'This is the time to get in front': Changing roles and opportunities for women in Liberia

African Affairs

Volumn 107, Issue 427, 2008, Pages 201-224

  Fuest, Veronika ^a  

^a MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER ISSUE; GENDER ROLE; PEACEKEEPING; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; WAR; WOMENS STATUS;

AFRICA; LIBERIA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WEST AFRICA;

EID: 42049089331     PISSN: 00019909     EISSN: 14682621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adn003     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. See also Philippa Atkinson and Edward Mulbah, 'NGOs and peace building in complex political emergencies: Community surveys from Liberia' (Peace Building and Complex Political Emergencies Working Paper Series No. 9, Institute for Development Policy and Management, Manchester, 2000), p. 18.
2. D. E. Dunn, A. J. Beyan, and C. P. Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of Liberia (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD, 2001), pp. 360-1;
3. Mary H. Moran and M. Anne Pitcher, 'The "basket case" and the "poster child": Explaining the end of civil conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique', Third World Quarterly 25, 3 (2004), pp. 501-19
4. Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The destruction of Liberia and the religious dimension of an African civil war (Hurst and Co., London,1999), pp. 143-4.
5. Ibid., p. 143
6. Interview, Monrovia, 16 February 2007.
7. Codou Bop, 'Women in conflicts, their gains and their losses' in Sheila Meintjes et al. (eds), The Aftermath: Women in post-conflict transformation (Zed Books, London and New York, 2001), pp. 19-34;
8. Meredeth Turshen, 'Women's war stories' in M. Turshen et al. (eds), What Women Do in Wartime (Zed Books, London and New York, 1998), pp. 1-26.
9. Meintjes et al., The Aftermath.
10. Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia and the editors, 'Hundreds of victims silently grieving' in Turshen et al., What Women Do, pp. 129-37;
11. United Nations Development Fund for Women, Gender Profile of the Conflict in Liberia (UNIFEM, New York, 2005).
12. Compare, for example, Okechukwu Ibeanu, 'Healing and changing: The changing identity of women in the aftermath of the Ogoni crisis in Nigeria' in Meintjes et al., The Aftermath, pp. 189-209.
13. For an illustrative case study of women's fragile positions and social tactics during the war cf. Mats Utas, 'Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering: Tactic agency in a young woman's social navigation of the Liberian war zone', Anthropological Quarterly 7, 2, (2005), pp. 403-30.
14. See also Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (eds), Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, armed conflict and political violence (Zed Books, London/New York, 2001), Inger Skjelsbaek and Dan Smith (eds), Gender, Peace and Conflict (Sage, London/Thousand Oaks, CA/ New Delhi, 2001).
15. Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay, and Meredeth Turshen, 'There is no aftermath for women' in Meintjes et al., The Aftermath, pp. 4-5.
16. Turshen, 'Women's war stories', pp. 20-1.
17. Gretchen Bauer and Hannah E. Britton, 'Women in African parliaments: A continental shift?' in Gretchen Bauer et al. (eds), Women in African Parliaments (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 2006), p. 11.
18. Ibid.
19. Liberia seeks to become model for good governance, with Africa's first elected woman president', International Herald Tribune, 16 December 2007, available at (1 August 2007).
20. Moran and Pitcher, 'The "basket case" and the "poster child"'.
21. For comprehensive discussions of gender roles in war and the gendered potentials of 'peace building', cf. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How gender shapes the war system and vice versa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001) as well as Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart (eds), Gender, Conflict and Peacekeeping (Rowman and Littelfield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2005).
22. Research involved interviews and group discussions with businesswomen, farmers, and urban men and women in the informal sector; interviews with key informants such as local authorities, leaders of women's organizations, NGO workers, and development agents; and participant observation in gender workshops and a women's conference.
23. Cf. D. Elwood Dunn and S. Byron Tarr, Liberia: A national polity in transition (Scarecrow Press, London, 1988).
24. Cf. Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy;
25. William Reno, 'The business of war in Liberia', Current History 95 (May 1996), pp. 211-15;
26. Paul Richards et al., 'Community cohesion in Liberia: A post-war rapid social assessment' (Social Development Paper No. 21, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005).
27. Andreas Mehler and Judy Smith-Höhn, 'Liberia: Ellen in Wonderland?', GIGA Focus Afrika 5 (May 2006), pp. 1-8.
28. Errol Miller, 'Gender, power and politics: An alternative perspective' in Skjelsbaek and Smith (eds), Gender, Peace and Conflict, p. 85.
