Married at seventeen, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa's first elected woman president
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf married at seventeen, raised four sons and kept books for a car-repair shop. She went on to earn a Harvard public administration degree, survive a ten-year prison sentence, and in 2006 take office as Liberia's president, the first woman elected to lead any African country.
Born in Monrovia in 1938, she had a Gola father and a mother of Kru and German descent. Both parents came from poor rural backgrounds and were raised by established Americo-Liberian families in the capital. Her father, the son of a minor Gola chief, took the surname Johnson out of loyalty to Liberia's first native-born president and became the first person from an indigenous group elected to the national legislature. Because of this upbringing and her Western schooling, many assume she is Americo-Liberian, a label she rejects.
In 1961 she went with her husband, James Sirleaf, to the United States, earning an accounting degree in Madison, Wisconsin; the marriage ended over his abuse. She then took an economics degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and a master's from Harvard Kennedy School. Back home as an assistant finance minister under William Tolbert, she caused a stir by telling the Chamber of Commerce that corporations were damaging the economy by hoarding profits or shipping them abroad. She quit over a spending dispute, worked for the World Bank, and returned as finance minister in 1979.
On 12 April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe seized power, had Tolbert assassinated and executed most of the cabinet. Sirleaf briefly ran a state development bank before criticising the new rulers and fleeing to the United States that November, where she worked for Citibank and Equator Bank. She came back to run for the Senate in 1985, was arrested for attacking the military government and sentenced to ten years, but was released. In 1997 she came second to Charles Taylor in the presidential vote.
She won the 2005 election, was sworn in on 16 January 2006 and won again in 2011. That year she shared the Nobel Peace Prize for her work drawing women into peacebuilding. In June 2016 she became the first woman to chair the Economic Community of West African States, and she served as Liberia's 24th president until 2018.
Source: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
