This Child Will Be Great
Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President
By Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2009
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-135347-5
Chapter One
The Beginning
When I was just a few days old, an old man came to visit
my parents, to see the new baby and to offer his good
wishes, as people did both then and now in my country
and everywhere. My mother brought the old man into the
room where I lay kicking and cooing on the bed. As the
story goes, the old man took one look at me and turned
to my mother with a strange expression on his face.
"Oh, Martha," he said. "This child shall be great. This
child is going to lead."
My mother and sister and I used to laugh whenever my
mother told this story. We would laugh and laugh and
laugh, because at many of the junctures in which she
recalled the words of the wise old man my life seemed
anything but great. Perhaps I was watching all my
friends go off to college abroad while I stayed at home
in Monrovia, trapped with an abusive husband, four young
sons, and no future in sight. Perhaps I was struggling
to pursue my education, build my career, and divorce
that husband without losing everything I had. Or perhaps
I was being hauled off to prison by order of my nation's
president-or maybe even plotting an escape into exile to
save my life.
"Where's all this greatness that was predicted?" my
mother would ask. Sometimes she laughed, sometimes she
cried. Always she prayed. "Where's that old man now?"
Over the years and as the path of greatness unfolded,
whenever I reflected on the prophecy of the old man, my
scientific orientation of self-determination would clash
with the Presbyterian teachings of predestination I had
received.
Which one, I have long wondered, is the way life really
is?
Early on during my historic 2005 campaign for the
presidency of Liberia, rumors began to circulate about
my ethnicity. My detractors began whispering that I was
an Americo-Liberian, a descendant of one of those first
American-born founders of our land-and thus a member of
the elite class that had ruled our nation for long.
This was an explosive charge. Given the historic
cleavage in our society and the long-standing divide
between the elite settler and indigenous populations,
many Liberians wanted nothing to do with another
Americo-Liberian president. And although I was well
known in my country-so well known that most people,
including the swarms of children who would come out to
greet me as I campaigned, simply called me
"Ellen"-still, there was danger that the rumor would
find traction. It could not be brushed off or ignored,
not if I wanted to win. It was crucial that the people
of Liberia know my background was not unlike their own.
They needed to know where I was coming from.
In truth, my family exemplifies the economic and social
divide that has torn our nation. But, unlike many
privileged Liberians, I can claim no American lineage.
My paternal grandfather was a Gola chief of great
renown. His name was Jahmale, sometimes called Jahmale
the Peacemaker, and he lived, along with his eight
wives, in the village of Julejuah, in Bomi County.
Jahmale used to travel from his home village to the
ocean, a distance of some twelve or fifteen miles that,
in those days, took months and months of slow walking
through the dense forests of coastal Liberia. During his
travels he learned to speak the languages and dialects
of the many peoples whose path he crossed and so became
a kind of negotiator when troubles erupted between the
indigenous people and the settlers in Monrovia.
In this way his reputation grew, and it was because of
this renown that my grandfather was sometimes visited by
Hilary Wright Johnson, Liberia's eleventh president.
Johnson was the first president of Liberia to be born in
our country. He was also the son of Elijah Johnson, one
of the original settlers.
At that time there were few roads in Liberia and none at
all outside the capital. So when the president traveled
into the hinterland to visit villages, he, along with
his entourage, would be carried about in hammocks,
welcomed with food and dance and celebration and perhaps
the gift of a young woman as a wife. The president in
turn brought excitement, gifts, and connection to the
country's power base back in Monrovia. It was President
Johnson who encouraged Jahmale to send my father to the
city as a ward.
As with many aspects of Liberian society, the ward
system, its history and legacy, is not simple to parse.
Its origins seem to lie in a complex combination of
tradition, expediency, and need; the motivations of its
participants varied greatly, as did the way in which it
was executed.
In the simplest explanation, the ward system flourished
in early Liberia because it met the settlers' crucial
need for cheap labor. Those early transplanted families,
not having enough children themselves, needed help with
the heavy housework of the nineteenth century: hauling
water, collecting firewood and coal, cooking, cleaning,
and tending crops.
At the same time, it was, in many villages, an African
tradition for chiefs and wealthier villagers to have
guardianship of children whose parents were either dead
or too poor to care for them. The extended family system
in Africa assumes that everyone is his brother's keeper;
it is one of our strengths. Likewise, it was common at
the time for chiefs who formed alliances with other
tribes or chiefs to offer women as wives and children as
wards to validate the agreements.
The American Colonization Society, recognizing how the
tradition could be used to spread Christianity among the
indigenous population, encouraged the settlers to take
local children into their homes. In many cases these
young people, once accepted into the family, were
treated equally and given the same duties,
responsibilities, and opportunities as the family's own
biological offspring. Often settlers grew so fond of
their wards that they provided for them in their wills,
as did Samuel C. Coker, a settler farmer from
Bensonville, who gave generous grants of lands to three
of his wards-provided, he wrote, they remain "among the
civilized elements."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Child Will Be Great
by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Copyright © 2009 by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Excerpted by permission.
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