29. This also applies to the Kruan-speaking southeast of the country, which has, however, different socio-political, agricultural and demographic features such as acephalous communities and out-migration of the Kru; cf. Mary H. Moran, 'Taking up the slack: Female farming and the "Kru problem" in southeastern Liberia', Liberian Studies Journal 11 2 (1986), pp. 117-24.
30. Brahima D. Kaba, Profile of Liberian Women in Marketing (University of Liberia, Monrovia, 1982), pp. 68-9.
31. Individual elders of the Sande society had a say in Poro matters, however; being beyond the age of biological reproduction, they were considered as cultural males.
32. Warren L. d'Azevedo, 'Some historical problems in the delineation of a central West Atlantic region', Annals New York Academy of Sciences 96 (1962), pp. 512-38.
33. Caroline Bledsoe, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1980), p. 110.
34. Mary H. Moran, Liberia: The violence of democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PN, 2006), pp. 40-8.
35. The famous Kpelle chief Suakoko, for example, has a reputation of having acted as go-between in a pending conflict between government armed forces and Kpelle chiefs at the beginning of the twentieth century, and is represented as a historical peacemaker today. Email communication, F. Siakor, 13 August 2007.
36. Bledsoe, Women and Marriage, p. 110.
37. Caroline Bledsoe, 'The political use of Sande ideology and symbolism', American Ethnologist 11, 2 (1984), pp. 455-67. Notwithstanding the absence of any comparable quantitative data on Liberia, formal leadership of women seems to have been more pronounced in the national arena of Sierra Leone's indirect rule. Significantly, the cases compiled by Hoffer clustered in the eastern areas with Poro/ Sande societies. Sande leaders sometimes mobilized large female interest groups to provide support for candidates in local or national elections.
38. Carol Hoffer, 'Mende and Sherbro women in high office', Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, 2 (1972), pp. 151-64.
39. Deborah L. Newman, The Emergence of Liberian Women in the Nineteenth Century (Howard University, Washington, DC, 1984), pp. 197-8, 378-9.
40. In the 1960s Monrovia was headed by a female commissioner. Sally Howe was elected to the House of Representatives, while Elizabeth Collins was appointed as Senator of Bong County and Ruth Sando Perry as Senator of Cape Mount County. For further cases of prominent Liberian women, cf. Dunn et al., Historical Dictionary of Liberia, pp. 361-2,
41. and Stanton Peabody, 'Women who made a difference: A special record', Liberian Studies Journal 31, 1 (2006), pp. 63-89.
42. A. D. Banks Henries, Women and Girls in Higher Education in Liberia (Ministry of Education, Monrovia, 1974).
43. Jeanette E. Carter, Liberian Women: Their role in food production and their educational and legal status (University of Liberia, Monrovia, 1982), p. 152.
44. Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership, 'Republic of Liberia', available at: (1 August 2007).
45. Carter, Liberian Women, p. 29.
46. Gerald E. Currens, 'Women, men, and rice: Agricultural innovation in northwestern Liberia', Human Organisation 35, 4 (1976), pp. 355-65,
47. Siapha Kamara, Processes of Agrarian Change and the Food Question in Liberia (Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1987).
48. A survey conducted among the Bassa in Monrovia in the late 1960s showed that 8 percent of the households were headed by women; cf. W. Penn Handwerker, 'Kinship, friendship, and business failure among market sellers in Monrovia, Liberia', Africa 43, 4 (1973), pp. 288-301.
49. Another survey conducted in Gbarnga in the late 1970s showed that 35 percent of the household heads were females: Karl-Heinz Hasselmann, 'Liberia: Geographical mosaics of the land and the people' (Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs and Tourism, Monrovia, 1979), p. 177.
50. See Bledsoe, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society;
51. Merran Fraenkel, Tribe and Class in Monrovia (Oxford University Press, London, 1964);
52. Veronika Fuest, 'A Job, a Shop, and Loving Business': Lebensweisen gebildeter Frauen in Liberia (LIT Verlag,M unster, 1996);
53. Mary H. Moran,' The market feeds me: Women and economic independence in Harper City, Liberia', Liberia-Forum 4 (1988), pp. 21-35.
54. Fuest, 'A Job, a Shop, and loving business' in Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy (eds), 'Wicked' Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 2001) provide an overview and case studies on independence and resistance strategies among African women.
55. Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy, p. 144.
56. Interview, educated woman, Gbarnga, 4 August 2005.
57. Compare, for example, Utas, 'Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering'. Famous women fighters include Ruth Milton, Martina Johnson, and Black Diamond. It is reported that hundreds of females served as bodyguards, and also as 'wives', of warlords Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor.
