellen knew she was in serious trouble. For one thing, she was a member of Jackson Doe’s party, whom Quiwonkpa had proclaimed the rightfully elected president. Seocnd, Quiwonkpa had said that when he returned to Liberia he planned to free Ellen. Third, there was a copy of a speech of hers that Quiwonkpa had signed — what if someone found it? Fourth, while she hadn’t planned to take an active role in the coup, she had heard rumors of it, and she certainly would have allied herself with Quiwonkpa had he been successful. Fifth, she’d danced in the celebration that very morning.

So yes, she was in trouble. Why the hell hadn’t the damn men secured Doe before going on the radio? Ellen thought.

‘Take us to Jackson Doe house,’ the soldiers demanded.

‘I’nt know where he living oh,’ Ellen lied. The man was probably already marked for death. She wasn’t going to speed the process by leading the soldiers straight to his door.

Another Jeep pulled up to them, and the vehicle she was in quickly pulled over. The reaction was so swift that she knew whoever was in the second Jeep was a higher authority.

‘We coming from Schiefflin. We got instructions to kill her there,’ said the officer in the second Jeep.

Ellen was pushed out of the car, one young soldier pulled back his leg to kick her, but she quickly jumped out of the way. She was bundled into the backseat of the second Jeep, pressed on either side by soldiers.

As they drove toward the barracks, the soldiers barraged her with verbal abuse. One took a match from his pocket, lit it, and held it close to her hair. A few minutes later, another soldier grabbed her hand and pointed at her gold ring. Saying, ‘You gwen die, wha you need ring for?’ he pulled the ring off her finger.

Ellen was in a preternaturally calm state that sometimes takes over when people are in absolute danger. She knew only too well what was coming: a lone woan, surrounded by drunken soldiers taking her to an isolated barracks outside of town.

It was dusk when the Jeep rumbled through the Schiefflin gates, but instead of going straight to the barracks, the driver veered away and drove to the beach. ‘This where de grave at,’ jeered one of the soldiers crammed in the back with her. ‘This where we killing you.’

The driver spun the Jeep in a big circle in the sand, then headed back to the barracks, to a small building that held only two cells. They led Ellen toward a tiny dank cell, next to a cell with a crush of fifteen or so men.”

“The soldiers returned to Ellen’s cell, excited, high-spirited, and mean. ‘Your time coming,’ they taunted her. ‘Ehn you want humbug our Pape?’

‘You dry, red, funky woman!’

‘Who do you think you are?’

Ellen sat in the corner of the fetid cell, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips moving silently as she prayed. Would they rape her before they killed her?

Hours passed. Outside, the soldiers drank and became even rowdier. Then, just past midnight, one soldier walked up to her cell, stood at the bars, and stared at her.

Several minutes passed in silence. Then he said, ‘I’m going to fuck you.’

He opened the cell door, and Ellen rose to her feet, heart pounding.

But just as the soldier was entering her cell, a voice behind him said, ‘As you were.’ The soldier dropped his hands.

‘Retreat,’ said the voice.

The soldier closed the cell door, locked it, and moved away.

Her savior stepped forward into the light. He was slightly older than the others, in his midtwenties, with beautiful dark skin and a serious face. Looking at him, Ellen wanted to cry.

‘They say you Gola?’ he asked her.

‘My pa Gola,’ she replied.

‘Say something in Gola.’

‘Eee-seh.’

‘Where your pa’town?’

‘Julejuah,’ she said.

Her rescuer stared at her for what felt like forever. Finally, he said, ‘Okay, I will stay here tonight. Nobody will humbug you.’

So on that night, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not raped.

But someone else was. A young Gio girl, who had also been captured and brought to Schiefflin, was gang-raped by soldiers there in the early hours of the morning, as Ellen huddled in her cell. Gio and Mano were rivals of the Krah, and Quiwonkpa was Gio. Whether Ellen’s would-be rapist took part as well, she would never know. After brutalizing the girl, the soldiers brought her, naked and crying hysterically, to Ellen’s cell, and pushed her in.

She looked to be around 19–20. She was bleeding and her eyes were wild with fear. Jumping up, Ellen put her arms around her and lowered her onto the floor. In the corner, the two rocked back and forth, clutching each other. Slowly, the girl’s cries softened. Her naked body started to tremble.

Leaving her new cellmate for a moment, Ellen went up to the bars. There were a few soldiers milling around, alongside the one who had rescued her.

‘Aye man, y’all think about your ma them,’ Ellen said, her voice shaking.

The soldiers looked at her. She tried again.

‘Think about y’all sisters them.’

Still nothig.

‘I beg y’all, at least please bring lapa or something for the child to wear.’

Finally, one of the men left and brought back a piece of cloth, and Ellen helped the girl cover herself. For the rest of the night, the two huddled side by side. They did not sleep, just sat and rocked back and forth as the minutes ticked away until dawn, when they came for Ellen.”

“Little girls do not come out of the womb vowing to become activists for female power. They don’t spend their childhood thinking about how they will repair the indignities, large and small, that bleed women daily.

It’s a series of things that multiply and turn ordinary women into movements of female determination. You’re living your life, sweeping floors at Rennebohm Drug Store in Madison, Wisconsin, when your husband storms in to yell at you in front of your white boss lady. You’re huddling with your sons inside your house at night, wondering what catastrophe awaits you, while that same husband sits in his parked car outside for hours. You’re stunned by the violent shock of a hand slapping your face, delivered by the man who promised to love, honor, and cherish you till death do you part.

You feel the warm, wet skin of a brutalized, naked, hysterical young woman as she crouches in the corner, bleeding, after being savaged by the men who swore an oath to protect Liberia and her people.”

“Finally, the Jeep arrived at the Mansion, and Ellen’s stomach tightened. This was it.

The head of Doe’s Executive Mansion guard walked up to the Jeep and looked at Ellen. After a long silence he asked, ‘Why you making all this trouble in this country?’

In a daze, Ellen repeated her now stock answer. ‘I not making no trouble.’ Even in her fear of what was coming, she was not giving in. She had witnessed Doe’s brutality firsthand. A political compromise was out of the question. Taking that Senate seat would mean sanctioning what those soldiers had done to that Gio girl at the barracks.

He sighed. He seemed weary. ‘We all one people here. Why we fighting this way?’

He turned to the lieutenant. ‘You can’t take her to the president. We know what will happen if you carry her to him.’

After a pause, he ordered an alternative: ‘Carry her to BTC.’

But as the Jeep started to pull away, he stopped them. He looked at the lieutenant. ‘Tell them I said don’t hurt her. Just put her in prison. Don’t do nothing to her. On my command.’

Intense relief flooded Ellen as the Jeep turned around and headed back up the hill, away from the Executive Mansion, finally turning left onto Capital Bypass. She stared unseeingly out of the window as they passed the Temple of Justice, then Boozy Quarters, before the car turned left into the BTC gates.

She was going to live. Colonel Smith had seen to that.’”

“Even after Quiwonkpa was killed, Doe’s soldiers didn’t rest. They cut up his corpse like meat and paraded the pieces through Monrovia.

Doe launched his ethnic retaliation campaign, focusing his efforts on the Gio and Mano people of Nimba County, laying waste to entire villages, in a purge that set the stage for the civil war that would engulf Liberia five years later.

Ever since the so-called Congo people had come in 1822, the importance of ethnic background had hovered over Liberia’s people, differentiating the haves from the have-nots. The 1980 coup had reversed the status of the Congo people and country people, but only briefly; after Doe’s initial purge, the Congo people still had enough money and education to either escape to America or stay in Liberia enjoying the same — though slightly muted — lifestyle they had enjoyed in the past.

But now one’s ethnic background was a matter of life and death. Quiwonkpa was Gio and supported by the Mano. Doe was Krahn. The question ‘Wha’ your tribe?’ became the first thing Doe’s Krahn soldiers asked when they stopped young men on the street. The wrong answer meant the difference between continuing on your way and being shot in the head.

