Woman Gave Birth to Baby Girl in Liberia and She Laugh
How Liberian Women Delivered Africa's Get-go Female President
MONROVIA, Liberia — Bernice Freeman was chatting with some market women, trying to explicate why it was so important that they leave their food stalls to vote for the outset woman to exist elected president of an African state, when she noticed some boys laughing nearby, waving something white.
Information technology was October 2005, the first presidential election afterward xv years of a hideous civil state of war in Liberia. On the election was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global technocrat with then much government experience it practically oozed from her pores, and a group of men, well-nigh notably the professional person soccer player George Weah.
Like many of the i.five one thousand thousand women in Republic of liberia who had survived the ceremonious state of war, Ms. Freeman had personally witnessed acts of violence so barbarous she even so had nightmares. Soldiers had gutted her viii½-months-pregnant cousin. Drugged-up rebels wearing Halloween masks had murdered her friends. Ms. Freeman herself had knelt in the dirt, praying, while henchmen loyal to the president had chambered rounds of their machine guns on orders to shoot her and the other women praying with her one afternoon.
Ms. Freeman had seen it all. But withal, she was unprepared for the sight of the young men laughing nearby as she campaigned for a female president. The boys had taken women'due south panties, had smeared the crotches with tomato paste and were waving them at the women — their unsubtle way of saying that a woman could not be president.
But instead of making Ms. Freeman and the other women embarrassed, the heckling only angered them.
"You know what?" one of the undecided women told Ms. Freeman, looking at the boys in cloy. "We volition vote. Don't worry, we volition vote."
And vote they did. Shut to 80 percent of the Liberian women who flooded the polls during the country'due south commencement postwar presidential election voted to usher a woman into power for the first fourth dimension on a continent that for centuries had been the world'south most patriarchal.
Eleven years before Pantsuit Nation became a secret Facebook grouping for women who supported Hillary Clinton in America and "I'one thousand With Her" buttons and bumper stickers sprouted on lapels and S.U.Five.south, the women of Liberia held a chief grade in how to get a adult female elected president. Now, as the American women who supported Mrs. Clinton grapple with the whys of last November'south election, the story of how, 4,500 miles away, the women of Liberia upended centuries of male rule to achieve what their American counterparts could non has acquired a sharp and keen relevance.
Imagining an Culling
The Republic of liberia story is one of extremes. Information technology is almost as if for Liberians to contemplate installing a woman equally president, the land needed to first go over a cliff and then steep that there seemed nowhere left to drop. Mothers saw their children kidnapped, drugged and forced to take up artillery in the country'due south never-ending ceremonious state of war. More than 70 percentage of Liberian women were raped during the state of war years. Starving immature girls gnawed on tree bark for sustenance, while horrified children were forced to watch their sisters, mothers and grandmothers gang-raped in front of them.
What happened in the state of war years then devastated Liberian women, who blamed the men who waged the state of war for the ensuing horrors, that many of them came to view Mrs. Sirleaf not necessarily equally the better of the presidential candidates but, rather, as the only alternative to putting a man back in power in a place that men had just run across the ground.
Masawa Jabateh, who had seen her 3-year-former daughter dice from malnourishment during the war, said her despair became infused with a blind fury when she saw men campaigning to exist president in 2005, especially since the leading candidate was Mr. Weah. "Those men desire put some grona boy in the chair who don't know what nosotros doing? Then we can become back to state of war again? No," she said.
Her thought process was straightforward: She was "voting for woman," she said.
"Vote for Woman," in 2005, became the de facto campaign slogan of Ms. Sirleaf's run for the presidency. Information technology all started on the morning of May 2, 2005, a week into the voter registration period for the looming presidential elections, when Vabah Gayflor, the minister for gender, woke up to discover that women had not been registering to vote.
A string of men were tossing their hats into the band for the presidency, including Mr. Weah, a renowned athlete who had won the Ballon d'Or and been named FIFA globe player of the year and African player of the century.
Dissimilar his rivals, Mr. Weah was not tainted past any association with those who had brought Liberia to ruin over the by fifteen years, but he had no higher education. (His list of a available'due south degree in sports management from Parkwood Academy in London was a subject area of a scandal after news accounts surfaced calling the school an unaccredited diploma factory requiring no bodily written report.)
At the other end of the spectrum was Mrs. Sirleaf. A erstwhile finance minister and jailed dissident, she had a full-blooded that included the United Nations, the Earth Bank and the International Monetary Fund. She had transformed herself from an abused married woman, cowering and hunched in the forepart seat of her husband's automobile while he slapped her, to an international bureaucrat attempting what no woman had ever washed before: winning, by popular vote, the correct to pb an African land.
