Thursday AfricaDigest (10/28/10): An Uncompromising Woman

[AfricaDigest Manager]

An Uncompromising Woman

By DANIEL BERGNER
NY Times

“Tell them to stop leaning on the fence!” Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,
president of Liberia and the first woman ever elected head of state on
the continent of Africa, ordered the leader of her security team. We
were driving along one of the scarce paved avenues in her nation’s
capital, Monrovia. With her convoy rode United Nations gunmen, part of
a peacekeeping force of 10,000 charged with preventing a conflagration
in the aftermath of 14 years of horrific civil war. The fighting ended
in 2003, but outside the windows of Sirleaf’s S.U.V., the skeletons of
abandoned buildings and the cries, at once thrilled and desperate, of
the onlookers along the president’s route were signs of the country’s
position near last on any list of how well the world’s nations are
functioning.

Yet Sirleaf’s attention narrowed on a bit of black iron railing and a
cluster of leaning teenage boys. The simple, wilting fence — a rare
adornment on the avenue’s median and a hint of order in a city still
reeling from war’s anarchy — looked close to collapse. The 71-year-old
president’s focus, always exacting, grew fierce. “Tell them to stop,”
she repeated in her scratchy voice. She meant for her security man to
radio back to someone else in the convoy to scold and scatter the
boys. It seemed she would have rather done the scolding herself. Below
her purple, geometrically patterned head wrap of African cloth, severe
grandmotherly disapproval seized her face. “They will break that
fence!”

Sirleaf, who beat a Liberian soccer star, George Weah, to win the
presidency in 2005, and who has announced that she will run for a
second term next year, is seen as a figure of profound hope for Africa
by many in the West and as a savior by some Liberians, partly because
she is so stern, her resolve palpable and her standards high, and
partly because she is a woman. Her rivals in the next election are
likely to include Weah again, as well as an ex-rebel commander named
Prince Yormie Johnson, who slaughtered one of the country’s recent
presidents.

Sirleaf would agree with the assessments of why she should keep
running Liberia. She takes pride in working long into every night and
in standing above — and, as much as possible, standing up to — the
country’s legendary and crippling government corruption. She credits
some of her strength to having survived a violently abusive husband.
And she doesn’t hesitate in declaring that women make better leaders.
Women lead more than a quarter of her ministries. If she could find
enough qualified females, she told me this summer, and if she could
make changes across the board without upsetting political balances,
she would appoint women to lead every one of them.

“Women are more committed,” she said, as we rode past one of the
Monrovia neighborhoods that has recently regained public electricity,
after Sirleaf’s administration started mending the capital’s
electrical grid that was damaged by the war’s ravages. The rest of the
city relies on private generators, with most of the cratered streets
pitch dark at night. “Women work harder,” she continued. “And women
are more honest; they have less reasons to be corrupt. They don’t have
so many diversions. Men have more than one wife; they have their
concubines. We havepolygamy here, not polyandry.” She laughed quietly
at her pointed logic.

Sirleaf’s precise, pointed manner has helped make her a darling in the
world of international aid, a reason for believing that the rescue of
Africa, with all its misrule, remains possible. Right before she tried
to save the keeling fence, she sat in a booth at a Monrovia radio
station. She educated listeners about the $4.6 billion worth of debt
relief her government had just gained through the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Her administration won the reprieve
by designing and starting to implement an auspicious set of fiscal
reforms. The relief was, she said to me, perhaps the most important
achievement of her presidency so far. And certainly her skilled and
perpetual soliciting of international support — including the forgiven
billions; a $20-million-plus loan program for Liberian businesses set
up by the African-American entrepreneur and Black Entertainment
Television founder Robert Johnson; and $500,000 newly awarded by an
American sorority to help Liberia’s market women — has been a
centerpiece of her leadership.

“Dey pour penalty on top,” she explained from the ramshackle radio
station, as the broadcast reached much of the country of around three
and a half million; its land — about the size of Ohio — runs from West
African beach to jungle interior. Speaking in Liberia’s patois to make
sure she was understood, she lectured on the consequence of the debt
that had accumulated over decades and dwarfed the nation’s current
$350 million annual budget: “We could no borrow a penny!” She talked
about the more modest loans — with better terms — she will seek and
can well hope to get, now that Liberia has been granted this fresh
start and vote of confidence.

It was, to an extent, a typical political performance, a president
telling her people how wisely she served them. And I couldn’t help
wondering whether the new loans Sirleaf anticipated, with their
generous deferrals of payment, would only result later in another
round of impossible amounts owed, another round of forgiveness sought
from the world’s powerful nations, another confirmation of Liberia’s —
and Africa’s — mismanagement and dispiriting dependence on
international charity.