Other members of Liberia’s 28 ethnic groups were desperate to show they had no dog in this fight. When stopped by soldiers, they spoke Bassa or Kpelle. Gio boys stammered to speak a different language, desperate to prove they weren’t Gio. It worked for some; others were hauled out of the backs of pickups and buses and shot on the spot.”

“On January 6, 1986, Samuel Doe was again sworn in as Liberia’s president. As a gesture toward reconciliation — belated, of course, as he had already killed thousands of people — he released 18 political prisoners who had been arrested during the attempted coup. But not Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Instead, she was formally charged with sedition, a crime that carried the death penalty.

Once again, her international contacts sprang into action. In the U.S., Jennie appeared on TV news reports to talk about her courageous sister, imprisoned unjustly. The U.S. Congress again pushed the Reagan administration to threaten to cut off aid if she was not released, and newspaper editorials rallied behind her.

On the Liberian airwaves, too, there were broadcasts about the women — a woman, my people — who was sitting in Monrovia Central Prison because of politics. All the broadcasts carried the Doe administration’s version of events: that Ellen had been plotting to overthrow the government. But few people believed that. All they saw was a tiny, feisty woman, losing weight by the day, imprisoned by the government over ‘ashtray’ — Liberian English for ‘nonsense.’

But as Ellen lost weight on the anemic prison rations, she grew in stature in the eyes of Liberian women and girls.”

“Here was a woman fighting for Liberia, Grace-tee thought. Here was a woman unafraid to stand up to Doe. All day she talked about Ellen to anyone who would listen. ‘Why is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in jail?’ she asked. It was a question repeated around town by young girls and marketeers and Holy Ghost women, on the streets of Monrovia, in newspapers around the world, and most significant for Doe, by the American officials who wrote the checks that kept his government afloat.”

“Finally, after nine months, Doe had had enough.

On a soggy July day in 1986, soldiers arrived at Monrovia Central Prison and told Ellen to get in a pickup with other political prisoners. As suddenly as she was taken into custody, she was being freed.”

The Civil War

“Ellen, now 51, threw herself into her work with the expat Liberian dissidents in an org that called itself the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia. As Taylor’s ragtag forces trained in Libya, the big question among the ACDL was whether they should provide financial support for what was clearly going to be an armed insurgency against Doe.

Ellen argued in favor of violence. She invoked Malcolm X; his refusal to embrace nonviolence had scared white America into listening to MLK Jr. Her argument came with the powerful backing of her cult hero status. She had been imprisoned by Doe, had been sentenced to Bella Yalla, had won and then refused to take a Senate seat because the elections were fraudulent. People paid attention when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf talked.

The ACDL decided to back Taylor. Soon they were sending him $10k.”

“On December 24, 1989, Charles Taylor and 170 insurgents crossed the Ivorian border into Liberia, launching Liberia’s civil war. It would last 14 years and snuff out 200,000 lives.

The ramifications of that war still aren’t fully known. Who can say, three decades later, what lives would have been led by the children who were turned into soldiers at the age of eight, drugged up on amphetamines and marched into the bushes on orders to kill, maim, and dismember? Who can know what demons haunt the dreams of the former child combatant, teddy bear backpack strapped over his shoulders, who sprayed a village just outside Monrovia with his machine gun while the severed head of his boyhood friend lay on the asphalt beside him, broiling under the hot sun? Or the woman who fought and screamed while her two boys were taken away by drunken rebels clad in Halloween masks, who then threw her to the ground, mounted and raped her, all the while keeping their masks on?

Almost three decades after the start of the Civil War, Liberia is still a country of the walking wounded, one of those places where every single person of a certain age has a war story to tell, a story so grisly that your stomach turns and you want to vomit. How do people come back from that?

But if the ramifications still aren’t known, they certainly weren’t foreseen back in 1989.”

“Doe sought to reassure the population that he still retained control of the country. But he also dispatched two well-armed battalions to Nimba to quash the invasion by attacking civilian Gio and Mano people there. The soldiers moved quickly and brutally against villages in their path, killing, looting, raping, and terrorizing. One woman reported that Doe’s soldiers wrapped her mother in a gas-soaked mattress and burned her to death.”

“Doe’s forces made no distinction between fighters and civilians; the bodies of men, women, and children littered the roadsides, as Doe’s soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on one village after another. Terrified villagers fled into the bush and over the borders, beginning a displacement and a refugee crisis that would last more than a decade.

The Liberian leader’s excessive response would seal his own fate. Taylor’s rebels saw their numbers swell, at first by hundreds, then thousands, as surviving Gio and Mano youths, bent on revenge, joined. Eventually, Taylor would recruit children kidnapped from terrified parents, but in the early months, hatred of Doe was so strong he didn’t need the extra help. However, unlike in the early days of the invasion, when he commanded a (relatively) tight group of trained men, he was now the head of a revenge-obsessed army over which he had no control. Or, at least, that is what he claimed when word started getting out about atrocities committed by his National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

Yet Liberians continued to give Taylor the benefit of the doubt, as reports of NPFL atrocities multiplied. There were other warning signs about Liberia’s new conquerer, including the bizarre practice among his soldiers of wearing wedding gowns and wigs — juju to protect them in battle. But because Doe’s soldiers were retaliating tenfold for every atrocity committed by the rebels, the fog of war made it easy for Taylor to disguise his own misdeeds under cover of Doe’s bigger ones.

For both sides, the enemy was less the opposing army than a civilian population that had to yield for victory to be secured. The result was a living nightmare for virtually all ordinary Liberians.

A young office worker who was feeding her two-year-old son heard yelling outside and saw a young boy who had been hawking gas and was now being harassed by a group of Doe’s soldiers in her front yard. With businesses shuttering because of the war, all Liberians had become market women, selling whatever goods they could muster on the side of the road. The young boy was offering gas by the gallon in plastic milk jugs. Gas hawkers got their supplies from filling stations on the outskirts of town, then peddled the fuel in the heart of the city. The boy, who looked to be around 13, wanted $2 for a gallon. Minus the dollar he had spent on the gas, this meant he could buy rice and dried fish at a time when food was becoming increasingly scarce.

Doe’s soldiers, barreling into her front yard, had other ideas. ‘They wanted his gas,’ she recalled later. ‘He wouldn’t give it to them. So they took it.’

Taking the boy’s gas wasn’t enough, however. One of the soldiers grabbed a grenade, pulled out the pin, and threw it at the young gas hawker. It detonated right in front of him, blowing into pieces in her front yard.

The force of the blast knocked her over, and shrapnel rained across her front porch, accompanied by the smell of smoke and burning flesh. Inside the house, her two-year-old was screaming hysterically. His shoulder, hit by a piece of metal, was bleeding. Sobbing and bleeding herself, she crawled across the floor to her child. She grabbed a piece of cloth to try to stem the blood from his shoulder while her eyes darted around wildly, wondering if it was safe to go outside to try to get to a hospital. In the upside-down world of the Liberian Civil War, the answer was yes, it was safe, because Doe’s soldiers, having blown up an adolescent boy for $2, had driven away.”

“The atrocities continued unabated. All over Monrovia, headless bodies littered the sidewalks and streets, and heads with no bodies piled up at one end of the roadway at the airfield.

By now, everyone knew: there were no good guys in this war. Doe was gone, but the two men left vying for the presidency were just as bad, if not worse.”

“The fear of a potential rival gripped Taylor, and, in this case, it was a fear based on very real facts. By all accounts, Jackson Doe — not Samuel Doe — had won the 1985 election. So he could be considered the rightful president if Taylor ever succeeded in getting rid of Samuel Doe.

Jackson Doe had crossed over to Taylor’s side in the summer of 1990, led by joyous Taylor fighters. ‘There was a big festival in the middle of the war to celebrate that a leader of our people had been saved; a leader who [Samuel] Doe wanted dead was saved.’ Jackson Doe was then escorted to Taylor. As it turned out, he was [then] assassinated on Taylor’s orders — hacked to death.”

