The Forging of an Iron Lady

by Robert Nolan

How the women of Liberia changed the course of their nation’s history

Fifty years before the #MeToo hashtag empowered thousands of women to stand up against sexual offenses, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf left her abusive husband in Liberia to launch a high-powered career in global finance and development. When U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke in 2016 of shattering “glass ceilings,” Sirleaf had already served for a decade as president of Liberia, the first woman ever elected president of an African country. And six years before an estimated five million women gathered peacefully in capitals around the world as part of the 2017 Women’s March, Sirleaf received the Nobel Peace Prize for her contributions to the “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights.”

Sirleaf’s history-making life has been well-documented in book and film. Do we really need to know more about this remarkable figure, so much of whose life has been lived in the public eye? Perhaps not, but the latest account of Sirleaf’s life, Madame President, by Helene Cooper, is so full of timely insights about gender and power dynamics that it doesn’t really matter.

Liberia’s tragic history, like that of many nations, can be summarized as a series of perplexing acts of violence, nearly all of them inflicted by men, frequently against other men, but often against women and children. The last is where Cooper, a Liberian-American journalist, directs the reader’s attention.

The Liberia portrayed in Madame President is a hellscape of aggression and destruction. By the end of the West African country’s civil war in 2003, Monrovia, the capital, was decimated, its coffers empty, its population traumatized. Nearly 75 percent of Liberian women suffered sexual assault during this time. Not surprisingly, many young women who had been raped sought work using the only asset at their disposal, their bodies. Battle-hardened young boys, their developing minds arrested by the amphetamines and other drugs they were given in order to fight, roamed the streets, looking to be nurtured. Who among us can forget the image of a boy soldier, armed with an AK-47, smoking a cigarette, dressed in a blond wig and white wedding gown, staring vapidly at the camera?

“Would the world be a more peaceful place with more women leaders?”

In post-war Liberia, such nurturing, Cooper suggests, could only be of the maternal sort. Her account of Sirleaf’s life makes a strong case for this proposition, one that will soon be tested as Liberia inaugurates a new president in 2018, almost surely a man. The author also asks a larger, perhaps more urgent question: Would the world be a more peaceful place with more women leaders?

In Cooper’s account, Sirleaf is a shapeshifter of the first order, her myriad personas revealed alongside the collapse of the West African country she loves so dearly. First, we meet young Ellen Sirleaf, a well-off resident of Monrovia, who, by the age of 21, had given birth to four boys and endured a physically abusive marriage. Despite her native Liberian heritage, the young woman is conscious of being mistaken for a “Congo,” a term used by Liberians to describe descendants of the freed American blacks who founded Liberia in 1821, and whose descendants long comprised its ruling class. Sirleaf, with light skin, an American education, and knowledge of finance, was able to obtain a post in the “Congo” administration of William Tolbert.

Next, we meet Sirleaf the technocrat. Following Tolbert’s murder in a 1980 military coup led by Samuel Doe, she returned to the U.S., eventually gaining entry to the most exclusive circles in global finance and development. Working stints with the World Bank and Citibank, Sirleaf moves easily between the male-dominated boardrooms of Washington, D.C., and the women-powered urban markets of Africa. She adapts her language and style accordingly, but never without a Ziploc bag of Liberian “beat up pepper” to sprinkle on her food — a small reminder of home as she flows in and out of diametric worlds.

“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 for keeping their children alive. But jail, for some reason, is a step too far.”

— Helene Cooper, Madame President

Sirleaf’s dexterity led to her next incarnation: politician. Despite her misgivings about then President Doe and her affiliation with the ousted Tolbert government, Sirleaf returned to Liberia, determined to use her background and connections in global finance to steer the country in the right direction. But when her ambitions became apparent, Doe had her arrested, detained, and nearly killed. “This where the grave at,” one soldier in the back of the army Jeep said to her, in Cooper’s account. “This where we killing you.” The soldiers didn’t make good on their threat, but Sirleaf’s cellmate, a 19-year-old woman, was raped repeatedly — an all-too-common occurrence that Cooper forces the reader to confront throughout the book.

Sirleaf emerges from her near-death experience a legend. “There are many things Liberian women will tolerate,” Cooper writes. “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 for keeping their children alive. But jail, for some reason, is a step too far.” When Liberia’s “market women” catch wind of Sirleaf’s imprisonment, they begin a movement to win her release that will change the fate of the continent. “The stage was now set for the revolution that would overturn gender politics in West Africa,” Cooper writes. “But the men still had one more act to play.”

That act would devastate Liberia for the next 14 years, as Liberia descended into civil war. When peace talks finally set the stage for free elections in 2003, roughly half a million people had died at the hands of warlords like Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson, and Joshua “General Butt Naked” Blahyi.

By this time, women had decided it was their turn. Their so-called “White Shirt” movement (named after the t-shirts worn in protest by the country’s market women) took to the streets, where they waged a massive voter registration campaign that brought Sirleaf back from the U.S. and helped thrust her into the natural culmination of her ever-evolving identities — that of the role of “Madame President.”

“Fellow Liberians,” she exclaimed upon her victory in 2005. “The days of the imperial presidency, of domineering and threatening chief executives, are over.”

Sirleaf’s tenure as president ended in 2017, her status as an elder and moral voice crystallized along with her legacy as a peacebuilder and economic driver. Whether or not the days of domineering and threatening chief executives are over — in Monrovia or elsewhere — remains to be seen.

Helene Cooper | Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf | Simon & Schuster | 320 pp. | 2017 | ISBN 978–1–4516–9735–3 | More about this book

Robert Nolan is executive director of communications and content strategy at Carnegie Corporation of New York.