Sirleaf has become symbolic of the burgeoning ascendancy of African women
ELLEN Johnson Sirleaf enters the room quietly. “Madam President, would you like to sit here?” an aide asks, motioning to a love seat in the RitzCarlton Georgetown suite that is serving as a makeshift office for the Liberian leader.
At 77, she still holds herself rigidly upright, head adorned with a regal swirl of fabric. She is President of Liberia, a West African nation roughly the size of Tennessee, and one of the few madam presidents the world has ever seen. Elected to the office a decade ago as the first woman to lead an African nation’s government, Sirleaf finds herself “always a bit lonely” at meetings of the continent’s leaders.
“There is not another woman that you can huddle with and plan your strategies with, and certainly you can’t do what the men do,” she says, during an interview between a flurry of Washington meetings. “You’re not going to go out and have beer together…”
Her place as one of the few women to attain the presidency has given her a reach far beyond her nation’s 4.5 million citizens. In Liberia she is known as “The Iron Lady” or “Ma Ellen,” but across the globe, Sirleaf has become symbolic of the burgeoning ascendancy of African women, a leg- acy for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011, along with two other female leaders.
She drew an avid crowd last month to the Politics & Prose book store, where she helped to promote a book by Riva Levinson, her longtime DC lobbyist, whose Choosing the Hero chronicles Sirleaf ’s path to the presidency. At the reading, a man asked Sirleaf what she would tell the next US president when “he takes office.”
“She!” shouted the bookish audience, booing his use of the male pronoun.
Male-dominated
Naturally, Sirleaf is interested in the possibility of a woman taking the helm of the most powerful nation in the world.
“In Liberia – a country, by tradition, male-dominated over all the years of its existence – women have always played a lesser role, an unimportant role,” Sirleaf says flatly. “My coming into leadership gave women much more of their own power.”
Sirleaf, who has a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and served as a government minister in the 1970s before a coup forced her into exile for several years, ran for president with a reputation as an unflappable technocrat. In the final year of her second six-year term, one would expect her to feel free to express herself – but Sirleaf was initially reluctant to weigh in on the complicated mess of the 2016 US presidential race. (“I didn’t want to get into politics,” she demurs when asked about it.)
Still, her facial expressions do not mask her feelings very well. Allowing that the world expects the next US president to “be presidential,” she frowns a little and raises her eyebrows, without actually uttering Donald Trump’s name.
Sirleaf is credited with rebuilding her nation and maintaining peace following 14 years of civil war that preceded her election. After a rocky start, she also helped lead the nation out of the Ebola crisis in 2014, and she says the nation’s economy has begun to grow.
The nation’s poverty rates, although lower than when Sirleaf took office, are still high, and a recent report by the nonprofit Global Witness found widespread bribery through- out the government. Sirleaf was not implicated and says those who were will stand trial.
Milestone
While Liberians recognised her election as a milestone and say that it has encouraged other women to rise throughout government, the novelty has worn off, says Elwood Dunn, a retired professor living in Tennessee who is serving on Liberia’s constitutional reform committee.
“Over time, the emphasis has been more on her performance in office, the public policies she has advanced, and how she has fared in terms of trying to lead a post-conflict country,” says Dunn, “…more than her person.” Is that a form of progress? Despite Trump’s talk of a “woman card,” the irony in 2016 is that the potential history-making moment of Hillary Clinton clinching the Democratic nomination and possibly ascending to the presidency is barely noticed any more. Pollsters have found that Clinton’s gender is not a determining factor for US voters.
“The reasons that people find (Clinton) unappealing are not because she’s a woman,” says Jennifer Lawless, the director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. “That’s not to say that for some segment of the population (gender is) not relevant, but we’ve reached the point where it is not decisive.”
Sirleaf understands that American voters are operating in a different context from the environment in which she rose to power. She is of a generation in Africa in which rule by “strong men” and warlords wreaked havoc on women’s lives. Women were victims in the war – their children forced into war as boy soldiers, their daughters raped, their livelihoods threatened. When she ran for office the rallying cry in the streets was “Ellen, She’s Our Man!” recalls Levinson.
The slogan was a clear rebuke of the men who ruled before her.
“With the freedoms we have created, Liberia cannot retrogress,” she says. “The tradition of male domination in Liberia has been punctured.” With that, Madam President takes her leave. – The Washington Post
Krissah Thompson began writing for The Washington Post in 2001. She has been a business reporter, covered presidential campaigns and written about civil rights and race. More recently, she has covered the First Lady’s office, politics and culture.