“Ellen had advocated on Taylor’s behalf, had submerged her own suspicions that he was not the savior the country needed. And she had been spectacularly wrong.

Jackson Doe was dead. Hundreds more Liberians were dead; thousands more would be joining them. Ellen had backed the wrong man.

It was still only the first year of what would turn out to be a 14-year war. Many more Liberians had yet to be killed.

And Ellen? Safe in her perch in America, she had started to campaign against Taylor.”

“Besides stocking up on weapons, Taylor used the two years of the cease-fire to take on more children for his army. Whether you call it recruitment, abduction, or rescue, the result was always the same: young, uneducated, and orphaned youngsters fought in the army of the man they called Pappy.

A reporter wrote of the young fighter he met who emerged from the bush to greet him when his car was stopped on the road to Taylor’s headquarters. The young boy told of how Taylor’s forces had slaughtered his entire family, leaving him alone. ‘Then,’ he wrote, ‘in the next thought, without irony or self-consciousness,’ he added: ‘But I joined them because they are the best.’

Others had more horrific stories to tell of being forced at gunpoint to kill their own parents, and then being dragooned into Taylor’s army; of watching as their mothers and sisters were raped by six, seven, eight drunken rebels, who then slapped them on the back and dragged them into the forest to fight alongside them.

In October 1994, Taylor’s forces entered the Bong County town of Zoweeta wearing red cloth masks over their faces. They massacred dozens of civilians, men, women, and children. 17 of the fighters raped a young woman named Rebecca. She died after the 17th man violated her — raped to death.

Some of the children who weren’t killed that day were forced to join the rebels. Months and years later, the ultimate breakdown of society occurred as orphans who had watched beloved family members killed went to work for, and professed to love, the man responsible for their deaths.”

“During the campaign, Jimmy Carter, there to observe the election, visited Ellen and asked if she would support Taylor if he won, since it was pretty clear to everyone except Ellen that Taylor was the leading candidate. She wouldn’t entertain the possibility, leaving Carter to describe her in his report as truculent: ‘Under our questioning about accepting the results of an honest election, she only became more vehement.’

To outsiders it seemed obvious that Liberians should support Ellen. But inside Liberia, a strange dynamic had taken hold. For all the death and destruction he had heaped on Liberia, Taylor somehow had the support of a great many people. Those supporters — including the masses of young boys singing and dancing for their Pappy in the streets — adopted the unofficial slogan ‘He kill my ma, he kill my pa, I will vote for him.’ To most Westerners, that made little sense, but to Liberians, it was a perfectly understandable extension of Darwin. Taylor had proven to be the strongest at war. Beyond that was a belief even among people who weren’t his supporters that after seven years of civil war, he deserved his shot at the presidency. ‘He spoil Liberia — so let him fix it.’”

“In July 1997, Taylor won 75% of the vote, crushing his nearest competitor, Ellen, who got around 10%.”

“Taylor may have won the presidency, but Ellen would do her damnedest to see to it that he couldn’t do anything with his prize.

She soon moved to Abidjan, where she set up a consultancy. From there she could keep a close eye on Liberia and work to undermine Taylor. It turned out to be an easy task.

Ellen understood that, after seven years in the interior away from his prized Monrovia, Taylor was expecting that the country’s treasury would finally be opened to him. He anticipated a Marshall Plan for Liberia, with a big influx of foreign money to help rebuild his broken country. And surely Liberia’s mammoth $3 billion in debt would be forgiven? The U.S. would come to the rescue? The World Bank? The IMF?

Not if Ellen could help it. The only way Taylor could possibly get additional IMF loans or World Bank aid was if Ellen — Liberia’s emissary to the global financial world — backed him. She did not, helping to create the ultimate catch-22 for Taylor: [he couldn’t do anything] without international aid to help Liberia get out of its financial trench — the country hadn’t had electricity or running water in years.”

The gentlemen’s agreement that ‘women were for raping, not killing’ was observed by Liberia’s military men. From Abijdan, Ellen spoke loudly to anyone in the international community who would listen: Taylor was leading Liberia to disaster.

But nothing would help make her case more forcefully than Taylor’s own foray into the Sierra Leone civil war. Less than two years after he’d launched his own war in 1990, armed men led by a former Sierra Leonean army officer started an insurrection. From the start, it was backed by Taylor and fought just like NPFL rebels did: child soldiers were forced to rape and kill their own mothers, civilians were killed. Except the RUF used even more imaginative tactics, including cutting off the hands and feet of their opponents.

As president, the diamonds Taylor got from weapons sales to these rebels would help fund his already failing administration. While the West was willing to overlook atrocities against his own population — these were internal affairs — the international community wasn’t willing to overlook cross-border outrages.”

“Throughout all of these blood-soaked years of horror, it was the women of these countries who suffered the most. There are, after all, far worse things than dying. Dying is easy: the clap-clap of a machine gun, the slicing of a cutlass, the nothingness that comes after. Living can be harder. To live with the image of your children being dragged away, knowing they will become killers and will then be killed themselves. To be raped so often by teenagers wearing Halloween masks that you can’t close your eyes without imagining a bewigged monstrosity looming above you. And to see your rapist take off his mask and reveal his face — and that face is your son’s.

In Liberia, the war turned every woman into a market woman. Rich and poor, elites and native women, educated and illiterate, the overwhelming reaction of the Liberian women to all that was going on around them was to make market. Whatever functional economy existed in Liberia during those black years existed because of the market women.

Women with college degrees began collecting kola nuts to sell on the side of the road. They made caustic soda soap, placed the bars in buckets atop their head, and walked from village to village. Some, like Lusu Sloan, a widow with three children, braved bullets, machine-gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and the penises of insane marauders to walk through the bush, from Monrovia to the Guinean border, to get sugar and flour and bouillon cubes to bring back to the markets in the starved and wasted capital city.

The market women had carried the country on their backs for years, making market through war. But now they realized that market alone was not going to be enough. Reality had become untenable.

In Monrovia, market women wearing white T-shirts began holding peace demonstrations. Some gathered in front of the Executive Mansion, looking terrified but determined. They demanded that Taylor attend peace talks in Ghana.

For days on end, the women occupied the large expanse of no man’s land in front of Payne Airport. Bernice Freeman, whose pregnant cousin had been murdered by Doe’s forces 13 years earlier, joined the women at ‘Airfield,’ the name Liberians gave the expanse. Wearing a white T-shirt over her loose skirt, Bernice knelt down in the sandy dirt and joined the other women to pray for peace.

The women wore no adornments to beautify themselves — just the white T-shirts and the loose clothes. They sang, they fasted, and they prayed. The Holy Ghost women moved in and out of the group, leading prayers and chants and songs. The days turned into weeks, and the women still came, every day, to Airfield.”

“On the floor outside the negotiating hall, 200 Liberian women staged a sit-down protest, continuing their demand that no one leave until they reached a peace deal. When one of the LURD warriors tried to leave the hall, the group blocked him. When he kicked at the women, Nigeria’s former president became furious. ‘I dare you,’ he told him. ‘If you were a real man, you wouldn’t be killing your people. But because you’re not a real man that is why these women will treat you like boys. I dare you to leave this hall until we have negotiated a peace with these women.’

And still, the fighting continued.

As LURD rebels advanced swiftly into Monrovia, shelling buildings and spraying bullets, women and children desperately sought shelter. ‘Anywhere we go, they say place full,’ one told a reporter, ‘We don’t have anywhere to go.’

Finally, after eight weeks of haggling in Accra while Monrovia burped, the warring sides reached a peace agreement. All combatants would disarm. West African peacekeeping forces would enter Liberia and would be replaced in a few months by a UN peacekeeping mission, complete with international troops. A transitional government would be set up, whose job would be to pave the way to democratic elections in Liberia. Taylor would leave. Nigeria, after years of losing its own blood and human treasure in Liberia, stepped forward and offered him a safe haven.”

“The real battle would be coming soon. The men had ruled the war. Now the women were getting ready to rule the peace.”