To the Weah supporters, there was no competition. Grandmother versus soccer star? Only to women like Ms. Gayflor, Ms. Jabateh and Ms. Freeman, there was also no contest. "You will have our state, our baby, and throw the baby away to football player? I beg y'all, no," Ms. Gayflor said.
Ms. Gayflor's job as gender minister was supposed to be about helping women and children get admission to health care, schoolhouse feeding programs (in a postwar country with inappreciably any schools) and rape support.
But she decided to redefine her role: getting a adult female elected president. And she was not happy with the news from the National Elections Commission: Of the 100,000 Liberians who had registered to vote in the first week of the monthlong registration bulldoze, merely 15 percent were women.
Who was registering instead? Former combatants, from all the armed groups that had fought in the state of war. Ms. Gayflor was appalled.
Getting Women to Vote
Huddling with Etweda Cooper, the women's activist known throughout Liberia as "Sugars," Ms. Gayflor knew they had to have activity fast.
The men were belongings mass rallies. But market women didn't take time to get to mass rallies. They were busy making market. Ms. Gayflor and Mrs. Cooper realized they would accept to try a different strategy.
Quickly they organized a grouping to use the radio stations to plead: "Women, oh women! Y'all got to annals to vote." They fanned out to the Monrovia markets.
At showtime, some of the market women balked; they had their wares and their babies to tend. But Mrs. Cooper was prepare for them with babysitters and stall tenders. "We will mind it for yous," she said. "Go register."
Information technology was not enough to stay in Monrovia. The Liberian bush loomed, big, imposing and filled with village women. The women bought bullhorns and scattered their troops along the route. "Women, oh women!" they yelled into the bullhorns. "Go register."
By the terminate of the registration period, the last figures came out: Some 1.5 million Liberians out of the country's population of three million had registered to vote.
50-ane percent of those registered were women.
Unlike American presidential campaigns, the Liberian entrada season begins two months before Election Day. Liberian ballot rules dictate that a winning candidate has to get 50 per centum of the vote — a quirk that guaranteed that in a crowded field of 22 candidates, in that location would be a runoff. So the central for Mrs. Sirleaf was to survive the first round by coming in 2d at to the lowest degree, so that she would and then stand up alone confronting Mr. Weah.
As a authorities minister, Ms. Gayflor was not allowed to show favoritism for whatsoever candidate, let solitary campaign on one's behalf. So she and Mrs. Cooper devised a strategy: They would nowadays their efforts as simply an attempt to empower women. Ms. Gayflor would not sully her chiffonier position by telling women whom to support. (She left that to Mrs. Cooper.) Instead, she would only encourage women to exercise their correct. She organized women'southward rallies where she gave speeches exhorting the crowd to vote.
"I'1000 non telling you who to vote for, women!" she said. "Just make sure you vote."
Right after Ms. Gayflor spoke, Mrs. Cooper — not constrained by whatever neutrality vows — shouted at the crowd, "Vote for woman!"
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Everywhere, the women'southward rallies followed the same script:
Ms. Gayflor: "Women, oh women! If y'all got to necktie your infant on your back soon in the morning, I beg y'all, go vote!"
Mrs. Cooper: "Vote for woman!"
Ms. Gayflor: "Even cocky your infant got poo-poo diapers, put information technology downwardly, get vote!"
Mrs. Cooper: "Vote for woman!
At the rallies, the women passed out plastic bags of drinking h2o, a rare and precious commodity in a place where people regularly drank from unsanitary wells and dirty rivers.
Making History
The rainy season was catastrophe, merely the air was nevertheless stewy when Election Twenty-four hours dawned. Of the i.five million people registered to vote, some 900,000 showed up at the polls. They came in wheelbarrows and wheelchairs. They came with babies on their backs. They came the nighttime before, some sleeping on the difficult ground outside the polling booths then they could vote when forenoon came.
The results began to trickle in that night. As expected, Mr. Weah was in first place. But he wasn't shut to l pct. And Mrs. Sirleaf was right behind him, where she needed to exist.
Time for the real battle. The soccer player versus the 67-twelvemonth-old grandmother.
The men fell in line backside Mr. Weah and complained that the women supporting Mrs. Sirleaf were sexist. Given the choice betwixt a soccer player with no credible higher education and a Harvard-educated development expert, the top male person presidential candidates who fell short of the runoff, with one exception, endorsed the soccer player.
In the meantime, Mr. Weah, honing a bulletin explaining why he, and not Mrs. Sirleaf, should run Liberia, settled on an "educated people failed" theme.
