Sirleaf went to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1970 for the summer to brush up her credentials, and then on to Harvard. Sirleaf’s time at Harvard was transformational in her life and politics. As we have seen, Sirleaf’s childhood had helped create a bridge between the two worlds of Liberia, urban and rural, the world of Americo-Liberia and the world of indigenous Liberia. She credits her time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with educating her about the unequal history of Liberia and its connections not just with the United States but also with historical and contemporary West Africa. She returned to Monrovia in July 1971 armed with new expertise in administration and a new appreciation for the history of West Africa and its economic challenges and opportunities. She arrived just after the death of President Tubman in London from complications from surgery.
Tubman had governed Liberia for nearly thirty years. His death came at a time when revolutions were sweeping through the remaining settler colonies of Africa, including the rise of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, and anticolonial movements in other parts of Southern Africa. Tubman had tried to move the country forward by crafting his Open Door Policy and the Unification Policy and by relying on the new young class of educated Liberians, many of whom had traveled abroad for educational opportunities. William R. Tolbert Jr., who had served as Tubman’s vice president since 1952, succeeded him in 1971 and continued to rely on the talents of the Diaspora to staff his administration.
The 1970s were the decade in which the Diaspora became a force in Liberian politics.7 New political movements were emerging in Liberia. Sirleaf always gravitated to the mainstream, attached to government rather than revolution, an orientation that would later shape her approach as president. She was friendly, however, with activist colleagues who wanted radical reform. Faculty who had been educated overseas started the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA). They wanted to pursue socialist policies of redistribution to address the inequalities they saw in Liberia. Amos Sawyer, with a PhD from Northwestern University in the United States, who later was a professor of political science and dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Liberia, and president of the Interim Government of National Unity after the end of the civil war in the 2000s, was a founding member along with Togba Nah Roberts, an economics professor at UL. This movement was in alignment with the anticolonial movements sweeping Southern Africa at the time: The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the Movement for the National Independence of Angola (MPLA), for example. As Sirleaf said, “MOJA played a pivotal role in radicalizing the urban and rural poor of Liberia, raising the issues of government corruption, advocating for the nationalization of Liberia’s major businesses.”8
However, while the Tolbert years were years of reform, the Tolbert administration was either unwilling or unable to fully address the inequalities in Liberia. Tolbert did not take the paths suggested by MOJA, although he did try to signify a new era through symbolic rejection of the formal Western attire of his predecessors in favor of open-necked suits, visits to poorer parts of Monrovia, and reform of government. But these were symbolic rather than structural reforms. Part of the difficulty of truly reforming Liberia was that it was so dependent on foreign interests. The 1926 agreement with Firestone weighed down the country. As early as 1951, for example, Firestone made in profits “three times the total income of the Liberian Treasury” even after it had paid its taxes to the Liberian government. In addition, the success of iron ore mining, which started in the 1950s, financed by investment from the United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden, also achieved great profits. Between 1951 and 1977, one mine, the Liberian Mining Company in the Bomi Hills, shipped out iron ore worth some $540 million while the Liberian government received only $84 million in return (excluding money from rents).9
On returning to Liberia, Sirleaf joined a wave of young professionals eager to help build the country using the skills they had acquired abroad. President Tolbert recruited Sirleaf to serve as assistant minister of finance from 1972 to 1973 and then as minister of finance in 1979. In 1972, the year that she was appointed to Tolbert’s new government, Sirleaf delivered the commencement address at her high school alma mater, the College of West Africa. In that speech she criticized the government and warned that if economic disparities were not addressed Liberia would “create unbearable tensions.”10 The speech caused great consternation in the halls of the Tolbert government, in part because it criticized the administration of which Sirleaf was a part. Although she avoided public reprimand, her position in Liberia became increasingly marginal. As a result, in 1973, she sought out friends at the World Bank and took up a position as a loan officer in Washington, DC. This post offered Sirleaf a wealth of experiences that would prove crucial to the philosophy of her presidency. She met key financial players in the international economy as well as in national settings, and she developed her ideas about the impact of development dollars. After working with the World Bank, she concluded that although foreign investment and development monies came with all sorts of restrictions and created difficult relationships between governments and funders, such investments were crucial, and that the lack of capacity in many countries of the Global South meant that countries had to depend on the expertise of people from the Global North. As we will see, this conviction became central to her decisions in her first term as president of Liberia. Sirleaf’s orientation toward neoliberalism with its emphasis on governance and investment rather than social justice and transformation was one of the reasons for her success in mobilizing support for Liberia. It was also, one could argue, the foundation of her alienation from the majority of Liberian citizens and the Achilles heel of her presidency.