Post-War Transition

“From the beginning, the men put up a fight. In Accra, it was time to choose an interim chairman for the transitional government. The person elected would be critical to positioning the country for real democratic elections, the kind in which the motto of one of the candidates isn’t ‘You killed my ma, you killed my pa, I will vote for you.’ Whoever won the position would have two years to rule Liberia, a critical period to begin the job of turning child soldiers, whose entire lives had been a close study in abandonment, violence, depravity, and survival, into people again. Whoever won the position would be barred from running in the presidential elections in 2005, but the winner would get a two-year window to begin dragging Liberia from the abyss to something resembling a functional civilization.

Ten men and one woman put their names forward for the position. Ellen won the most votes — 33, while the second place finisher got 18. But for women, apparently, it is not enough to win the popular vote.

After the vote, representatives of the factions declared themselves an ‘electoral college’ and asked for the names of the three highest vote-getters. From those three, they would choose an interim president. Meanwhile, in the hallways outside, businesspeople wanting to curry favor with a new Liberian government baldly offered cash to the various power players.

That night, Ellen huddled with one of her advisers and came up with a plan: she would join the cash-for-votes practice and would bribe one of the warlords to talk the rest of the men into pushing for her; she was the top vote-getter after all, she reasoned.

A LURD chief was summoned to Ellen’s makeshift HQ in Accra, where she gave him $10,000 in cash that she got from a wealthy friend, in return for his vote. The warlord took the money and left to attend the meeting.

In African politics — like politics in the Americas, Europe, and everywhere else — there are always two worlds. One is the aspirant world, where leaders talk about good governance and anti-corruption and spout platitudes about the importance of staying clean and walking the high road. In some places, maybe Sweden, some even manage to do so. And then there is the real world, where aspirant leaders — even one who cut her teeth at the World Bank and the UN — offer cash under the table to a warload for his vote.

Ellen played in both worlds.

A businessman was selected as interim president the next day. The men making the selection said that he was politically neutral and therefore acceptable to all warring parties.

The men had won the bottle, but they had set themselves up to lose the war. Ellen wouldn’t get first crack at trying to turn her blood-soaked home back into a country again, but the coast was now clear for her to run for president in 2005.”

“Liberia in 2004 was a postapocalyptic place slowly awakening to the possibility that the war might actually be behind it. But its population was ravaged. In the streets, young women wearing long wigs, with no family, no prospects, and no training, patrolled the side of the road hoping to be picked up by men with money — UN bureaucrats, NGO workers, returning Congo men — anyone, really, willing to pay the price of lunch and maybe a trip to the hair stylist for a cheap thrill. Girls as young as 14 were being squired around town by 70-year-old men, former and present government ministers, who saw nothing coercive about exploiting teenage war orphans with no other means of support. At a wedding reception, a mature man of means and former government minister bragged that his current ‘girlfriend’ was getting too old for him. ‘She just turned 17,’ he said, laughing. People around him shook their heads in a ‘boys will be boys’ way.

Ellen’s Election

“Gayflor barely knew Ellen, but that didn’t matter. Gayflor had lived in Liberia throughout the Taylor and Doe years. She knew what she wanted — and more important, what she did not want — for her country in the years to come.

As the head of the Ministry of Gender, Gayflor’s job was supposed to be about helping women and children get access to healthcare, school feeding programs (in a postwar country with hardly any schools), antimalaria drugs, maternal support groups, rape support groups, and more. But Gayflor did not view her job that way. She had decided that all those nice programs for women would be available only if there was a woman at the top to supply them. So she decided her job as minister of gender was to get a woman elected president. And on the morning of May 2, she was not happy with the news she had just gotten from the National Elections Commission: of the 100,000 Liberians who had registered to vote in the first week of the month-long registration drive, only 15% were women.

Who was registering instead? Former combatants — from LURD, Taylor’s NPFL, and all the other armed groups. Gayflor was appalled.”

“The men were holding mass rallies to urge their supporters to vote. But market women didn’t have time to go to mass rallies. They were busy trying to make a living. Gayflor and Cooper realized they were going to have to try a different strategy.

Quickly they organized a group to use the radio stations to plead: ‘Women, oh women! Y’all gotta register to vote.’ They fanned out to the Monrovia markets, corralling the women who had set up shop to sell potato greens, kola nuts, soap, and bread.

At first, some of the women balked; they had their wares or their babies to tend. But Cooper was ready for them. ‘You selling your bitterballs and your okra?’ she asked. ‘We will mind it for you. Go register.’ And young aides dispatched by Cooper and Gayflor tended their stalls for the women while they left to register. For young mothers who said they couldn’t register because they had children to mind, Harris had nannies at the ready. ‘Bring your baby,’ she said. ‘Let me hold your baby. Go register.’

A young woman whose baby had died from malnourishment during the Taylor years joined them. She remained haunted by the loss of her three-year-old. And that despair mixed with a blinding fury when she thought about the elections. ‘Those men want put some grona boy in the chair who don’t know what he doing? So we can go back to war again? No.’ Her thought process was straightforward: ‘Women will not go get boyfriend. Women now bury plenty of her children them. I voting for woman.’ So she joined the women, going door to door, to get women in Monrovia registered to vote.

But it wasn’t enough to register the women in Monrovia. The Liberian bush loomed, large, imposing, and filled with village women. ‘We got to get out of the city because if we don’t do something up country, we are doomed,’ Gayflor said.

They bought bullhorns and scattered their troops along the road to Cape Mount, to Gborpolu, to Margibi, to Gbarnga, all the way to Nimba, along the traditional pathways used by market women to bring their wares into the cities. ‘Women, oh, women!’ they yelled into the bullhorns. ‘Go register.’

Up country, Gayflor asked the officials at the local registration office to set up mobile registration stands in the villages deep in the bush, to take the registration process to the people. They agreed. So she and Cooper and other women activists walked three, five, seven hours into villages deep in the bush with their mobile stands, to register women to vote. Men came to register as well, and Gayflor and Cooper didn’t turn them away. But they focused on the women.

It was almost like a party at times, the women dancing and singing behind their leaders, who bellowed into their bullhorns for all to hear as they entered each village: ‘Women, oh women! Come register.’”

“1.5 million Liberians out of the country’s 3 million population had registered to vote. 51% of the registered voters were women.”

“The Iron Lady never got tired. She decided early on that she would visit each of Liberia’s 15 counties. The country is only the size of Ohio, but with a few exceptions, there are no paved roads outside of Monrovia. And there are very few dirt roads. And the dirt roads that do exist are barely passable during the dry season, being postmarked with crater-size holes and bridges held together with car parts. In the rainy season, most became unusable.

And yet Ellen insisted on using them. ‘I have to be the show,’ she told her aides. She drove all night and campaigned during the day. They were long, painful drives, with her convoy going excruciatingly slowly to navigate the potholes, the mud, and the pools of rainwater that collected in the middle of the road. Sometimes Ellen, along with everyone else in her convoy, got out and pushed the cars through the mud. Where there were no roads, she took canoes — sometimes paddling herself — to cross a river to visit a village.

Everywhere she went up country, Ellen was confronted with stories of survival. Everyone she met, in fact, was a survivor with a story to tell of escape from some sort of wartime atrocity. She heard of entire families who died of malaria because they couldn’t get drugs during the war; of people who fled into the bush to escape one militia or another and who survived by eating rats; of girls who were turned into sex slaves and given to various rebel groups, made to serve an entire corps, until they inevitably got pregnant and swollen and were then abandoned to have their babies alone in the bush.

With only seven weeks before the election, Ellen certainly could not go everywhere. That’s when her growing army of market women came into play. From village to village, from hut to hut, they traveled to campaign for her.

One was chatting with some market women one afternoon, trying to convince them to vote for Ellen, when she noticed some boys laughing nearby, waving something white. She looked closer. The boys had taken women’s panties, smeared the crotches with tomato paste, and were waving them at women. Instead of making them cower in embarrassment, however, the heckling only pissed them off. ‘You know what?’ one of the undecided women told her, looking at the boys in disgust. ‘We will vote. Don’t worry, we will vote.’”

