The men fell in line behind George Weah and then complained that the women supporting Ellen were sexist.
It was a remarkable display. Given the choice between a football player with no credible college education, but two fantastic goals against Bayern and Verona, and a Harvard-educated development expert, the top male presidential candidates who fell short in the runoff, with the exception of Brumskine, endorsed the football player. Sherman, Tubman, Matthews—all hurried to back Weah.
Years later, Tubman explained his rationale. He endorsed the former football player not because he thought Weah was more qualified to be president than Ellen but because he knew he had a better chance of rising to a top position in a Weah government than a Sirleaf government. “I knew that I could have more influence with George Weah,” he explained in an interview in 2013, “whereas Ellen Johnson Sirleaf already had lots of people backing her who were just like me, so my voice would be muted.”
Weah, honing his message explaining why he, and not the Old Lady, should run Liberia, settled on an “educated people failed” theme. “You know book, you not know book, I will vote for you,” became the Weah runoff slogan. And that theme was endorsed by the failed male presidential candidates who endorsed him. Even Sherman, the Harvard-trained lawyer, was claiming Weah’s candidacy represented the future of Liberia.
Liberia had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. So an illiterate population would identify with a president who dropped out of school, right?
Wrong. What the men who endorsed that strategy failed to realize is how much that very idea was angering the market women. Those women may not have been educated themselves, but they worked day and night in the fields and the market stalls to send their children to school. Now the men were telling them education wasn’t important?
Just as the men fell in behind Weah, the women fell in behind Ellen.
It didn’t happen all at once. Women political candidates had appeared all over the ballot in the elections, running for Senate and House, on the same ticket as Weah and Tubman and Sherman. Even Parleh Harris had competed in the first round on the Liberia Destiny Party as Nathaniel Barnes’s vice presidential candidate.
But once the time came for campaigning for the runoff, those allegiances peeled away even the women who were staunch members of parties that opposed Ellen’s Unity Party abandoned the men and took up the now familiar mantra “Vote for woman!”
Door-to-door the market women passed out T-shirts and handing out fliers. They slept on the side of the road at night, curled up on their mats. They walked from village to village, exhorting women to vote for woman.
Weah’s supporters responded by predicting that if he lost, the country would go back to war. “No Weah, no peace!” they chanted.
Weah himself fed that view. He suggested that he had actually won the first round, that he had received 62 percent of the vote, and that the Elections Commission had engaged in fraud to keep him from being declared the outright winner. One of his campaign surrogates told supporters that only fraud would keep Weah from winning and that Weah’s supporters wouldn’t “accept anything less than victory.”
Thus the runoff started resembling past elections, like the one in 1985 in which Doe’s supporters had suggested the same thing: Vote for Doe or the country goes back to war. Ellen raised a stink against such talk, and members of the international community took up the call, urging Weah and his supporters to refrain from such bullying. But in Liberia, this tactic was how men managed to get their way: they simply threatened the people.
Except that, in November 2005, they appeared to have met their match. Because the women had their own tricks, tricks that would make Weah’s threats look like boys’ play.
* * *
“You want beer? Just gimme your voter ID card, I will buy you beer.”
“I say, we buying voter ID cards oh. Ten Liberty dollars for one.”
“Who looking for money? Just bring your voter ID card.”
The group of women had stationed themselves at a bar near the ELWA Junction, a major intersection in Monrovia along the road to Robertsfield. Armed with Liberian dollars—so-called Liberty dollars—which were virtually worthless on the international market but good for small purchases within the country, the women set to work luring the young men in a time-honored fashion. Except this time it wasn’t sex on the table. And this time the women were the ones with the cash and the young men were the ones with the commodity for sale.
“Some of those boys were finish stupid,” one market woman recalled with a smirk. She declined to give her name to the interviewer but was happy to go into detail about what she called the women’s “crafty technique.”
“We were crafty oh!” she said, one silver tooth glinting in the sunshine as she laughed. Many of the young men thought they were done with voting after the first round and didn’t understand they would need their ID cards again if their man was to actually assume the presidency. Others knew and didn’t care; late in the evening of a muggy hot day, the lure of a crisp, cold, and malty Club Beer far outshone whatever benefits they thought their voter card could bring them.
As for the ones who were too smart to sell their voter card—well, their mothers simply stole them. “Some of those old ma them, when their children had hard head, said they still voting for George Weah, they stole their children’ them voting cards,” Parleh Harris said, looking sheepish and defiant at the same time.
One market woman, who agreed to be referred to as “the Oma,” said she snuck into her son’s room while he was sleeping, slipped his voter ID out of his wallet, and buried it in the yard.