Yet Sirleaf’s no-nonsense tone hushed misgivings. She has a master’s
degree in public administration from Harvard and a reputation for
fiscal vigilance dating back to her rise through Liberia’s financial
ministry in the late 1960s and ’70s. By the ’80s, her stances against
dictatorial repression and official plundering earned her a sentence
to prison and years in exile.

“We see her as one of us,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S.
ambassador to Liberia, said, describing Sirleaf’s appeal to Western
diplomats and dispensers of aid. Thomas-Greenfield, an African-
American who originally came to Liberia as a doctoral student studying
rice production in the late ’70s, and who heard about Sirleaf then,
stressed the importance of Sirleaf’s having worked, while in exile, as
a senior U.N. official and as a Citicorp vice president in Nairobi in
charge of the bank’s African operation. Sirleaf, she said, straddles
worlds with agility. The president is able to address Liberian
constituents in ways that disarm distrust of her “book” learning; she
has managed to work with old political enemies now in the Liberian
Legislature; and, the ambassador said: “She speaks our language. We
know, with her, that good governance and corruption are being taken
seriously. She’s tremendously well liked. We know our dollars are
being well spent. And then there’s the fact that she’s a woman — the
first. We don’t want to see her fail.”

Thomas-Greenfield described Sirleaf’s lobbying style: “I wouldn’t say
that she’s charismatic. It’s more that she’s very serious, very
focused. Down to the most minute detail.” This was easy to imagine,
given Sirleaf’s attention to the fence amid all else that is awry
after a war that unleashed widespread rape and the conscription of
child soldiers, perhaps as young as 7, some of them forced to kill
their own parents. “She’s bringing this country out of darkness into
light,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Not all Liberians, though, are so enthusiastic. Plenty do recognize
Sirleaf’s favored status among international benefactors — and
Liberians tend to be keenly aware of the importance of foreign
benevolence. But Sirleaf has been in office four years now, and there
is a level of impatience with her leadership that I didn’t hear on my
last trip to Liberia a year ago. She may still be beloved by some as
“Mama Ellen,” and she may be likely to win another term, yet many
Liberians are resentful that they continue to count on packs of
vigilantes to protect them, because the police — whose starting salary
is just over $4.50 a day — are ineffectual and relentlessly corrupt
and the courts too slow to matter. Bureaucrats high and low go on
requiring bribes and siphoning government funds in ways that have long
robbed the country of infrastructure and debilitated the economy. “We
can’t stamp it out, not yet,” Sirleaf said to me, clenching her fists
in frustration over the country’s bone-deep corruption. She spoke of
being torn between firing every transgressing official and keeping
enough ministers and staff members at their desks so the government
can go on operating, no matter how badly it is compromised. And
meanwhile, unemployment in the country, whose population shifted
heavily to Monrovia during the war, stands as high as 85 percent by
some estimates. Instilling faith that Liberia’s economic wasteland can
be redeemed, however gradually, may be the only way to ensure long-
lasting peace, especially with the U.N. troops expected to start
pulling out after next year’s elections. Over the radio, Sirleaf put
the emphasis on gradually. “I beg you I no magician,” she said,
letting a plea seep into her lecture. “I can’t just wave a magic
wand.”

The president has a light, red-brown complexion; skin that serves as a
particular reminder of one cause of her country’s implosion. Liberia
was founded — as a coastal settlement in 1822 and as Africa’s first
republic in 1847 — by free American blacks, and the settler class that
developed did all it could to replicate the American society it had
sailed away from. The men wore top hats and tails; the women, bonnets
and bustles. The republic designed its flag after the Stars and
Stripes of the United States, named its capital after the U.S.
president James Monroe and subjugated the tribes within its borders in
ways that sometimes resembled outright slavery.

Not until 1980 did Liberia have its first indigenous ruler, Samuel
Doe, an army sergeant whose coup can be understood as a surge of long-
suppressed rage. He disemboweled the president, then executed 13
government ministers before a crowd of hundreds on Monrovia’s beach.
Today, the divide between the people Liberians refer to as “native”
and those called “Americo-Liberian” still plagues the nation. And
Sirleaf, whose complexion is lighter than just about any Liberian’s,
has pointed out frequently and emphatically that her color is
misleading, that she actually has no Americo-Liberian blood
whatsoever, that she does not belong to the racial elite whose greed
and historic oppression is named by some as the origin of Liberia’s
brutal collapse.

