Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by Scully Pamela;

Author:Scully, Pamela; [Scully, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2016-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Daily Talk newsstand in Monrovia, reporting the policies of the incoming president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in December 2005. Photo by Chris Guillebeau.

The challenges Sirleaf faced were huge. Governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island recalled in an interview that when he landed in Liberia during the election, his driver described the country, only two years out of war, as “this is where Mad Max meets the postapocalypse.”12 War-ravaged boys and young men, high on heroin and drunk with terror and bravado still roamed the streets. People tried to recover from histories of rape and abuse often far from their villages, which they had fled either in terror or shame, or both. The infrastructure of the country, never great to begin with, was devastated. Indeed, it hardly existed beyond the confines of Monrovia. In the city, which had had electricity in some neighborhoods, people had stolen the wires to sell. People lived on top of crumbling piles of bricks, the detritus of mortar shells and bullets all around. Old mansions, once glamorous, now were covered with grime, full of people with nowhere else to go. A whole generation had not gone to school, while children born at the beginning of the millennium would be able to go if only there were schools to go to. Liberia was an aching wound. After a shocking civil war, one could describe Liberia as a country with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It would take a miracle to make things better, and for a while it seemed a miracle had come in the form of Sirleaf. However, she is after all only human. Perhaps it would take more than drive and a particular kind of expertise to heal a country so depressed and mutilated by its histories of inequality and brutality.

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