58. The higher estimates may be a result of the surrender of guns by civilian women at the disarmament cantonments. Owners of weapon stocks thus provided their female relatives or girlfriends with income opportunities (Interview, H. Togbah, Gbarnga, 16 August 2005). See also Wolf-Christian Paes, 'The challenges of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration in Liberia', International Peacekeeping 12, 2 (2005), pp. 253-61, who notes that out of about 102,000 'disarmed' people an indeterminate section probably never participated in active fighting but performed as fighters in the cantonments due to the shrewd 'commercialization' of the disarmament process.
59. For an analysis of opportunities and constraints of Sierra Leonean female ex-combatants and the dubious role of the UN in the demobilization and rehabilitation processes, see Anita Schroven, Women after War: Gender mainstreaming and the social construction of identity in contemporary Sierra Leone (LIT Verlag, Berlin, 2006). She also shows that communities and extended families provide less support to women than to men concerning cleansing rituals as prerequisites of reintegration (p. 53).
60. See also Utas, 'Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering', p. 405.
61. Compare, for example, Atkinson and Mulbah, 'NGOs and peacebuilding'.
62. Interview, Superintendent of the Bong County branch of the Liberian Market Association, Gbarnga, 27 February 2007. She also mentioned that the most important goods traded in the war were salt and Maggi cubes.
63. Interview, NGO activist, Monrovia, 9 March 2007.
64. For background and details on the 'Mandingo question' during and after the war, see Amos Sawyer, Beyond Plunder: Toward democratic governance in Liberia (Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO and London, 2005), pp. 62-5
65. and Christian K. Højbjerg, 'Masked violence: Ritual action and the perception of violence in an Upper Guinea ethnic conflict' in Nils Kastfeldt (ed.), Religion and African Civil Wars (Hurst and Company, London, 2005), pp. 147-71.
66. Adopted at the end of a conference of women activists on 30 March 2006 in Monrovia, presented to the government of Liberia, and published in the press. This and the following quote are from WANEP and WIPNET, 'Women's national agenda for peace, security and development in post-war Liberia. Adopted 30 March 2006, presented to the government of the Republic of Liberia' (Women in Peacebuilding Network, Monrovia).
67. Interview, Monrovia, 21 February 2007.
68. See also Moran and Pitcher, 'The "basket case" and the "poster child"'.
69. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this trend towards exogenously motivated organization provides new economic and political capital to local female leaders. The emergence of rural female 'development brokers', and their probable employment of international gender discourse, certainly deserves further research, especially since studies of this group have so far focused on male agency. Cf. T. Bierschenk, J.-P. Chauveau and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, Courtiers en développement: Les villages africains en quête de projets (Karthala, Paris, 2000).
70. See also Veronika Fuest, '"Women can do what men can do"? Refigurations of female identities in Liberia' in Jacqueline Knörr and Wilson Trajano Filho (eds), The Powerful Presence of the Past (forthcoming).
71. Moran, Liberia: The violence of democracy, pp. 40-6.
72. For the Kru see George Buelow, 'Eve's rib: Association membership and mental health among Kru women', Liberian Studies Journal 9, 1 (1981), pp. 23-33.
73. Hans D. Seibel and Andreas Massing, Traditional Organizations and Economic Development: Studies in indigenous cooperatives in Liberia (Praeger Publishers, New York, NY, 1974), pp. 176-81.
74. Speech given at the National Conference of the Women in Peacebuilding Network, 28 March 2006, Monrovia City Hall.
75. E.g., Christine Chinkin, 'Gender, international legal framework and peacebuilding' in K. H. Karamé (ed.), Gender and Peacebuilding in Africa (Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt, Oslo, 2004), pp. 27-46;
76. Mazurana et al. (eds), Gender, Conflict and Peacekeeping.
77. Chinkin, 'Gender, international legal framework and peacebuilding'.
78. See also AfricanWomen and Peace Support Group, LiberianWomen Peacemakers: Fighting for the right to be seen, heard, and counted (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 2004);
79. Moran and Pitcher, 'The "basket case" and the "poster child"';
80. and Nadine Puechgirbal, 'Involving women in peace processes: Lessons learnt from four African countries (Burundi, DRC, Liberia and Sierra Leone)' in Karamé (ed.), Gender and Peacebuilding in Africa, pp. 47-66.
81. Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy, p. 144
82. In the 23 ministries at least 15 deputy ministers posts and 16 assistant minister posts have been occupied by women. Total figures may be higher.
83. In addition there is one assistant superintendent in Bomi County.
84. The US ambassador, quoted by Morrison O. G. Sayon, 'Ellen promises to empower women', The Inquirer (Monrovia), 14 March 2006, http://allafrica.com.
