Liberia: EJS @88: The Iron Lady’s Long Goodbye

Monrovia – On a humid January morning in 2018, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf stood at the Samuel Kanyon Doe Sports Stadium in Paynesville and handed the keys of the Liberian state to a former footballer, George Manneh Weah. It was the first time in 74 years that one elected Liberian leader had peacefully passed power to another. By Rodney D. Sieh On a continent where presidents often rewrite constitutions to stay, she simply left. Her own party had expelled her weeks earlier. Many in the crowd blamed her for what had not changed. She smiled, waved and went home. Today, October 29, the woman the world calls Africa’s “Iron Lady” turns 88. Her journey from a Monrovia schoolgirl to a Nobel laureate is, in many ways, the story of modern Liberia itself: brilliant, battered, contested and still unfinished.

A prophecy in Monrovia Family lore holds that when baby Ellen was born in 1938, an elderly visitor looked at her and declared that the child would be great. Her father, Jahmale Carney Johnson, was the son of a Gola chief who rose to become one of the first indigenous Liberians in the national legislature. Her mother was a teacher and preacher of mixed Kru and German heritage. That mix mattered. For more than a century, Liberia was ruled by a small elite descended from freed American slaves. Sirleaf straddled both worlds: rooted in the indigenous majority, yet schooled among the settler class at Monrovia’s College of West Africa. She married James Sirleaf at 17 and had four sons in quick succession. The marriage was turbulent and later ended. In 1961 the couple left for the United States, where she studied accounting at Madison Business College in Wisconsin, worked as a waitress to pay her way, and later earned a master’s in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The…