Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the 24th and current President of Liberia, in office since 2006. She served as Minister of Finance under President William Tolbert from 1979 until the 1980 coup dtat, after which she left Liberia and held senior positions at various financial institutions. She placed second in the 1997 presidential election won by Charles Taylor. She won the 2005 presidential election and took office onJanuary 2006, and she was a successful candidate for reelection in 2011. Sirleaf is the first elected female head of state in Africa.
Sirleafs father was Gola and her mother had mixed Kru and German ancestry. While not AmericoLiberian in terms of ancestry, Sirleaf is considered culturally AmericoLiberian by some observers or assumed to be AmericoLiberian. However, Sirleaf does not identify as such. Sirleafs father, Jahmale Carney Johnson, was born into an impoverished rural region. He was the son of a minor Gola chief named Jahmale and one of his wives, Jenneh, in Julijuah, Bomi County. Her father was sent to Monrovia, where he changed his surname to Johnson due to his fathers loyalty to President Hilary R. W. Johnson, Liberias first nativeborn president. He grew up in Monrovia, where he was raised by an AmericoLiberian family with the surname McCritty. Sirleafs father later became the first Liberian from an indigenous ethnic group to sit in the countrys national legislature. Sirleafs mother was also born into poverty in Greenville. Her grandmother, Juah Sarwee, sent Sirleafs mother to Monrovia when Sirleafs German g
Source: Wikipedia