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Scholar and Government Employee

The 1960s and 1970s

In 1962, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf went to the United States to study. The catalyst for her going was the scholarship that Doc had received to study at the University of Wisconsin. Sirleaf saw that her school friends were faring better with higher educational opportunities. Sirleaf decided that she too needed to study in the United States. It is hard to know exactly what drives individuals, but clearly Sirleaf believed in herself from a young age and was driven to achieve. She overcame the kinds of obstacles (domestic violence, imprisonment, exile) that would have derailed a more timid personality. With perhaps only a hint of irony, Sirleaf’s autobiography is titled This Child Will Be Great, evidence of a strong ego. Indeed, the book is framed to show how “the path of greatness unfolded.”¹

In order to study, Sirleaf had to leave her children behind. Having to choose between taking up educational or job opportunities and staying with one’s children was a common dilemma for many women across West Africa. In Sirleaf’s case, going to the United States offered a number of advantages: furthering her education, thus helping the family’s future, and staying with her husband. Like many Africans, Sirleaf and Doc left their children, including baby Adamah, in the care of relatives: two sons went to Doc’s mother and two to Ellen’s. But such separations did not come without cost: Sirleaf says while she had to do this, it did cause a “hairline fracture” in the relationship with her children, although as we will see, three of her sons have helped support her presidency in one way or another.

In moving to the United States for further study, Sirleaf joined a new wave of young Liberians who looked to the United States as a land of opportunities. The number of Liberians in the United States at that time was, however, much smaller than it would later become: only some two thousand students made their way in these years to the United States. While Doc Sirleaf studied at the University of Wisconsin, a leading state school, Sirleaf attended Madison Business College, a much smaller and less prestigious institution. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, the college went through at least five name changes before finally closing its doors in 1998. Sirleaf received her accounting degree from the college in 1964 and continued to be a good student, attending the University of Colorado and finally receiving a master’s in public administration from Harvard in 1971.

Sirleaf attended college in the 1960s, the era of civil rights, including the rise of Black Consciousness and the second wave of the feminist movement. In many ways, her career embodied the promise offered by both movements: the rights of people of African descent to lay public claim to their rights and the expansion of opportunities for women. But in both the public sphere and the private, this also was a time of tensions: Sirleaf was in the United States when President Kennedy was assassinated and when his brother Bobby was gunned down. In the private sphere of Sirleaf’s life, violence also reigned. For Sirleaf these were years of increasing violence in her home, as her husband succumbed to drinking and jealousy and started attacking her. Sirleaf’s personal experiences with domestic violence perhaps helped propel her later into the public sphere to address women’s rights, and particularly women’s rights to be free of sexual violence both in war and in peacetime, as we will see in later chapters.

Colleges and universities were the site of ferment and debate about America’s role in the Vietnam War and in internationalization more generally. Students from Liberia also began to participate in politics. In the late 1960s they organized the Liberian Student Union. According to one author, Liberian students in the United States generally supported the government of William V. S. Tubman because they benefited from his financial support for education.² While a student, Sirleaf did not participate in these early movements; instead, she concentrated on her studies, holding her difficult marriage together, and working after school in a menial job to put food on the table. At Harvard too she focused on her studies. But once she entered the business world in later years, she began to have more interaction with the politics of the Diaspora. In 1974, Gabriel Baccus Matthews founded the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL), which leaned toward socialist and Pan-Africanist policies. Sirleaf has called him the “Godfather of Liberian Democracy.” Sirleaf never became a member of PAL, but she did participate in meetings when she was in the United States working for the World Bank.

Back in Liberia in the 1960s, the government was becoming enmeshed in the politics of the Cold War. Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 to 1971, which included a long stretch of the Cold War. During that era, the United States looked to countries around the world to shore up its position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Liberia was just such a place. The United States had long been interested in Liberia, as evidenced by the Firestone agreement in 1926, which the US government had monitored closely. The United States signed a defense pact with Liberia as early as 1942 and built the Roberts airport to support military activity during World War I. The Voice of America’s main relay station was near Monrovia, and the US Embassy compound housed the CIA’s main African station.³

Tubman was a very popular president in Monrovia. A song popular in the 1950s, celebrating the occasion of his second inauguration, suggests that at least some residents of Monrovia were encouraged by his leadership: “Inauguration, President Tubman, Inauguration is a time for rejoicing. He give me a house. He give me good water. President Tubman, thank you for your kindness. He give me good roads. He give me good food. President Tubman, thank you for your kindness.”⁴ Some of Tubman’s support derived from his forging of close relations with the United States and other countries in the West, which was a mark of his presidency, along with encouraging foreign investment in Liberia through his Open Door Policy. President Tubman inaugurated the Open Door Policy in the first year of his presidency, thinking that virtually unfettered access to Liberia’s natural resources and low taxes on foreign companies would stimulate investment. Foreign companies did take advantage of these options, with companies such as the Republic Steel Corporation and LAMCO building railways to their concessions in Bomi and Nimba counties. In the 1950s, Liberia had the second-highest increase in gross national product, second only to Japan’s.⁵ While the companies employed thousands of Liberians, well-paying jobs went to expatriates, and little was done to invest in the education or promotion of Liberian workers.⁶ In her first term as president Sirleaf sought to address the unequal terms of foreign companies’ relations with Liberia.

Tubman also initiated a new relationship with the interior under what he called the Unification Policy. The aim of this approach was to lessen the divide between the Americo-Liberian coast and the indigenous interior. In 1964 the old hinterland provinces, which had been ruled through indirect rule, were given the status of counties, thus creating, at least in bureaucratic terms, an equal relationship between all people to the state. By his death in 1971, Tubman had achieved better integration of Liberia. However, property qualifications undermined the extension of the vote to indigenous citizens, and persistent inequality remained between urban elites and the majority of Liberians, who lived in the rural areas.

On returning to Liberia, Sirleaf started work in the Treasury Department in 1965. This position gave her a very good, but not very optimistic, view of the economy, which was laden with debt and dependence on foreign companies such as Firestone. During her time in the Treasury her marriage continued to crumble, and ultimately Sirleaf and her husband divorced. Two of her sons went to school; one stayed with his paternal uncle, but Rob, the third child, insisted on staying with Sirleaf. He traveled with her to the United States when she decided to continue her education. He lived with friends in South Dakota and finished high school there. This time with his mother consolidated a close relationship between the two of them. When she became president, he returned to Liberia, serving as her adviser and becoming the first head of the National Oil Company of Liberia and later chair of the First National Bank.

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