“The men fell in line behind George Weah and then complained that the women supporting Ellen were sexist.

It was a remarkable display. Given the choice between a football player with no credible college education, but two fantastic goals against Bayern and Verona, and a Harvard-educated development expert, the top male presidential candidates who fell short in the runoff, with one exception, endorsed the football player.

Years later, one explained his rationale. He endorsed the former football player not because he thought Weah was more qualified to be president than Ellen but because he knew he had a better chance of rising to a top position in a Weah government than a Sirleaf government. ‘I knew that I could have more influence with Weah,’ he explained in a 2013 interview, ‘whereas Ellen Johnson already had lots of people backing her who were just like me, so my voice would be muted.’

Weah, honing his messaging explaining why he, and not the Old Lady, should run Liberia, settled on an ‘educated people failed’ theme. ‘You know book, you not know book, I will vote for you,’ became the Weah runoff slogan. Liberia had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, so an illiterate population would identify with a president who dropped out of school, right?

Wrong. What the men who endorsed that strategy failed to realize is how much that very idea was angering market women. Those women may not have been educated themselves, but they worked day and night in the fields and the market stalls to send their children to school. Now the men were telling them education wasn’t important?

Just as the men fell in behind Weah, the women fell in behind Ellen. It didn’t happen all at once. Women political candidates had appeared all over the ballot in the elections, running for Senate and House, on the same ticket as Weah and Tubman and Sherman. One was even a vice presidential candidate.

But once the time came for campaigning for the runoff, those allegiances peeled away even the women who were staunch members of parties that opposed Ellen’s Unity Party abandoned the men and took up the now familiar mantra ‘Vote for woman!’

Door-to-door the market women passed out T-shirts and handed out flyers. They slept on the side of the road at night, curled up on their mats. They walked from village to village, exhorting women to vote for woman.

Weah’s supporters responded by predicting that if he lost, the country would go back to war. ‘No weah, no peace!’ they chanted. Weah himself fed that view. He suggested that he had actually won the first round, that he’d received 62% of the vote, and that the Elections Commission had engaged in fraud to keep him from being declared the outright winner. One of his campaign surrogates told supporters that only fraud would keep him from winning and that his supporters wouldn’t ‘accept anything less than victory.’

Thus the runoff started resembling past elections, like the one in 1985 in which Doe’s supporters had suggested the same thing: Vote for Doe or the country goes back to war. Ellen raised a stink against such talk, and members of the international community took up the call, urging Weah and his supporters to refrain from such bullying. But in Liberia, this tactic was how men managed to get their way: they simply threatened the people.

Except that, in November 2005, they appeared to have met their match. Because the women had their own tricks, tricks that would make Weah’s threats look like boys’ play.”

“‘You want beer? Just gimme your voter ID card, I will buy you beer.’

‘I say, we buying voter ID cards oh. Ten Liberty dollars for one.’

‘Who looking for money? Just bring your voter ID card.’

The group of women had stationed themselves at a bar near a major intersection in Monrovia. Armed with Liberian dollars — so-called Liberty dollars — which were virtually worthless on the international market but good for small purchases within the country, the women set to work luring the young men in a time-honored fashion. Except this time it wasn’t sex on the table. And this time the women were the ones with the cash and the young men were the ones with the commodity for sale.

‘Some of those boys were finish stupid,’ one market woman recalled with a smirk. ‘We were crafty oh!’ she said, one silver tooth glinting in the sunshine as she laughed. Many of the young men thought they were done with voting after the first round and didn’t understand they would need their ID cards again if their man was to actually assume the presidency. Others knew and didn’t care: late in the evening of a muggy hot day, the lure of a crisp, cold, and malty Club Beer far outshone whatever benefits they thought their voter card could bring them.

As for the ones who were too smart to sell their voter card — well, their mothers simply stole them. ‘Some of those old ma them, when their children had hard head, said they still voting for Weah, they stole their children them voting cards,’ Parleh Harris said, looking sheepish and defiant at the same time.

One market woman said she snuck into her son’s room while he was sleeping, slipped his voter ID card out of his wallet, and buried it in the yard. Years later there was no shame among the women who stole their sons’ ID cards. ‘Yeah, I took it. And so what?’ one said. ‘That foolish boy, what he knew? I carried him for nine months. I took care of him. I fed him when he wa hungry. Then he will take people country and give it away? You wi’ give elephant head to child to carry?’”

“Helpful poll workers at a polling station were allowing pregnant women and nursing mothers to cut to the front of the line, so a handful of women were passing around babies and toddlers.

‘You want borrow de baby?’ Bernice was grinning at one woman, sneaking a furtive look over her shoulder. ‘Put de baby on your back.’ To another woman, she advised, ‘Act pregnant. If dey think you pregnant you can vote in front.’

It was unclear whether the poll workers noticed how many different women were carrying the same baby.

Meanwhile, at her house, Ellen woke up on runoff day, showered, and got dressed, putting on the colorful gown and head-tie she had chosen for this, the biggest day of her life.”

“On November 23, the National Elections Commission had declared game, set, and match to Ellen. It dismissed Weah’s complaints of fraud and declared that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had been elected the 23rd president of Liberia. In all of Africa, this was a feat no woman had ever before accomplished.

The Old Lady would be Madame President. Out of the 25 years of carnage that was Liberia’s descent into hell had emerged a new leader, and that person was a 67-year-old grandma.

‘I felt a chill that day, straight on my spine,’ Parleh Harris recalled.

Ellen too was feeling chills. Heading back to her house from her campaign HQ, she was juggling congratulatory calls from officials all over the world. Ellen was on the phone with the American president, accepting his congratulations and best wishes. Then the phone went dead.

Liberia in 2005 had no landlines thanks to the war, so everyone used cell phones. They paid for service from Lonestar Cell by purchasing scratch cards from grona boys on the side of the road. The president-elect of Liberia had just run out of credit on her scratch card. ‘I need to buy another scratch card!’ she exclaimed. Her driver immediately pulled over as she rolled down the windows and called to the boys, ‘Y’all plee bring people some scratch cards!’

Soon everyone in the car was frantically scratching out the codes on the cards to plug into Ellen’s phone so she could call back President Bush and continue their nice chat. Turning to an adviser, she smirked, ‘This isn’t very presidential at all, is it?’”

Developing Liberia

“Nothing knew if the victory would be pyrrhic or total. For all of the euphoria, the task of bringing Liberia back from the grip of madness that had engulfed it for two decades was enormous. Unemployment was so high no one even bothered to calculate the rate; whatever estimates the international community put out were useless in the face of the legions of former combatants and young people who gathered in the streets day after day with nowhere to go, nothing to do. There was no running water; generators were the sole source of electric power, and the only people who could afford the luxury were the relief orgs and the foreign groups in the country.

Liberians, for their part, lived in the dark: dark houses, kept even more so with dark paint in an effort to keep out the relentless heat. At night, the few people lucky enough to have a cell phone used its light to navigate the dark streets and even darker country roads. Downtown Monrovia at night looked positively medieval; candles in shopfronts cast their dim glow on the ribbons of dirty water that ran down the gutters. People gingerly picked their way through the gloom to their shanties and hovels that clustered on what used to be sidewalks. The smell of feces and urine from gutters that served as public toilets permeated the air.

There were few hospitals, and in those few hospitals there were fewer drugs and even fewer doctors. The health system was barely equipped to handle a routine bout of malaria, let alone an infectious disease outbreak. The country’s HIV rate had quadrupled during the war. Children routinely died of curable diseases: tuberculosis, malaria, measles. Few of the ones who lived went to school. Few of the ones who went to school went to schools that had textbooks.

And the country owed $4.7 billion to the World Bank, the IMF, and international donors. Because the previous governments had not paid down that debt, Liberia was not longer considered creditworthy.

This was the country Madame was now supposed to fix.”

