Interviews with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

We were going through the period of conflict and people were dying and destruction was all over. It was the Liberian women who stood up, who gathered, women from all walks of life, you know, from the grass roots, from the professionals– they all got up and then marched every day.

They sat in the sun and the rain, you know, being able to petition the African leaderships in other countries to– to bring peace to the country. That´s already been produced in a very major documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell, and that tells the whole story of the role that the women play, very courageous role in a society at the time where tolerance was at a very low level.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the president of Liberia. She was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Sirleaf served as minister of finance in Liberia until the 1980 coup d’état by Samuel Doe. She left the country and served in senior positions with the World Bank and later Citibank.

Sirleaf returned to Liberia in 1985 and was arrested and imprisoned by the Doe government. After her release, she went into exile in the United States where she remained throughout a brutal Liberian civil war between the Doe government and a rebel group headed by warlord Charles Taylor. Following a peace agreement ending the war, Sirleaf returned home to run unsuccessfully against Taylor for the presidency. Taylor’s election has been attributed in part to a fear by the Liberian public that he would restart the war if he lost.

Following a second Liberian civil war, Taylor was exiled in 2003. Sirleaf again sought the presidency and was elected in 2005, the first woman democratically elected to serve as a head of state in Africa.

In 2008, Sirleaf published her memoir, “This Child Will Be Great.”