Iron Ladies Liberia_Reflection Memo

In my first class reflection memo I would like to reflect on the movie Iron Ladies of Liberia which follows the first year of the first African female president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in office. The comments I would like to make are related to the journalist (and director as well if I understood correctly) who is leading the audience throughout the documentary and to the situation of African females in the highest positions of a state. To be honest, I was truly surprised when it was said that the documentary focuses on the female president of Liberia Ellen Sirleaf. I know that my lack of knowledge and probably also my biases against Africa in general contributed to my suprise but I did not expect a female president to run any African country. It is also because there are (were) not many female presidents in Europe or any other continent and even despite the situation is getting better, I still did not expect any woman to become a head of an African country in next few years (how much I was wrong can be illustrated not only with Ellen Sirleaf but also with Joyce Hilda Banda, former president of Malawi or Ameenah Firdaus Gurib-Fakim, current president of Mauritius (YNaija 2015)). I was even more astonished (in a very positive way) when it was said that president Sirleaf appointed other women to the highest posts (if I remember correctly the Ministers of Justice, Commerce and Finance and also Chief of Police, which is pretty unusual, were women). The position of Ellen Sirleaf, when she was appointed to the office, was definitely not easy at all. She (and the whole government) had very hard tasks ahead of them, they basically had to rebuild the whole country and transform it from devastated, patrimonial state into prospering, democratic country. Liberia suffered from long civil war which resulted in high rate of uneymployment, land problems, displacement of many people, corruption and massive international debts, which seemed to me as the most crucial issue for president Sirleaf to resolve. This only problem was truly solved at the end of the document (I was wondering if also other issues which were touched by her had the same successful end and why it was not included in the documentary as well but the reason may be that the topic of international debt was truly the most important one and it had to be solved first in order to solve other problems. The other issues could have been resolved as well but since the documentary focused only on the first year of the presidency, we have no knowledge about it). President Sirleaf also had to deal with the inclusion of the soldiers who fought for the former President Charles Taylor and who were causing troubles because of their made up stories of not receiving their retirement wage. I would argue that President Sirleaf coped with this situation greatly because she listened to the demands of the former soldiers but at the same time she showed them her toughness. She was willing to make a compromise but she was definitely not willing to step back from her principles which had to be especially hard because she was under many pressures. I also expected that some opponents of President Sirleaf would attack her „just“ because she is woman and therefore not able to run the country properly (as this attitude is nothing new). Of course, there were many dissatisfactions among Liberian citizens, some even said that the current government was not different from Charles Taylor's government, but nobody said that she or the other ladies in the government were incapable of leading country „just“ because they are women. However, this could be because of the not really objective attitude of journalist Siatta Scott Johnson who is the director of the documentary. Even despite the fact that President Sirleaf definitely is an inspiring woman, sometimes it seemed to me that Johnson tried to picture her in the best light possible and focused only on all the good things she did and not on the possible negative aspects of her presidency (one explanation can be that there were truly no even slight failures but it is hard to believe since President Sirleaf is still just a human). I also wonder if it was neccessery to include President Sirleaf's sister in the documentary as she only told us how hard President Sirleaf is working and how she was always supposed to do „something big“. As I indicated earlier, I think that the journalist Johnson was too interested in the documentary and therefore not really objective. I was thinking about somebody else who would shoot the documentary in a neutral way but then I realized that it is especially hard since no Liberian is neutral (everobody supports somebody which is projected in their opinions and therefore it is maybe not possible to actually shoot an objective documentary). One option could be that somebody out of Liberia would shoot the movie but again, there is another problem of not experiencing the things Liberian citizens went through and therefore not understanding properly the current situation. I am also not sure if it was absolutely necessary to include Johnson's dispute over the land she bought. I understand her intention to show the real problems Liberian were facing after the chaos of the civil war but, in my opinion, she could have shot a dispute of somebody else since I believe that she was definitely not the only person who was struggling with land problems. On the other hand, I would argue that at this moment there was first (and as far as I remember also the only one) indication of some criticism of President Sirleaf (Johnson had the land dispute with a bodyguard of President Sirleaf and it was visible that she was little angry because the changes she expected were not happening as fast as she would like. On the other hand she acknowledged that it was hard to rebuild the country so her anger could have been interpreted not as a criticism of Sirleaf but just as an act of frustration). What I found especially limiting was the fact that Johnson decided to monitor only the first year of Sirleaf's presidency. I am aware of the fact that monitoring all the six years (Constitution of the Republic of Liberia 1980: 19) of her time in the office would be extremely demanding but maybe it would be worth the effort to see if her government was doing as great as in the first year and if the desirable transition to democratic country and all her other efforts were successful.