'Mama Ellen' Pens a Riveting 'Tell-All' Bio

Special to the NNPA from GIN

(GIN) - Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, sometimes known as “Mama Ellen” has written a riveting tell-all book about her life from early youth to her accession to the country’s highest post.

In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf tells of the years spent as the daughter of parents born into poverty and the path which took her to a career in government finance and international banking and in 2006, the presidency of Liberia.

“I wasn’t exactly catapulted into all this, you know — I’ve paid the price and earned the stripes,’’ President Sirleaf Johnson told the magazine MORE in a recent interview. “I’ve navigated in a man’s world. I took positions, and I stuck with them. I carried on with whatever I thought was the right thing to do and always made sure that my performance was equal to or better than theirs.’’

Married at 17, Johnson Sirleaf traveled to the U.S. with her husband, who had been awarded an agriculture scholarship. While here, she studied business at a small school in Madison, Wisconsin (where she also swept floors and waitressed at a drugstore lunch counter, and became a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers). Years later, she would receive a master’s in public administration from Harvard and hold senior positions at the United Nations, the World Bank, and Citibank.

Her marriage, however, was less successful; she left her husband after many years of abuse, she says in her memoir.

She recounts her struggles at home and abroad; watching dictator Samuel Doe and later Charles Taylor destroy Liberia with little interference from the U.S.

The memoir, titled “This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President,” is published by HarperCollins and is available in bookstores and online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Story posted: 4/11/2009

» World News Archive
» Subscribe to The Gary Crusader