Just two years later, Sirleaf returned to Liberia and the Tolbert government, but this time as an adviser seconded by the World Bank. She was in government, but to some extent not complicit with it. The Liberia she returned to remained divided between the Americo-Liberians who claimed to be on the side of civilization and the indigenous Liberians who sought greater participation in government and greater opportunities for advancement. Matilda Newport Day was still an official national holiday. This holiday celebrated an early settler who “saved the settlers from ‘the natives’” in a battle of 1822. In 2003, a Liberian recalled,
As a youth growing up in Monrovia, we used to assemble at Coconut Plantation each December 1 to watch the reenactment of the Battle of Fort Hill. And during the reenactment, one group of actors would dress up in native Liberian attire with their faces painted to portray native Liberian tribesmen, and the other groups of actors would dress up in Antebellum south-style outfits to portray Americo-Liberians Settlers or Pioneers. And suddenly, a woman dressed up as an old lady would appear from nowhere, light a cannon pointed directly at the actors dressed like native tribesmen (portrayed like fools in front of the cannon), and then “BOOM” the cannon goes off, and all of them would fall and pretend to die.11
The fact that the government marked this event with a holiday and expected all Liberians to celebrate it exemplified the tone-deafness of the Americo-Liberian elite, as well as the Tolbert administration, to the injustices and indignities that lay at the heart of the country.
Helene Cooper, writing of the 1970s, describes these divisions: “In Liberia, we cared far more about how we looked outside than about who we were inside. It was crucial to be ‘Honorable’. . . . You could have a PhD from Harvard but if you were a Country man with a tribal affiliation you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee.” Americo-Liberians associated with government lived in great style, although perhaps not many in the style of Helene Cooper’s family. In her poignant memoir The House at Sugar Beach, she describes their family compound some eleven miles outside of Monrovia, which had air conditioning, at least seven bedrooms, and six bathrooms. The family had a family farm and a house in Spain, and the older daughter was schooled in England. Like many other Congo families, th
e Coopers also participated in the ward system, bringing a young woman, Eunice, to live as a companion to the young Helene. Even in 1974, “Native Liberians routinely jumped at the chance to have their children reared by Congo families” because it offered the possibility of education in a highly stratified society.12
The Tolbert government never really figured out how to respond creatively to the growing tide of criticism coming from PAL and MOJA. PAL was the first legal opposition party in many years in Liberia. Although Tolbert had encouraged them in this endeavor, the administration was unsettled by actual debate and criticism: this was the tradition in the history of state rule in Liberia. As part of Tolbert’s plan to bring Liberia into greater communication with other African countries, he proposed that Liberia host the 1979 Organisation of African Unity summit. Doing so meant that in the years leading up to it, vast amounts of money were spent on paving roads and building a hotel and the Unity Conference Center outside Monrovia. Tensions around government spending came to a head when the price of rice, the staple food of Liberia and already subsidized by the government for that reason, went from $22 to $27 for a hundred-pound bag. The riots that broke out in response spelled the end of the Tolbert administration. PAL led the charge for cheaper rice, and a rally was organized for 3 p.m. on April 14, 1979. Forty-one deaths were documented, although there might have been a hundred more. President Tolbert arrested the leaders and instituted a commission of inquiry, which Sirleaf sat on. She was, as ever, part of government but from a critical distance.