Years later there was no shame among the women who stole their sons’ ID cards. “Yeah, I took it. And so what?” the Oma said. “That foolish boy, wha’ he knew? I carried him for nine months. I took care of him. I fed him when he wa’ hungry. Then he will take people country and give it away? You wi’ give elephant head to child to carry?”
* * *
A few days before the runoff, Gayflor called a meeting at the Ministry of Gender. Tensions were high. Both Weah and Ellen had been bouncing all over the country, campaigning. Ellen was pushing through on a punishing schedule that left her younger aides panting. One morning she left Monrovia before dawn for Buchanan, on the coast, a hundred miles away. A hundred miles on Liberia’s dismal roads usually meant a four-hour drive, but it took Ellen all day because at every village, every town, every orange stand on the side of the road, people came out to wave and cheer, and she stopped to talk with them. She avoided mention of Weah and talked instead about what she planned to do to get the country back on track.
Back in Monrovia, she attended Gayflor’s meeting in a room at the Ministry of Gender on Gurley Street, notorious as the street where Monrovia’s prostitutes worked. Because the minister was not supposed to be holding political rallies, the meeting was billed as a simple women’s meeting, meant to encourage women to vote. The list of invitees was long—Gayflor basically invited every female political candidate, no matter what party she belonged to, along with market women, female lawyers, and anyone else she could think of who lacked a Y chromosome. She had even invited the Mandingo women. Liberia in 2005 was too bombastically Christian to elect a Muslim president, but with the Mandingo population at over 30 percent, they were a force. She called it an “interfaith” meeting.
Ellen arrived as the meeting was beginning. Some two hundred women had gathered in the musty hot room. Someone had opened the windows so a little air could get in, but that served only to let in more mosquitoes, and there were sounds of smacking as women tried to swat the mosquitoes before they could draw blood.
When all the women were assembled, Gayflor spoke. “Liberia,” she said, “is ready to produce the first female president.”
The room buzzed as it sank in that Gayflor was abandoning any pretense at neutrality. Women from competing political parties looked at each other, then at Ellen, who herself looked shocked.
“Women, oh women,” Gayflor said, “we are here today because if anyone can change things in this country, it is this woman.” And she pointed at Ellen.
One by one, women in the audience stood up and spoke. They pledged their support for Ellen and exhorted others to work on her behalf. “We will campaign in the market! In the hospital! In the church!”
Two women from Weah’s party stood up, shaking, and were asked, Will you support Ellen?
They nodded.
All eyes turned to Charles Taylor’s wife, Jewel Taylor. She had won a Senate seat in the general election a few weeks before, representing Bong County. Now she was asked, Will you support Ellen?
And she answered, “Yes.”
From the back of the room, one woman said softly, “We will win.”
Then another voice joined, and another, and another. “We will win.”
Soon everyone in the room, all two hundred women, were standing up and shouting, “We will win! We will win!”
“We will win!”
“We will win!”
Their voices poured out the windows, spilling out onto Gurley Street and onward to Center Street. In Mamba Point, people could hear “We will win!”
“We will win!”
Finally Ellen stood up. Not one for showing emotion, on this night she looked overcome. She struggled to stand upright, then slumped against the wall. Then she got herself in order again.
The room got quiet as the women waited for her to speak.
“If I were a crying woman,” she said, “I would be crying right now. You have humbled me.”
The repercussions came the next day. Gayflor arrived at work to find reporters camped out on the ministry’s steps. She invited them into her office and sat down behind her desk. The microphones and tape recorders hit the desk in front of her, ready to record her defense of her actions. The questions came furiously. Wasn’t the meeting illegal? Isn’t it a conflict of interest for the gender minister to endorse a female candidate? Isn’t it wrong to make the whole election about sex?
Gayflor was past the point of backing down. “When you men were falling behind each other, y’all didn’t know it was gender?” she shot back. “When Winston Tubman was endorsing George Weah, that one wasn’t gender? When Varney Sherman, all of them, was falling behind the football player, that one wasn’t gender?”
She continued, “You take a former football player and give him our country? Liberia is not a learning ground!”
And she had one last shot to fire. “Let me give you a goodbye statement,” the soon-to-be-former minister said. “Mrs. Sirleaf will be the next president of this country.”
In the streets of Monrovia, the signs for Ellen had changed. Now they read, “Ellen: She’s our man.”
* * *
On Tuesday, November 8, the people of Liberia woke up and went to the polls for the second time in four weeks. There was a real and palpable sense in the air that something big was happening.
