Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first elected female head of state when Liberians chose her as president in 2005. She studied at Harvard and worked for the World Bank and the United Nations. In 1985, Samuel Doe’s government jailed her for criticizing his regime, and she later spent years in exile.
The West African nation of Liberia takes its name from the Latin word for free. Freed American slaves founded it in 1822, and its motto still reads “The love of liberty brought us here.” But the settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, dominated the indigenous peoples until a violent coup in 1980 ended their rule. A decade later, Liberia fell into two civil wars fought by soldiers as young as eight. When the fighting ended in 2003, Liberians began rebuilding their nation by holding free elections.
An American Settlement
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 to send freed slaves and free born Black Americans to Africa. Most Black Americans had little interest in leaving. Their ancestors had been taken from many parts of Africa, and many families had lived in America for generations. In 1821, a U.S. naval officer pressured local chiefs into selling land at Cape Mesurado, and the first settlers landed there the next year. The society named the colony Liberia and its capital Monrovia, after President James Monroe, whose administration helped fund the voyages.
Advertisement
Liberia declared its independence in 1847. For the next 133 years, Americo-Liberians ran the government, though they made up only a small minority of the population. Indigenous Liberians could not become citizens until 1904 or vote until 1946. The last Americo-Liberian president, William R. Tolbert, was killed in a 1980 coup led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe, who became Liberia’s first indigenous leader.
Monrovia stands on Cape Mesurado, a rocky point of high ground beside a river harbor. The American Colonization Society chose the site after fever forced settlers to abandon their first settlement on a swampy island to the north. The inset map shows Liberia’s location in Africa.
Civil War
Doe’s regime was violent and corrupt. In 1989, Charles Taylor led a rebel army against him, and the next year, a rival rebel group captured and killed Doe. The fighting dragged on for years, with armed groups on every side recruiting soldiers as young as eight. Taylor won the 1997 presidential election, but many Liberians voted for him because they feared he would restart the war if he lost. A new rebellion drove him into exile in 2003. In 2012, an international court sentenced him to fifty years in prison for war crimes. He is serving his sentence in England.
Young soldiers line up with automatic rifles. Charles Taylor’s army organized children into a “Small Boys Unit,” but girls fought too. Many were kidnapped on their way to school. By the war’s end, about 15,000 children were serving in Liberia’s armed groups.
Women Demand Peace
Liberia’s Christian and Muslim women joined together to demand an end to a war that had killed about 250,000 people, roughly one in twelve Liberians. Their protests, led by Leymah Gbowee, helped bring the warring factions to sign a peace agreement in 2003. The United Nations, a worldwide assembly of nearly 200 nations, sent soldiers from dozens of countries to keep the peace. They collected weapons from more than 100,000 fighters, including thousands of children.
Rebuilding
In 2005, Liberians of every ethnic group, men and women alike, chose their leaders in the freest and fairest elections in their nation’s history. They elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist, as Africa’s first elected female president. Sirleaf helped rebuild Liberia’s government and public services and shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, a female peace activist from Yemen.
After two terms, Sirleaf handed power to her elected successor, George Weah, the first time in Liberia’s history that one freely elected president followed another. When Weah lost his reelection bid, he conceded defeat to Joseph Boakai and stepped aside. Liberia’s economy is growing, and workers are expanding roads and electricity services. Poverty and corruption remain serious problems, but Liberians have kept the peace since 2003.
Resources
Download this lesson as a worksheet with activities