Sirleaf’s complexion and her privileged childhood make for a
complicated story. She is the granddaughter, on her father’s side, of
a prominent rural chief and one of his eight wives, and on her
mother’s of a market woman and a German trader who was soon banished
from Liberia, along with all Germans, as Liberia proclaimed its
loyalty to the United States at the start of World War I. It’s the
German lineage that lightens Sirleaf’s skin, but the access to
education and power that elevated her girlhood stems from a Liberian
tradition known as the ward system.

Since the early years of the republic, the poor have often sent their
sons and daughters to live with the better off, to serve them in
return for the promise of schooling and the hope of other
opportunities. In this way, indigenous children have cleaned the homes
and cooked the meals of the settler class. They have belonged, more or
less, to their warder families, as something between slaves and foster
children; they have generally been given their warders’ last names.
Over generations, the tradition hasn’t eradicated distinctions of
blood and status — the schooling provided can be meager and the chance
for advancement minimal — but it has blurred the lines. And in
Sirleaf’s case, it eliminated them. Sent from his remote village to
Monrovia as a ward, her father was treated relatively well, in
Sirleaf’s telling, because his father, as a chief, had become
acquainted with the nation’s president. Her father apprenticed himself
to a lawyer, then practiced as a lawyer and, before a stroke paralyzed
him in his 40s, became the first indigenous man elected to Liberia’s
House of Representatives. Sirleaf’s mother, after a cruel stint with
her first settler family, was claimed by another warder and raised
generously — in part because of her nearly white skin.

Sirleaf’s own rise started with sheer girlhood determination. She
reminisced with me about her preparations for a fistfight with a
neighbor girl over a stolen plum. When she was about 9, Sirleaf asked
her grandmother to arrange for her to be given “a potion, fighting
medicine.” The underside of her left wrist was sliced repeatedly with
a razor blade, the potion spread into the wounds. She showed me the
still-visible dark scars, as a sign of how badly she wanted to win
that battle.

Her older sister, Jennie Bernard, recalled Sirleaf’s drive and success
in school, yet at 17 Sirleaf detoured abruptly from ambition when she
fell in love with a man seven years older who had just returned home
after going to college in the United States. He married her and took
her along when he went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a
master’s degree in agriculture. She enrolled as an undergraduate at a
local business college and, when they were strapped for cash, worked
in a drugstore. Jealous of her time and ashamed of her menial job, her
husband, who has since died, lurched into the store one evening, she
recounted, ripped a broom from her hands and screamed that she should
be home. He drank and grew more and more aggressive in Madison and
when they moved back to Monrovia. At one point, he struck her head
with the butt of a gun. Her sister remembered that he once walked into
Sirleaf’s office, during her early years at the ministry of finance,
and slapped her for working late.

In reflective tones, Sirleaf spoke with me about his love for her and
his possessiveness. She wrested herself from the marriage at last, she
said, after he leveled a gun at her in front of one of their four
young sons. The boy grabbed a can of mosquito repellent and tried to
spray it in his father’s eyes to wake him from his blind rage.

Sirleaf’s marriage seems to have hardened a resilience she always
possessed and to have steeled her against the violence that was coming
to her country. By the time Samuel Doe carried out his murderous coup
in 1980, she had earned her master’s at Harvard with the help of an
American economics professor advising the government in Monrovia, and
she was Liberia’s minister of finance. In the overthrow, she had
reason to expect to be killed, by Doe himself or by the roving throngs
taking revenge on well-off Monrovians. Yet she managed to survive, by
her account, through a combination of composure and a knowledge of
financial matters that Doe desperately needed. At the dictator’s
request, she ran one of the nation’s largest banks; then, after
rebuking the regime for greed and corruption, she fled into exile.
When Doe sought the legitimacy of being elected, she risked returning
to Liberia and taking an acerbic part in the campaign against him. She
was locked up and sentenced to 10 years, then was let go almost
immediately, partly because of pressure from the Reagan
administration, which supported Doe as a cold-war ally. The experience
didn’t stop her from defying Doe. Soon she was taken captive again by
his men, threatened with rape and told she would be buried alive.
Released, she went back into exile.