Throughout the country, international observers stationed themselves at polling places and voting booths; some 230 agencies, from the Carter Center to the European Union, showed up to chronicle the proceedings. Helicopters from the United Nations mission hovered overhead, a constant presence above the voting booth lines.
Lusu Sloan got up at 5 a.m. She went straight to the polls, sitting outside for three hours, so that she could be one of the first to vote as soon as the booth opened. Then, after voting, she headed to the market at Red Light, just outside Monrovia, to hustle the market women there to go vote. From table to table, stall to stall, Lusu went. “Y’all go vote, oh,” she said.
“We coming,” the answer came back.
At forty-three, Sloan might as well have carried the entire weight of the market women’s burdens on her back. By the time she went to the polls on the day of the runoff, she had more than two decades of making market under her belt. As she hustled from poll to poll, urging the women to vote, she thought about the years that had brought her to this point.
She thought about 1989, when Charles Taylor first entered Liberia, igniting the Civil War. In her heart, she believed that if the market women had not been around then, Liberia would have collapsed. She thought about the times when the market women were the only ones willing to walk to get food. She thought about the weeks when there was nothing to eat in Mamba Point, when all the food to be had was across the city, at Red Light. During those times, Sloan and other market women piled goods into buckets upon their head, ducking and weaving through warring battle lines.
She thought about the time she and several market women walked all the way to Guinea, illegally, because Monrovia had no Maggi bouillon cubes for seasoning, no salt, no nothing to cook with the dry rice.
They ran into a group of rebel fighters in the bush near the Guinean border. “Where y’all going?” the fighters asked, shoving their guns into the women’s faces. Sloan and the other market women started begging the fighters. “We just trying to carry food back to Monrovia oh,” they said.
One of the fighters pushed Sloan to the ground and climbed on top of her. “I know this woman, she from Bong Mines,” he grunted. “She married to soldier. Her husband da Krahn man.” The words struck terror in Sloan, since the fighters were sworn enemies of Doe’s Krahn soldiers.
She pleaded with the man. Her husband had died years before. He wasn’t Krahn. “I beg you, that not me you thinking of,” she insisted.
Eventually he rolled off her and let her go.
On the day of the runoff, Sloan thought about another night years past, when she and other market women, returning from Guinea with their purchases, encountered another group of soldiers. This time they were Guinean soldiers, and they surrounded the women as they tried to cross the border. They told the women to lie down in the dirt. Sloan had a bag of coffee on her head; she placed it next to her and lay down, heart pounding.
In French, the soldiers fired questions. The women didn’t speak French, but they all started pleading to be let go.
“Oh my people, I beg y’all,” Sloan said. “We don’t have food to eat in Monrovia. We are your sisters. Please forgive us.”
For more than an hour, the soldiers kept the women at gunpoint on the ground. Many times during that hour, Sloan thought she was going to die.
But again the soldiers let the women go.
Years later, on the morning of November 8, 2005, Sloan thought about those terrible nights in the bush, as she went from market to market, stall to stall, to corral her market women friends to go vote. “Y’all remember,” she said, “vote for woman.”
Sloan prayed that Ellen would prevail that day. She thought about the taunts from the Weah boys, who called Ellen “that Old Ma.” One of them, the day before, had said to Sloan, “That Old Ma, she will soon die, oh.”
“Y’all must sit down there, that Oma will soon kick the bucket,” he said.
But Sloan felt she knew better.
“Vote for woman,” she told the women. “Y’all go vote. Vote for woman.”
* * *
Helpful poll workers at a polling station in Sinkor were allowing pregnant women and nursing mothers to cut to the front of the line, so Bernice Freeman, Louise Yarsiah, and a handful of other women were passing around babies and toddlers.
“You want borrow de baby?” Bernice was grinning at one woman, sneaking a furtive look over her shoulder. “Put de baby on your back.” To another woman, she advised, “Act pregnant. If dey think you pregnant you can vote in front.”
It was unclear whether the poll workers noticed how many different women were carrying the same baby.
Meanwhile, at her house near Fish Market, Ellen woke up on runoff day, showered, and got dressed, putting on the colorful gown and head-tie she had chosen for this, the biggest day of her life. Her sister, Jennie, and Jennie’s husband, Jeff, had moved back to Liberia to support Ellen’s campaign, and the rest of the family, including Ellen’s brother Carney, were on board as well.
As Ellen always did, she ate breakfast—oatmeal and cassava and fish gravy—in the dining room that overlooked the yard. Then she climbed into the backseat of her SUV, and her driver took her to the polls.