Echoing Sirleaf’s speeches about government corruption earlier in the decade, this commission also called out the administration for nepotism and called for the release of the leaders. Perhaps this forthrightness appealed to Tolbert, because shortly after the OAU summit, he appointed Sirleaf the minister of finance. Thus she was right in the middle of the government when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe launched his coup on April 12, 1980.
3
Liberian Opportunities and International Perils
On April 12, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe of the Liberian army launched a coup against President William R. Tolbert Jr. and his administration. As we have seen, the Tolbert administration had sought to make symbolic overtures to indigenous Liberians by eschewing the American trappings of formal attire and by trying to integrate Liberia into a Pan-African world. But this was too little and definitely too late. After more than 130 years of being relegated to second-class status and seeing wealth accumulated by a few families, some people were ready to make change happen.
Samuel Doe was the antithesis of the Congo elite: He was born on May 6, 1950, to poor parents in Tuzon, a village just north of the capital of Grand Gedeh County, which borders Côte d’Ivoire. As the County Development Report stated in 2011, “Grand Gedeh is the third largest County in Liberia and historically one of the most neglected. The over-concentration of facilities and services in Monrovia has led to the under-development of the countryside in Liberia, and Grand Gedeh County is no exception. Inadequate and non-existent basic infrastructure continues to hobble the quality of life, and this was a main contributing factor to the civil crisis.” In 1984, the population of the district was 63,028 people in a landscape of slightly more than four thousand square miles, just over 9 percent of Liberia’s land. Zwedru, the capital, is about 350 miles southeast of Monrovia and even to this day is accessed by only one main road, which winds its way northeast from Monrovia and then takes a turn south. So although Grand Gedeh is not in fact far from Monrovia, it is, and was, distant from access to power and influence, exemplified by the lack of a main road directly to its own capital. Grand Gedeh is rich in iron ore and gold, and it is densely forested. When Doe was growing up, people were mostly engaged in agriculture (which was profoundly disrupted by the civil war in the 1980s and beyond). Farmers grew and sold rice as well as cocoa to neighboring counties. People were also employed on palm farms and by the big logging companies that had concessions in the area.1
Doe was twenty-eight when he orchestrated the coup. A member of the Krahn ethnic group, the dominant ethnic group in Grand Gedeh County, he finished elementary school and then joined the Liberian army, one of the few avenues for social mobility. He was promoted to master sergeant just six months before he led the coup against Tolbert in April 1980. He also attended night school and had made it as far as his junior year by the time of the coup. In this respect, Doe took up one of the mantras of Liberian life: that education could be a vehicle for advancement. But we can assume that he also knew that as a member of an ethnic group from a far-off and neglected county, he would not get as far as he wished. He plotted the coup in secret along with others in the Armed Forced of Liberia. The former US ambassador (who had a staff of some five hundred at the US Embassy in Monrovia) says that the coup came as a surprise.2
In the wee hours of April 12, William R. Tolbert Jr., president of Liberia, was brutally killed while in his dressing gown. In the course of the day, other ministers, including Sirleaf, were called to appear before Doe. According to Sirleaf, Doe asked her to explain her most recent budget to one of his newly appointed staff, and thereafter he sent her home, safely, with an escort. These interviews continued for a few days. In the meantime, people attacked the Congo and looted wealthy homes, inspired by the overthrow of Tolbert’s elite government. As told in her memoir, soldiers looking to attack Congo families raided Helene Cooper’s house at Sugar Beach, some eleven miles from Monrovia.
While anarchy prevailed in the streets, brutality continued in the halls of power. Cabinet ministers were arrested and brought before a military tribunal of five men. The disdain many of the Americo-Liberian elite had shown their indigenous countrymen now turned up outside court. As soldiers dragged in the former minister of finance, the crowd apparently cried, “Who born soldier? Country woman! Who born minister? Congo woman!”3 Doe had members of Tolbert’s cabinet taken to the beach in Monrovia, where they were lined up and shot. Thirteen people were murdered. Sirleaf avoided this fate, perhaps because of her gender, perhaps because of her talent with finances, perhaps because as Doe said, Sirleaf’s mother had once been kind to him (something her mother did not verify), or perhaps, as Sirleaf recounts in her biography, because she had given enough public speeches denouncing corruption in the Tolbert government to have credibility with Doe.