In 1989, while living in the United States, Sirleaf raised money for
an insurgency against Doe led by Charles Taylor, who went on to stoke
the country’s all-consuming war, who claimed Liberia’s presidency in a
dubious election in 1997, who enriched himself immensely during his
rule and who is now on trial, in a special court at the Hague, charged
with crimes against humanity committed as he stirred war in
neighboring Sierra Leone. Because of her early and enthusiastic
backing for Taylor, the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
charged with helping the nation to heal, recommended last year that
she be barred from public office for 30 years. The proposal, which
holds no legal power, seems to be viewed by Liberians and Westerners,
and by Sirleaf herself, as almost precious. “We were trying to bring
down a dictator,” Sirleaf said to me, with more impatience than
apology. We were creeping along a mud road just outside Monrovia,
where the city gives way swiftly to villages and bush. She was going
to a ceremony for a new maritime-training center that, she hoped,
would help Liberians land jobs as deckhands on foreign ships. As her
convoy approached a village, a dusty man beat a conga drum that had a
badly torn head, and an impromptu, bedraggled choir sang in tribute.
Ordering the convoy to stop, Sirleaf directed one of her staff workers
to give the village leader about $20 in cash. It was Sirleaf’s money.
She did this regularly. She glanced at me, chagrined by the
impropriety in the gesture — but, again, hardly apologetic. There was
no government system of support for the poor, she said tersely; this,
for now, was the best she could do.

One reality she contends with — the nearness of her nation’s explosive
history — may be best captured by the presidential candidacy of Prince
Yormie Johnson, the rebel who, in 1990, after a split from Taylor,
captured Doe. With a video camera recording the proceedings, Johnson
drank beer and looked on while his henchmen sliced off the president’s
ears. The killing came later. The video is currently sold by peddlers
in the capital’s downtown. Johnson’s run for president might be
considered a macabre joke, except that in 2005 the people of his home
region elected him to the Liberian Senate. “It’s Obama style!” he
proclaimed to me this summer, talking about the small contributions
that were already accumulating in his presidential-campaign chest.
With his round cheeks and whitening beard, Johnson looked something
like a Liberian Santa Claus. He assured me that his lack of formal
education would be an advantage in governing the country: “Did Abraham
Lincoln have a Ph.D.? My support is swelling daily!”

As I watched Sirleaf rigorously and tirelessly at work in her spare,
hushed office, I was often struck by the distance she has put between
herself and the violence of her own past: the violence inflicted
privately upon her as a wife, the violence threatened against her as a
public figure. The office sits on the top floor of a government
building in which the electricity staggers now and then and the
elevator buttons have long been broken. Given her status, Sirleaf
works and lives frugally — a brunch she and I shared at her house one
Sunday was made up partly of leftovers set on the table in plastic
containers. What she prizes instead of splendor is calm. In the
conference rooms adjoining her office, the meetings I watched her run
— with angry widows of Taylor-era soldiers demanding benefits; with a
quarreling auditor and minister — were muted affairs. She listened
with stoic patience to everyone, as though only in this way could she
keep disgruntlement from leaking out onto the streets like lighter
fluid.

Sirleaf’s mission is, above all, to distance her country as far from
violence as she has delivered herself, and her success most likely
depends, primarily, on the economy, on her ability to produce signs
that decades defined by abject poverty and rampant plundering can be
replaced by the hope of simple employment and lawful profit. Without
such signs, there is little reason to think that frustration and
fatalism won’t combust again in the decades to come.

So in addition to debt relief, some of Sirleaf’s crucial achievements
have been the renegotiations of unfavorable contracts with foreign
corporations like Arcelor Mittal, of Luxembourg, the largest steel
company in the world, which plans to mine Liberian iron, and with the
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which has tapped the country’s
rubber trees for almost a century. Yet to spend time on Fire stone’s
plantation among its thousands of tappers, who scrape at the trunks
with barbed knives and scramble to collect their daily quota of latex
in zinc buckets, is to confront how inconceivably far the Liberian
economy has to go. If the tappers present enough latex at the weighing
stations, they can earn $4.41 a day. It is very desirable job by
Liberian standards.

Liberia’s natural resources just aren’t in high-enough demand around
the world to spur the economy and generate much public revenue.
Firestone is providing the government with $4.7 million this year,
Sirleaf estimated. To truly take advantage of its iron, rubber and
timber, Liberia would have to manufacture things with them; it would
have to export finished products rather than raw materials. And it
can’t; the country is all but pre industrial.

The lone hope for Liberia’s sudden transformation may lie in offshore
petroleum. Oil is not iron or rubber. Sirleaf spoke of recent ocean
finds — not only off the coast of Ghana, but even closer by, in the
waters of Sierra Leone and, in the most nascent way, off Liberia’s own
beaches — as signs of arriving transfiguration.