85. The figures in these tables have been compiled from: European Commission to Monrovia and Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 'A profile of members of the 52nd legislature of Liberia' (EC and KAF, Monrovia, April 2006);
86. WONGOSOL, 'Liberian women in national leadership' (calendar, Women NGOs Secretariat of Liberia, Monrovia, 2007);
87. and Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership, 'Republic of Liberia'.
88. E.g., the 'Ellen Development Fund' to support Liberian market women, and the national Girls' Education Policy providing scholarships to young Liberian girls to go to school and affording young women the opportunity to attend teacher training institutes. Cf. Jamesetta B. Horace, 'Liberia: Govt drafts national policy on girls education', The Analyst (Monrovia), 13 April 2006, http://allafrica.com.
89. Ministry of Education, 'Liberia needs assessment - education' (report, Ministry of Education, Monrovia, 2003).
90. Cf. Renate Bosch and Horst Waskow, 'Das Schulwesen Liberias' in Robert Kappel (ed.), Liberia: Unterentwicklung und politische Herkunft in einer peripheren Gesellschaft (Institut für Afrika-Kunde, Hamburg, 1986), p. 277.
91. Ministry of Education, 'Ministry of Education school census 2006. General school details - preliminary tables' (Ministry of Education, Monrovia, 2006).
92. A general enthusiasm about education is reflected in the currently massive demand for schools and both internal and external support of the education sector. However, in the long run this policy may prove to be a cul-de-sac as total employment opportunities are likely to remain minimal.
93. Examples include the Mother Paten College, Democratic Education Network - Liberia, Lutheran World Service, Christian Health Association of Liberia, WIPNET.
94. Veronika Fuest, '"Modernes" wissen - "moderne" macht: Zur kulturellen Konstruktion formaler Bildung am Beispiel von Geheimbund-Gesellschaften in Liberia und Sierra Leone', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 124 (1999), pp. 73-95.
95. Gretchen Bauer and Hannah E. Britton, 'Women in African parliaments: A continental shift?' in Bauer et al. (eds), Women in African Parliaments, p. 11.
96. The above is a notable exception.
97. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The merging of development and security (Zed Books, London, 2005), pp. 2-11.
98. UN organizations and departments are required to promote gender equality within their own structures and to design their policies and programmes in gender-sensitive ways. Cooperation partners of the UN - local NGOs - are therefore also formally obliged to submit themselves to gender-mainstreaming policies. For an analysis of factors constraining the effective implementation of such policies, cf. Angela Raven-Roberts, 'Gender mainstreaming in United Nations peacekeeping operations: Talking the talk, tripping over the walk', inMazurana et al. (eds), Gender, Conflict and Peacekeeping, pp. 43-64.
99. With external support WIPNET, for example, has run a 'voices of women' radio programme for the past two years in order to provide a platform for rural women to be involved in national debates. In 2006 the programme ran in three counties.
100. Meintjes et al., 'There is no aftermath for women', p. 13.
101. Turshen, 'Women's war stories', pp. 20-1.
102. Cf. Stephen Ellis, 'The mutual assimilation of elites: The development of secret societies in twentieth-century Liberian politics' (paper presented at the conference 'The Powerful Presence of the Past', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, October 2006).
103. The influence of the Sande has probably contributed to the striking absence of public campaigns to fight female genital mutilation (FGM), which are so common in other African countries. In Sierra Leone mere rumours of anti-FGM sentiments sufficed to seriously impede the chances of a female presidential candidate in the 2002 elections; see Jacqueline Knörr, 'Zur sozialen Bedeutung weiblicher Geheimbünde in Freetown, Sierra Leone' (public lecture, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, 25 January 2006).
104. See also Mary H. Moran, 'Carrying the queen: Identity and nationalism in a Liberian queen rally' in Colleen B. Cohen, R. Wilk, and B. Stoeltje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, contests, and power (Library of Congress, New York, 1996), pp. 147-265.
105. Mehler and Smith-Höhn, 'Liberia: Ellen in Wonderland?'.
106. Dorina Bekoe and Christina Parajon, 'Women's role in Liberia's reconstruction' (USIP Peace Briefing, May 2007), available at: (1 August 2007).
107. US$750 for a senator, for a member of the House of Representatives US$500. The Carter Center and National Democratic Institute, 'Liberia election watch' (briefing, No. 2, 12 August 2005).
108. See, for example, David Mosse, 'Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice', Development and Change 3, 4 (2004), pp. 639-71.