Doe appointed his new cabinet, including members of MOJA (Movement for Justice in Africa) and of PAL (Progressive Alliance of Liberia) whom Tolbert had put in prison for leading the opposition and inciting the rice riots. Doe’s new cabinet also included Sirleaf. Clearly the choice in these early days was doing his bidding or death. Rule fell to Doe’s military supporters, now called the People’s Redemption Council. Sirleaf agreed to serve in the new administration as president of the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment. Operating between a rock and a hard place, or making pragmatic compromises with tyrants at least in the early days of their rule, might be described as Sirleaf’s modus operandi until she became president herself. Her willingness to try for a while to work with Charles Taylor led to cries of foul during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRC) hearings.
So Sirleaf stayed to work in the Doe government even after the assassinations of cabinet ministers, the flight of her sister into exile, the suspension of the constitution, and the institution of martial law. Sirleaf justifies her decision as being in the service of her country. As she says, the Liberia that Doe seized was in tremendous debt from hosting the Organisation of African Unity and owed some $700 million in foreign debt. The coup also meant that wealthy Liberians and investors took their money out of the country. It is hard to know quite what to make of Sirleaf’s decision. In one light she was an opportunist; in another, a selfless veteran of government who saw that her expertise was needed in an administration ruled by a man with talent but without much education. Clearly Sirleaf is a pragmatist. Perhaps that is the quality that helped her navigate different political terrains so successfully.
T
he early years of the Doe administration, although far from ideal, were peaceful enough that Leymah Gbowee, a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Sirleaf in 2011, recalls a happy childhood in Monrovia. The main thoroughfare, Tubman Road, was still lined with trees and graceful buildings, and the University of Liberia sat up on the hill across the road from the executive mansion. In the 1970s, Gbowee’s father worked as chief radio technician and liaison with the United States, working at the US Embassy at the end of the street where Sirleaf grew up.4 The United States continued its close relationship with Liberia owing to the geopolitics of the Cold War. In Monrovia, the US Embassy collaborated with the Liberian National Security Agency.
Doe consolidated his power in part through working the politics of the Cold War. Never mind that Doe had killed almost the entire Liberian cabinet; on August 17, 1982, he went to the White House. Photographs show Doe with President Reagan and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. On that day, President Reagan spoke on the White House lawn: “Chairman Doe told me of his government’s ambitious goals, including the return to democratic institutions and economic stabilization. We welcome his emphasis on bringing the benefits of development to every corner of Liberia. And today we discussed how the United States can assist Liberia in achieving these goals.” Doe said he welcomed President Reagan’s assurance that “we can continue to count on America’s understanding and support for the fulfillment of the objectives of our revolution.”5
The United States was indeed interested in maintaining influence over Liberia. President Jimmy Carter was the first president to visit the country (in 1978, while Tolbert was still president) since Roosevelt had stopped there briefly in 1943. Carter stayed for only four hours en route to Nigeria—but the visit signified the US desire to maintain close ties because of Liberia’s strategic importance. The United States supported Doe in part because he represented a change from the oligarchy that had ruled the country since its founding. As the first indigenous president, though illegitimately in that role, Doe spoke to the ideals of democracy embraced at least rhetorically by the Reagan administration. In addition, Doe was eager to keep those ties as close as possible. He closed the Libyan Embassy in Monrovia and opened greater diplomatic relations with Israel. As a result of this cooperation, the United States gave some $500 million to Liberia during the first five years of the Doe administration. And Doe diverted about a third of the $220 million economy into his pockets and those of his cronies.6
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Page 3