Her name was first on the ballot, in black and white: “Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen (president) and Boakai, Joseph (vice president), Unity Party,” ahead of “Weah, George Manneh (president) and Johnson, J. Rudolph (vice president), Congress for Democratic Change Party.”
Ellen checked the box next to her name. Then she went home to await the results.
* * *
“The Oma in the lead, oh!”
A few miles down the road from Ellen’s house, Parleh Harris was with a bunch of women glued to the radio that evening, listening to election news, when an informant came in with the update. The official results weren’t in yet; polls had just closed, and the final tally wouldn’t be known for weeks. But already there was a whisper in the air from spies posted at different polling places. People weren’t supposed to disclose voting trends at the polling booths, for fear of swaying those who hadn’t cast their vote yet. But all across the country, Ellen’s army of women was finding ways to skirt the regulation.
For Lusu Sloan, the workaround came by reverting to an old nursery school chant used to teach children the alphabet: “S-O So, G-O Go, N-O No.” Every Liberian kid knows this chant.
For Sloan on runoff night, the chant took on a new meaning. Hanging outside a polling booth, she nervously asked an informant how the vote was going.
He eyed the voting officials in attendance, then grinned. “S-O So, G-O Go, N-O No,” he sang. Then he added, “U-P Up!”
Unity Party, up!
Sloan started dancing and singing in glee: “S-O So, G-O Go, N-O No, U-P Up!”
“U-P Up!”
“U-P Up!”
When the election officials glared at her, she sassed them. “You can’t stop me from singing my S-O So!” she said. “U-P Up!”
Across Monrovia, the women took up the chant. “U-P Up!”
They went to bed that night singing.
* * *
The Old Lady was in the lead.
On Wednesday morning, she woke up and walked into her living room to find it already full of campaign aides excited about the preliminary returns from Lofa and Nimba counties. She wasn’t just in the lead; she was in the lead by a lot: 60 percent to 40 percent.
It was a lead that she never relinquished during the days of counting that followed. Weah’s supporters demonstrated in the streets, yelling, “No Weah, no peace.” Young men threw stones at the American Embassy to display their ire. But none of that changed the numbers in the vote count.
U-P Up.
For forty-three days, Weah protested the election.
On the Saturday after the runoff, pickup trucks mounted with loudspeakers drove up and down Tubman Boulevard, blasting music and urging Weah’s supporters to go to a rally the next day to protest the rigged election.
Weah’s protest continued even after all the international organizations on hand to monitor the elections deemed them free and fair. It continued after the heavy hitters on the African political scene, from Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria to Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, issued statements calling the runoff transparent, peaceful, and fair.
It wasn’t until December 21 that Weah told a news conference in Paynesville that he was dropping his challenge against the election results, to “allow peace” in Liberia.
His news conference was little-noted because a month before that, on November 23, the National Elections Commission had declared game, set, and match to Ellen. It dismissed Weah’s complaints of fraud and declared that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had been elected the twenty-third president of Liberia. In all of Africa, this was a feat no woman had ever before accomplished.
The Old Lady would be Madame President. Out of the twenty-five years of carnage that was Liberia’s descent into hell had emerged a new leader, and that person was a sixty-seven-year-old grandma.
“I felt a chill that day, straight on my spine,” Parleh Harris recalled.
Ellen too was feeling chills. Heading back to her house from her campaign headquarters on November 23, she was juggling congratulatory phone calls from officials all over the world.
In the backseat of her SUV, her American friend Steve Cashin turned to her, grinning. “The White House just called. Bush wants to talk to you,” he said, then recited a very secure, encrypted phone number. “Call that number.”
A minute later, Ellen was on the phone with the American president, accepting his congratulations and best wishes.
Then the phone went dead.
Liberia in 2005 had no landlines thanks to the war, so everyone used cell phones. They paid for service from Lonestar Cell by purchasing scratch cards from grona boys on the side of the road. The president-elect of Liberia had just run out of credit on her scratch card. “I need to buy another scratch card!” she exclaimed. Her driver immediately pulled over to the side of Tubman Boulevard as she and Cashin rolled down the windows and called to the boys, “Y’all plee bring people some scratch cards!”
Soon everyone in the car was frantically scratching out the codes on the cards to plug into Ellen’s phone so she could call back President Bush and continue their nice chat.
Turning to Cashin, Ellen smirked. “This isn’t very presidential at all, is it?”
* * *
When word spread that Ellen’s victory was free and clear, the markets of Monrovia emptied as the women who minded the stalls at Rally Time and Nancy Doe and Red Light and Paynesville ran, jubilant, into the streets.
“Go to school, go to school!” some of them yelled.