“Development in Liberia had all but stopped during the war years. Forget about the aspirations of African countries to lure foreign investment and developmental funds to try to get their anemic economies on the road to industrialization; Liberia was so far behind it was not even a part of the conversation.

When Madame took office, she was confronted by a country not only mired in debt, but one that had survived for two decades on the black, or underground, economy: trade of ammunition, drugs, illegal natural resources, and other illicit products. Each product created its own environment, and the drivers of the economy were a few people who kept the rest of society quiet with hush money. The result was that the normal drivers of commerce — farming, small-scale manufacturing — were broken by this black economy, which also served to obliterate the country’s already nonexistent tax base, leaving Liberia broke, and with no framework form which to rebuild.

For two decades, Liberia had sat on the sidelines while other African countries grew, and even so, Africa was way behind Asia. The postcolonial period had begun with countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America together at the starting gate, a line of banana republics with enormous natural resource potential but held back by the legacy of European colonial pretensions that had stymied the intellectual growth and development of indigenous minds. Once the Euros packed up their colonial overseers and left, these countries, eager to rule themselves and join the modern age, all jumped on the development ladder — but with wildly differing degrees of success.

The Asian countries got out ahead fast, with the Latin Americans limping behind them. Once upon a time, for instance, Ghana and Malaysia were in the same shape. They had both just become independent from Britain in 1957. They both began independence with British institutions, plenty of natural resources and foreign-currency reserves, and annual per capita income of around $750. But Malaysia quickly outstripped Ghana, as foreign investors flocked to the Asian tiger in part because Malaysia put its money into primary education, raising its literacy rate to 80%, while Ghana put its money into elite universities, producing a talented elite class but leaving the rest of the country with a literacy rate of around 40% by 1995.

Liberia, of course, was never in quite the same place as the other African countries because it was never colonized by the Europeans but by freed American slaves. The freed slaves came with a dollar or two from the American Colonization Society, but the U.S. government never had the empire-building aspirations of the Europeans and largely left Liberia alone to do as it pleased. This was a blessing in one particular way: Liberians felt inordinately proud that they hadn’t been colonized by Europeans and were the oldest independent country in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, whose claim to independence dates back to 800 BC. But it was also a curse: Liberians, left to their own devices to make or break their country, didn’t just break it; they jumped up and down on the broken pieces and ground them into dust.

All the while, Liberians wondered why their country couldn’t be more like Ghana.

The answer was simple: Ghana had finally taken off in pursuit of Malaysia. Tired of its coups and anemic growth rate, Ghana — with a lot of help still from the British government and foreign office — had had four successful elections since 1993 and had actually experienced a peaceful transfer of power between democratically elected governments, a rarity in the neighborhood. The country had a free and vibrant press, steady albeit slow economic growth, and tourism. Accra even had shopping malls and a multiplex cinema.

Ghana had finally put its money in primary education, and as a result its real literacy rate had passed 60%, so farmers were now able to learn new growing methods and a large slice of the population was able to work in export-oriented manufacturing.

To be sure, Ghana was still a poor place. The country had a per capita income of $421 a year, and most people survived on $300-$400. Child mortality rates were still high, and a huge gender gap remained in primary school education, with boys far outstripping girls in school attendance.”

“Madame privately set a goal in her head: Ghana in thirty years. To get to Ghana in thirty, she had to first get the market women out of the streets. Because those cars fighting it out against the women in the streets of Monrovia had passengers in them who were foreign investors. More than anything, Madame knew, the country needed more foreign investment. It needed factories, places for all those youths who had laid down their weapons after the war to go and work. It needed the construction work that comes when someone decides to build a bank branch. It even needed the service work that comes when a rich foreign family moves to town and hires a cook, a guard, and a houseboy. Liberian children needed to see people in business attire walking into their smart-looking office buildings so they could at least have something to aspire to that didn’t involve sweeping floors

But the way Monrovia looked right now scared all but the bravest souls. No one who had not experienced life in Cambodia or the DRC or Afghanistan could look at Monrovia and not want to run. How do you imagine, let alone build, a T-shirt factory when the streets are overrun with people, wheelbarrows, mangy dogs, flies, and feces?”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

“The Carter Camp massacre took place in 1993 at a refugee camp near the Firestone Rubber Plantation. It was a place where rubber tappers and their families tried to hide during the nightly bombing raids. A subsequent UN-commissioned inquiry found Doe’s army responsible, but later accounts conflicted with that verdict. What all agree on, though, is that on the night of June 5, around 400 men and women and 200 children were slaughtered at Carter Camp. Gunmen dressed in military uniforms entered the sprawling camp; two Jeeps took up position at either end of the camp to stop terrified residents from fleeing. Then, using machine guns and cutlasses, the men systematically butchered the refugees. Howls of anguish rent the air, mixing with the steady rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire. When the men were finished, they got in their Jeeps and left. A reporter described it: ‘Strewn through the camp were babies with crushed skulls, mothers hacked by machetes, elderly people butchered like livestock.’”

“Perhaps no early setback for Madame was as stark as the one posed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Theoretically patterned after the one established by postapartheid government in South Africa to investigate the wrongs of the past, Liberia’s nine-member commission, established under the ’03 peace agreement in Accra, was supposed to look into the long host of atrocities inflicted on a traumatized Liberian population, going all the way back to 1979, when Tolbert rounded up political dissidents and threw them in jail. In a place where the idea of justice had long given way to the day-to-day reality that few crimes were punished, the commission was supposed to give Liberians a sense of due process, even if it didn’t lead to anything.

In announcing its formation, the president set lofty goals. ‘We must make collective restitution to those victimized, rehabilitate the victimizers, while at the same time visiting some form of retribution upon those whose violations qualify as crimes against humanity,’ she said.

The new commission quickly went about the business of collecting testimony. They said they wanted to give child soldiers an opportunity to seek forgiveness after confessing their sins, but that opened the door for those accused of indiscriminate killing to excuse their actions by simply saying that they were forced (in the case of the boys) or possessed by the devil (in the case of the men).

In most cases relating to the boys, that was the truth: young boys and, to a lesser extent, girls had been dragged away from their home, pumped with drugs, armed to the teeth, and told to kill or be killed. But the men? Was it really enough just to confess to slaughter, squeeze out a tear, blame the devil, and walk away free?

Because by and large — with one notable exception so ironic it could happen only in Liberia — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not about crime and punishment. It was only about crime: a way to talk about crime, to discuss how it affected you, but with no avenue for punishment. The warring parties at the Accra peace talks had unsurprisingly balked at establishing a war crimes tribunal for Liberia, setting up instead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to make sure they themselves wouldn’t end up prosecuted for what they had done during the war.”

“The case of General Butt Naked demonstrated the inadequacies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of Liberia’s most notorious warlords, he spent the Taylor years leading his infamous Butt Naked Brigade into battle wearing only boots and carrying machine guns. Ritualistic child sacrifice and cannibalism were his calling cards; all old, he boasted that he and his forces killed more than 20,000 people, mostly children, a stunning, although probably exaggerated number.

General Butt Naked stood up before dozens of people gathered in a hot room and described his killings. He said that he first started killing children when he was a child himself, eleven years old, and was initiated into what he called a priesthood ritual performed by members of the Krahn people — a ritual that began, he said, when he was brought a young girl as a sacrifice whom he then killed, later eating her organs.

Noisily crying, he testified that after his Krahn tribesman Samuel Doe was captured, he went on a rampage of revenge on behalf of his tribe. The Krahn political leaders looked the other way because they knew that ‘if they wanted me to fight, they should allow me to make human sacrifices.’ These sacrifices included ‘the killing of an innocent child and plugging out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat. More than 20,000 people fell victim to me and my men. They were killed.’

He ordered members of his brigade to rape women, but downplayed the evil in that order by explaining that only women who had had sexual relations with Taylor’s forces were raped by his men.

Like most of the other killers who came crying for forgiveness to the commission, General Butt Naked credited god for turning him back to the straight and narrow — conveniently as the war neared its close. In his case, god appeared before him as he was scampering naked across a bridge in Monrovia during a battle and told him that he was a slave to Satan and should repent. He asked Liberians to forgive him, saying, ‘What we did at the time was not of our own but upon orders of evil men.’”