Imagining the boon to her country if, over the next few years, the
intimations become bountiful wells, Sirleaf lost hold of the harsh
realism that usually keeps her thoughts and words blade-sharp. I asked
whether she worried that corruption would devour the benefits that oil
could bring to Liberia, as had happened in Nigeria and Equatorial
Guinea. Not, she replied, if a major company like Chevron winds up
winning the rights to drill — as it did, soon after my visit. She
couldn’t possibly have been unaware of Chevron’s dark history along
Nigeria’s southern shoreline, but at that moment, while she envisioned
the company pumping oil from her coast, such history seemed far from
her mind.

While we talked, British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon well was spewing
into the Gulf of Mexico, and I mentioned to Sirleaf that if such a
disaster befell Liberia, her country would command a lot less
attention than the United States when it came time to clean up.

“Let’s find it first before we worry about the spilling,” she said,
realism and severity returning. “Right now we’re worried about feeding
the people and giving them jobs. The environment — we’ll take care of
it later.”

If by way of oil, or if by slower yet still miraculous economic
metamorphoses, or if because Liberians are just too weary of war,
stability takes root in her country, then one of Sirleaf’s deepest
ambitions might be realized: to improve the plight of women, who
suffered inordinately throughout the years of fighting. Rape was
endemic during the war, and, Sirleaf lamented, it infects the culture
now. A new courtroom has been built; it is reserved for trying cases
of sexual assault, an attempt to assure women that such crimes will be
taken seriously and to dissuade them from settling with rapists
informally — sometimes, as happened in a case I followed during a
visit several years ago, for as little as $2.

But to step into the Women and Children Protection Unit in the
Liberian police department’s headquarters in Monrovia is to sense that
even a determined female president may have trouble providing women
with much in the way of safety. The dilapidated headquarters is a kind
of vertical cave, blearily lighted where it is lighted at all. The
place all but advertises the country’s flimsy ability to enforce its
laws, yet given her meager budget, Sirleaf said that before she
considers renovating the building, she intends to construct living
quarters for the police in rural areas, where it is hard to attract
recruits and where enforcement is even flimsier than in the capital.

The Women and Children Protection Unit, where rape victims are meant
to report their assaults, sits at the end of a hall of cryptlike
offices filled with men, some in uniform, some perhaps detectives in
plainclothes, some criminals, some just loitering, spilling into the
corridor. At the end of this menacing gantlet, in the Protection Unit,
a female receptionist and a female sergeant wait at scarred wooden
desks. But even here the men leach in; the headquarters is their
domain, and it is easy to imagine that women would rather be paid
minimally for their suffering than begin the search for justice in
this place.

A brighter expression of Sirleaf’s goals lies along one of the
capital’s rutted dirt lanes. A Nike Foundation program trains Liberian
women in their late teens and early 20s to work in offices or hotels.
Sirleaf’s lobbying persuaded the sporting-goods giant to choose
Liberia as the pilot nation for the project, which will try to imbue
2,500 women around the country with vocational skills. Proudly, one of
the young women led me on a tour through the training stations for the
course on hotel hospitality. Wearing vibrant African fabrics, she led
me past a hand-scrawled sign — “Mama Ellen Johnson Sirleaf we love you
for what you are doing for the young girls of our nation” — and into
the facsimile of a guest room where the students practiced making
beds; into the bathroom where two girls in masks were practicing the
scrubbing of toilets; out to a gazebo arranged as a mock restaurant,
with a table fully set and a chalkboard announcing “Chicken Liberian
Style” as the day’s special.

“If I can provide my own money, men will not be able to carry on their
violence,” one student said hopefully, referring not to rape but to
the range of commonplace assaults she and her fellow trainees might
typically endure. And the stations were so orderly that it was easy to
believe, at least briefly, that all the graduates would soon be
employed — menially, in many cases, but gainfully. All sorts of
transformations appeared plausible in the mock restaurant with the
paper napkins slipped daintily inside the glasses.

And then reality reasserted itself. Where were the Liberian hotels to
hire these students? The country has a handful of places that cater to
visiting U.N. employees and the few foreign investors looking for
resources to be reaped. But Liberian tourism is hardly a growth
industry.

“I’m going to show you a beautiful spot,” Sirleaf said to me one
afternoon, as if to answer my doubts about the trainees’ prospects,
though I hadn’t raised the dispiriting subject. Near the village whose
drummer had beat at his torn conga drum, her convoy stopped at a wispy
and graceful bridge stretching over a small river. A lush green island
lay on the far side of the span, and a pair of ample, alluring houses
stood perched over the water, one on either bank. The property
belonged to a man she knew, she said. She saw it as the beginning of a
future resort. The president of Liberia stood amid the luxuriant calm
of that lovely dream.


Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer. He is the author of “In the
Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa.”


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You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips. -
Oliver Goldsmith, writer and physician (1730-1774)
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