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THIS CHILD WILL BE GREAT by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

THIS CHILD WILL BE GREAT

Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President

by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf with Kim McLarin

Pub Date: April 7th, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-135347-5
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

A carefully written memoir of life in Liberia, “a wonderful, beautiful, mixed-up country struggling mightily to find itself.”

So writes the country’s sitting president, who came to office in an improbably constitutional way. Sirleaf’s bloodline is instructive. She is part European, her maternal grandfather a German expelled from the country during World War I as a move to prove Liberia’s loyalty to the United States; her mother was “a fair-skinned child with long, wavy hair,” not the easiest thing to be in the ethnically torn nation. Her father was “tall, brown-skinned, and stylish…a son of a Gola chief from Bomi County.” Through luck and hard work, she attained a fine education at the College of West Africa. However, she notes, the view of her nation that she took away was the Americo-Liberian one, for Liberia had been settled in part by repatriated slaves who did not always fit in—and whose descendants still do not. After studying in America, she became an economic advisor to Liberia’s president in the late 1970s, a time when the economy began to falter, which in turn undid the near century of comparative political calm the country had enjoyed. The next two decades saw a coup during which Sirleaf was imprisoned, then the onset of a civil war that “killed a quarter of a million of our 3 million people and displaced most of the rest.” That she survived the succeeding regimes is testimony to her diplomatic skill and good fortune. Recounting these events and her rise to power, Sirleaf contextualizes contemporary events in the bigger picture. One of Africa’s chief problems, she writes, is debt, and one way to settle debt in the days of the Cold War was to align with the United States or the Soviets, at which point “the money flowed in”—and the blood began to flow out, which explains much recent history.

Of interest to students of modern Africa, but less well written than Helene Cooper’s remarkable memoir The House at Sugar Beach (2008), which addresses some of the same events.