“General Butt Naked, now president of an evangelical ministry, got married and became something of a cult figure in the West after starring in the 2010 documentary film The Redemption of General Butt Naked by the Sundance Institute. He provided the inspiration for a couple of evangelical churches in the U.S., and even served as the basis for a character in the musical The Book of Mormon.”

“Madame appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee as well, where she was taken to task for her initial support of Taylor. The commission ignored the time she ran against him in 1997 and the fact that Taylor accused her of treason.

Instead, when the commission finally released its recommendations — all toothless — for justice against those who committed brutal acts during the Civil War, it included Madame on the list of Liberians who should be sanctioned. The reason? The commission said she didn’t express proper remorse for her early support of Taylor.

And guess who was left off the list of those deserving of justice? Arab Devil and General Butt Naked. No justice needed there, the commission ruled. After all, they asked for forgiveness.”

“Madame had vaulted over the first hurdle of convincing the U.S. Congress that with her at the helm, it was time to start thinking about forgiving Liberia’s debt. But the next hurdle presented by Congress was extremely high. She was told to apprehend Charles Taylor.

Over the course of 14 years, Taylor had laid waste to his country, turning the already limping West African backwater into a hell on earth. He had launched a war. His forces had kidnapped thousands of children, fed them alcohol and drugs, and turned them into psychopathic killers. The forces he unleashed left an estimated 75% of Liberian women victimized by rape and other forms of sexual violence.

And yet, when the self-appointed dispensers of justice for genocidal maniacs decided it was time to prosecute Taylor for war crimes, they went after him for crimes he committed in Sierra Leone. And then, as if to further drive home the irony, they demanded the Liberian government — that is, Madame — be the one to turn him over to the UN-baked criminal court.

Congressman Ed Royce (R-CA), had telephoned Madame before she even took the oath of office. The chairman of the House’s Africa subcommittee, Royce said, ‘If you want your government to succeed, you’ve got to do something about this Taylor. The U.S. would not support her government otherwise.

Taylor, along with his entourage, was presently residing in a seaside villa in Nigeria. As far as Madame was concerned, he could stay there; the last thing she wanted to do, especially considering the huge number of things already on her plate, was to unleash the human tsunami that was Taylor on the Liberian population. Taylor still had hundreds of thousands of fervent supporters, many of them still angry that their ‘papay’ had been run out of town. If she made bringing Taylor to justice her first order of business, she would risk reigniting the conflict she’d hoped had finally been put to rest.

But Taylor had been indicted by the UN-backed Special Court in Sierra Leone for war crimes, and the U.S. wanted to make an example out of him. Madame wanted that debt forgiven. The U.S. wanted Taylor.

The Nigerian President said he’d hand over Taylor only if he violated the terms of his asylum (which he hadn’t) or if the head of a democratically elected government in Liberia (i.e. Madame) asked for him. So the problem of what to do about Taylor was now squarely in Madame’s lap, where she least wanted it to be.

After she addressed the joint session of Congress, President Bush hosted her in the Oval Office, and she met with Secretary of State Rice. They threaded their praise for her achievements with a warning: if Madame wanted the U.S. to pony up much-needed money for Liberia’s development and to lead the way to forgiving the debt, she’d have to find a way to deliver Taylor to the Special Court.

On March 17, two days after her speech to Congress, Madame gave the Americans what they were demanding. She formally requested that Nigeria hand over Taylor. In so doing, she was opening a Pandora’s box for herself and her new administration, but there was really no choice. The country needed money. And no Taylor, no money.

But even to the last, after formally requesting the extradition of her nemesis, Madame was still trying to keep Taylor out of Liberia. She suggested that he be sent straight to Sierra Leone, bypassing Liberia entirely. But the Nigerian president was adamant. He would send the accused war criminal only to Liberia.

During a press conference announcing her request that Taylor be turned over, Madame went out of her way to stress that she and the Liberian government weren’t the ones going after him. Liberia, she said, didn’t have a formal case against Taylor. Nigeria was releasing him to the international community, to the Special Court for Sierra Leone. It wasn’t her fault that the Nigerian president was insisting she had to be the one to hand him to the Special Court.”

“In Monrovia, his supporters were furious. ‘Charles Taylor is innocent’ posters went up all over the city almost instantly, and his backers held press conferences to pronounce their belief in his innocence — although how such a word could be used about such a man is one of those only-in-Liberia head-scratchers.

‘Taylor is better than Madame Sirleaf today,’ a supporter yelled at a TV crew.”

Sexual Assault

“Madame was handed photographs of the mutilated bodies of five women recently killed in Bong County. The women had been raped, after which their attackers had cut out their genitalia. They tied the body of one woman, spread-eagled, to branches in a nearby creek and left her there. The mutilated bodies of two other women were left in the bush.

‘You see how they coming for us?’ one of the women asked Madame, her voice cracking. ‘You see what they doing to us because of you?’

The women seemed angry, not frightened. They told Madame that everyone in Bong County knew who had committed the crimes; in fact, the men responsible were even bragging. But the police hadn’t made any arrests.

Madame has never been an emotional person — her reserve, in fact, had often led people to call her cold. But on this morning, looking at the photos before her, the tears came. ‘Don’t show these pictures to the press,’ she said. The news would get out, she knew, but the photos were too horrific to appear in the newspaper or on TV, where other sadistic misogynists could find inspiration. ‘I need to make some phone calls.’

There was never any question that the election of the first woman to rule Liberia would spark a backlash among the men. Africa has always been a deeply patriarchal place, dominated for centuries by a Y chromosome that instilled in generations of men the belief that no matter how many conquerors might come to rule them, at the end of the day the men would always at least have women under them. And as long as the women were under their control, many African men believed, all was not lost.

Now Madame and her women had upended that fundamental tenet of African sexual politics. And that sparked the anger that comes from seeing someone you view as your inferior rise above you, like in the ‘We want our country back’ signs after Obama was elected president.

With a woman president, a feat engineered largely by women, the doormats that for centuries had cushioned the men from the floor were gone. And men wanted them back. But the doormats weren’t willing to be doormats anymore.

Ritualistic killings had long been common in Liberia; witch doctors and medicine people sometimes cut out the organs of children, leaving the mutilated bodies in the bush, so they could go ‘make medicine.’ But cutting away female genitalia was a new twist, aimed directly at the president, a macabre reminder of a belief that no power gleaned at a ballot box could supersede the power of brute strength and a bullet. If Madame let this go unchallenged, she might as well resign.

She phoned the superintendent of the area and demanded, ‘I want the people who did this arrested. Before noon today, I want to know how these women died.’ By two, the police announced they’d arrested five suspects.

But these were anemic steps. That a crime so heinous could be unaddressed in Liberia’s second largest city, until the president herself intervened, said much about the deep disregard for women of many men who were still in power. There they were aided in part by a societal groupthink that shrugged collectively at sexual violence. Rape was both prevalent and widely accepted in Liberia. There was no law that stipulated punishment for it, so sexual predators were never prosecuted.

Within weeks of being inaugurated, Madame, egged on by the women, began a campaign to stigmatize rape, particularly of underage girls. But even before she was elected, in 2005 she and a handful of female lawyers asked the legislature to prescribe sentences for rapists. ‘Do you know the farthest the legislature would go is seven years?’ a disgusted Madame recalled later.

Still, seven years was something. A few weeks after she was elected, reports surfaced that a Nigerian soldier who was part of the international peacekeeping mission in Liberia had raped a nine-year-old girl. Enraged, Madame got on the phone to the head of the operation. ‘Don’t let him leave Liberia,’ she ordered, ‘If he goes back to Nigeria, they’ll free him.’

Then she went on the radio with a warning to all: ‘I’ve got granddaughters that age. Those who engage in rape better know that from now, we’re going to prosecute.’