But what the men who endorsed that strategy failed to realize was how much that very idea was angering the market women. Those women may not have been educated themselves, just they worked in the fields and the market stalls to ship their children to schoolhouse. Now the men were telling them that education wasn't important. Only equally the men roughshod in behind Mr. Weah, the women roughshod in behind Mrs. Sirleaf.
The marketplace women went door to door, passing out T-shirts and fliers. They slept on the side of the road at dark, curled up on their mats. They walked from village to village, calling out the now familiar mantra "Vote for adult female!"
Mr. Weah's supporters responded by promising that if he lost, the country would become back to state of war. "No Weah, no peace!" they chanted.
Thus the runoff started resembling past elections, like the ane in 1985, in which Samuel Doe's supporters had suggested the same thing: Vote for Mr. Doe or the country goes back to war.
Except that in Nov 2005, this tactic appeared to have met its match. Considering the women had their own tricks, tricks that would brand Mr. Weah'southward threats look like boys' play.
"You want beer? Just requite me your voter ID bill of fare; I volition purchase you beer."
"I say, nosotros buying voter ID cards, oh. Ten Freedom dollars for 1."
"Who looking for money? Just bring your voter ID bill of fare."
A group of women had stationed themselves at a bar nearly a major intersection, luring young men in a fourth dimension-honored fashion. Except this time the women were the ones with the cash, and the young men were the ones with the article for sale.
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"Some of those boys were finish stupid," a market woman, Nancy Nagbe, recalled with a smirk. "We were crafty, oh!"
Many of the immature men thought they were done with voting afterward the outset round and didn't understand that they would demand their IDs again. Others knew and did non care; tardily in the evening of a muggy hot 24-hour interval, the lure of a well-baked, cold and malty Club Beer far outshone whatsoever benefits they thought their voter menu could bring them.
As for the ones who were likewise smart to sell their voter carte du jour — their mothers simply stole them, recalled one gender ministry official, Parleh Harris.
One market woman said she sneaked into her son's room while he was sleeping, slipped his voter ID out of his wallet and buried it in the yard.
"Yes, I took it. And and so what?" the woman said. "That foolish boy, what he knew? I carried him for nine months. I took care of him. I fed him when he was hungry. Then he will take people country and give it away?"
Ms. Gayflor, by now, was sailing perilously close to getting fired for illegally campaigning as a government minister. A few days earlier the runoff, she called a meeting in a room at the gender ministry. She invited every female political candidate, no matter what party she belonged to, along with market women, female person lawyers and anyone else she could think of who lacked a Y chromosome.
That night, in the stuffy room, the women all stood, 1 by one, and pledged to support Mrs. Sirleaf, who was so overcome afterward she could barely stand up upright. "If I were a crying adult female," she said, "I would be crying right now. You take humbled me."
The repercussions came the next day. Ms. Gayflor arrived at piece of work to find reporters camped out on the ministry building's steps. The questions came furiously.
Ms. Gayflor was past the point of bankroll down. "You take a old football player and give him our state?" she shot back. "Liberia is not a learning basis!"
She had one final shot to fire. "Let me give y'all a goodbye statement," the soon-to-exist-former minister said. "Mrs. Sirleaf will be the adjacent president of this land."
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, the people of Liberia went to the polls for the 2nd time in four weeks. There was a palpable sense in the air that something large was happening. International observers stationed themselves at polling places and voting booths; some 230 agencies, from the Carter Center to the European Spousal relationship, showed up to chronicle the proceedings. Helicopters from the United Nations mission hovered overhead, a abiding presence above the voting booth lines.
But the helicopters could non run into what was going on at a polling station in Sinkor. Helpful poll workers were allowing significant women and nursing mothers to cut to the front end of the line. So Ms. Freeman — who had been heckled weeks before by the young men waving white panties smeared with tomato paste — and a handful of other women were passing around babies and toddlers.
"You desire infringe the baby?" Ms. Freeman grinned at ane woman, sneaking a furtive expect over her shoulder. "Put the babe on your back." To another woman, she advised: "Act pregnant. If they think you significant you can vote in forepart."
It was unclear whether the poll workers noticed how many dissimilar women were carrying the aforementioned baby to vote on that Election Day in November 2005.
And when the National Elections Commission, on November. 23, announced the election results — Mrs. Sirleaf's 59.4 percentage to Mr. Weah'south 40.6 percent — Ms. Freeman wore a smile on her face.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/world/africa/liberia-president-ellen-johnson-sirleaf-women-voters.html
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