Prosecution for men who rape nine-year-olds is considered mandatory in many countries, but the Liberia that Madame had inherited was a place where two decades of carnage had broken down social constraints. The population had become so demoralized that the fabric of humanity had stretched past its breaking point. And nowhere did that manifest more clearly in the backlash against women after Madame was elected president.

Except now the crimes were being prosecuted, a change that confused some members of the Liberian press. For instance, 38-year-old Modesco Nyanti was convicted of the murder of Annie Kpakilah. He was sentenced to death by hanging, leaving the newspaper to report: ‘The sentence is the first of its kind. It is still unclear why the decision of the court was death by hanging because there have been similar murder cases with convicts getting live imprisonment, why others have been jailed for specific number of years.’

Cleaning Up Corruption

“Kpaan secretly tape-recorded county representative Edward Forh trying to get her to agree to steal county funds and share the pot with him. Such corruption is normal among government officials in Liberia; the only thing of note here is that Kpaan, a political ally of Madame’s, chose not to keep quiet about it. But since Liberian government officials always deny such accusations, Kpaan made sure she had proof. But she wasn’t happy with the quality of hte tape, so a few weeks later, she recorded him again. ‘The money in question must be divided amongst us. You eat some, I eat some, the minister eat some,’ Forh said on the tape.

Kpaan told Liberian media outlets she had the tape, and they reported it. Forh countered that it was Kpaan who was crooked, not he. So Kpaan appeared before the press with the recording: ‘I’m pleased to present this copy of the CD which contains the actual voice of Rep Forh requesting that I apportion funds intended for the Liberian people to him.’ And there he was, clear as a bell. Over and over, radio stations broadcast the audio.

The recording outraged the House. But not because Forh had tried to steal the money. The legislators were furious that Kpaan had broadcast a recording of him doing so. They accused her of disrespecting him. They also accused her of being the crooked one.”

“Mary Broh and a group of women had massed in front of Monrovia Central Prison to stop the arrest of Grace Kpaan. There was a fight. Now Broh and Kpaan were on the run. The House had had another vote. This time, they voted 49–9 to declare the women ‘wanted fugitives.’

Oh Jesus, now Broh was involved. She had used her vacation time from her job at Marvel back in 2005 to campaign for Madame with her team of Spiderman backpack-carrying women. In return Madame had appointed her acting mayor of Monrovia. ‘This is unbelievable,’ Madame erupted.

Too many people were clustered around her, so Madame went into the ladies room to make her call. ‘I’m calling you from the bathroom,’ she barked at the Vice President. ‘These people are enraged,’ he told her. Worse for Madame was that Broh had now become involved because for all that the name Grace Kpaan could send the legislative men into conniptions, the name Mary Broh sent them into apoplectic fits. The legislature hated her so much that when Madame appointed her mayor of Monrovia, they refused to confirm the appointment. So for three years Broh had been the acting city mayor. She was the epitome of the legislature’s worst nightmare: a tough-talking woman with absolutely no fear of alienating anyone in her path.

It was Broh who had cleaned up Monrovia. There were far fewer open latrines in the city now, far fewer mounds of trash, far fewer illegal market stalls in the middle of the road. Broh and her crews of young women in green T-shirts could be seen on the side of the street early Saturday morning with garbage bags, picking up trash. They descended on one neighborhood after the next, confronting residents for littering.

Broh tore down the illegal houses, stalls, and lean-tos that had taken over the city’s landscape and swelled its suburbs. First, she and her teams drew yellow chalk markings around the structures, as a warning that they didn’t belong in the middle of what passed for the sidewalk. When that was ignored, as it usually was, the team went in with another warning. When all of the warnings were ignored, as they usually were, Broh sent bulldozers, hoes, axes, and heavy equipment, and the structures were destroyed. The result is that now one could walk down some patches of Broad Street without plowing straight into a mass of illegal stalls.

Monrovians were both happy that their city was cleaner and angry that their favorite illegal stalls were no longer available to service their needs.”

“Two weeks passed in relative quiet. Then Madame went to Tunis, the legislature voted to arrest Grace Kpaan, and Mary the Menace came out swinging.

When Brigadier-General Martin Johnson, the House of Representatives sergeant at arms who was ordered to take Kpaan to jail, arrived at the prison with his charge, things went downhill quickly. Recounting the events later, when he explained to the House how he managed to lose his prisoner to a bunch of obstreperous women, Johnson struck an aggravated tone. First, he said, the prison authorities didn’t want to let him into the prison compound with Kpaan. After a lot of back and forth, he finally got through the gate with his charge.

‘I asked her out of the car. By the time she got off the car, I saw Mary Broh coming with a group of people from the opposite direction.’ Mary the Menace approached with a large band of sisters, including Julia Duncan-Cassell, Madame’s minister of gender and development, and other ‘co-horts,’ as described in one Liberian newspaper account of the melee. Broh took Kpaan’s arm. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

General Johnson tried to stop them, grabbing Kpaan and pulling her back toward him. But before he could do anything, he was surrounded by irate women who pushed and shoved him instead. ‘They started hitting me from the back, to the extent they cut my uniform button,’ the brigadier general said, as if discussing a war wound. ‘In that process they overpowered me and they took her and put her on Mary Broh’s pickup.’ And peeled away like gangsters leaving the scene of a crime.

These were the events Madame’s aide relayed to her on the tarmac in Freetown when her plane landed. Squeezing her eyes shut, Madame took a few deep breaths. Not enough. She took a few more.

‘This is the one woman who has done so well at cleaning up Monrovia,’ she fumed. ‘This is the only single person who gets money from Bill Gates. Wha’ wrong with these people?’

She ordered both women suspended. Her instructions to Broh to take it down a notch meant, among other things, that she was not supposed to go to the city jail with a bunch of women, spring Kpaan, and assault the outerwear of the aggrieved House sergeant at arms, a charge Broh later denied. Furious that Broh hadn’t given Justice Minister Tah time to free Kpaan in a less inflammatory way, Madame flew back to Liberia, where she found the capital city in an uproar.”

“Interestingly, none of the press reports delved into the illegality of the House’s attempt to arrest Kpaan; it was as if the Liberian media just assumed that, as elected representatives, the majority men of the august body were perfectly within their rights to vote to arrest anyone who tape-recorded them soliciting kickbacks and bribes. Instead, the press coverage revolved about the sheer chutzpah of Mary the Menace to stop the legislators from exercising their God-given right to throw Kpaan in jail.

Broh and Kpaan lay low for a few days while the legislature voted again to arrest them. On February 28, Broh resigned her post; Kpaan followed suit a few days later. Five days after accepting her resignation, Madame appointed Broh to lead a $30 million project to build large-scale community housing in Monrovia, and then on to head the General Services Agency.

And within a month, mountains of trash were growing around Monrovia again.”

Ebola

“I was sitting — inconspicuously, I hoped — along the wall trying to stifle a snort as the minister of defense, Brownie Smukwai, found himself heckled for 15 minutes by the executive director of a Liberian women’s empowerment org. She was not complaining about the Defense Ministry’s efforts in the fight against Ebola; she was trying to provoke him into sharing some of the platters of Spam and cheese sitting on the table. He ignored her, trying to pay attention to the meeting, but his heckler raised her voice louder. ‘I say, Brownie, you will not pass people de food?’ she demanded. ‘This how you treat women?’

Finally, an exasperated Madame had had enough and called a timeout. ‘Very well. Y’all can take a break to have some chips.’”

“By the end of October, Liberians were winning the fight against Ebola. The country was still in crisis mode, and the Ebola treatment units were still being constructed. But dead bodies were no longer piling up on the sides of the road. Beds in treatment centers were left empty. The numbers of the dying were going down, sharply down, even as they kept going up in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Because unlike Guinea and Sierra Leone, in Liberia the woman in charge of running the country, slammed by the deluge of criticism that hit the airwaves her failed West Point quarantine, had quickly admitted that her initial response had been wrong and had moved to change it. The very freedom and democratic process that had flourished in Liberia under her presidency kicked her into action.”