“We see her as one of us,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to Liberia, said, describing Sirleaf’s appeal to Western diplomats and dispensers of aid. Thomas-Greenfield, an African-American who originally came to Liberia as a doctoral student studying rice production in the late ’70s, and who heard about Sirleaf then, stressed the importance of Sirleaf’s having worked, while in exile, as a senior U.N. official and as a Citicorp vice president in Nairobi in charge of the bank’s African operation. Sirleaf, she said, straddles worlds with agility. The president is able to address Liberian constituents in ways that disarm distrust of her “book” learning; she has managed to work with old political enemies now in the Liberian Legislature; and, the ambassador said: “She speaks our language. We know, with her, that good governance and corruption are being taken seriously. She’s tremendously well liked. We know our dollars are being well spent. And then there’s the fact that she’s a woman — the first. We don’t want to see her fail.”

Thomas-Greenfield described Sirleaf’s lobbying style: “I wouldn’t say that she’s charismatic. It’s more that she’s very serious, very focused. Down to the most minute detail.” This was easy to imagine, given Sirleaf’s attention to the fence amid all else that is awry after a war that unleashed widespread rape and the conscription of child soldiers, perhaps as young as 7, some of them forced to kill their own parents. “She’s bringing this country out of darkness into light,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Not all Liberians, though, are so enthusiastic. Plenty do recognize Sirleaf’s favored status among international benefactors — and Liberians tend to be keenly aware of the importance of foreign benevolence. But Sirleaf has been in office four years now, and there is a level of impatience with her leadership that I didn’t hear on my last trip to Liberia a year ago. She may still be beloved by some as “Mama Ellen,” and she may be likely to win another term, yet many Liberians are resentful that they continue to count on packs of vigilantes to protect them, because the police — whose starting salary is just over $4.50 a day — are ineffectual and relentlessly corrupt and the courts too slow to matter. Bureaucrats high and low go on requiring bribes and siphoning government funds in ways that have long robbed the country of infrastructure and debilitated the economy. “We can’t stamp it out, not yet,” Sirleaf said to me, clenching her fists in frustration over the country’s bone-deep corruption. She spoke of being torn between firing every transgressing official and keeping enough ministers and staff members at their desks so the government can go on operating, no matter how badly it is compromised. And meanwhile, unemployment in the country, whose population shifted heavily to Monrovia during the war, stands as high as 85 percent by some estimates. Instilling faith that Liberia’s economic wasteland can be redeemed, however gradually, may be the only way to ensure long-lasting peace, especially with the U.N. troops expected to start pulling out after next year’s elections. Over the radio, Sirleaf put the emphasis on gradually. “I beg you I no magician,” she said, letting a plea seep into her lecture. “I can’t just wave a magic wand.”

The president has a light, red-brown complexion; skin that serves as a particular reminder of one cause of her country’s implosion. Liberia was founded — as a coastal settlement in 1822 and as Africa’s first republic in 1847 — by free American blacks, and the settler class that developed did all it could to replicate the American society it had sailed away from. The men wore top hats and tails; the women, bonnets and bustles. The republic designed its flag after the Stars and Stripes of the United States, named its capital after the U.S. president James Monroe and subjugated the tribes within its borders in ways that sometimes resembled outright slavery.

Not until 1980 did Liberia have its first indigenous ruler, Samuel Doe, an army sergeant whose coup can be understood as a surge of long-­suppressed rage. He disemboweled the president, then executed 13 government ministers before a crowd of hundreds on Monrovia’s beach. Today, the divide between the people Liberians refer to as “native” and those called “Americo-Liberian” still plagues the nation. And Sirleaf, whose complexion is lighter than just about any Liberian’s, has pointed out frequently and emphatically that her color is misleading, that she actually has no Americo-Liberian blood whatsoever, that she does not belong to the racial elite whose greed and historic oppression is named by some as the origin of Liberia’s brutal collapse.

Sirleaf’s complexion and her privileged childhood make for a complicated story. She is the granddaughter, on her father’s side, of a prominent rural chief and one of his eight wives, and on her mother’s of a market woman and a German trader who was soon banished from Liberia, along with all Germans, as Liberia proclaimed its loyalty to the United States at the start of World War I. It’s the German lineage that lightens Sirleaf’s skin, but the access to education and power that elevated her girlhood stems from a Liberian tradition known as the ward system.

Since the early years of the republic, the poor have often sent their sons and daughters to live with the better off, to serve them in return for the promise of schooling and the hope of other opportunities. In this way, indigenous children have cleaned the homes and cooked the meals of the settler class. They have belonged, more or less, to their warder families, as something between slaves and foster children; they have generally been given their warders’ last names. Over generations, the tradition hasn’t eradicated distinctions of blood and status — the schooling provided can be meager and the chance for advancement minimal — but it has blurred the lines. And in Sirleaf’s case, it eliminated them. Sent from his remote village to Monrovia as a ward, her father was treated relatively well, in Sirleaf’s telling, because his father, as a chief, had become acquainted with the nation’s president. Her father apprenticed himself to a lawyer, then practiced as a lawyer and, before a stroke paralyzed him in his 40s, became the first indigenous man elected to Liberia’s House of Representatives. Sirleaf’s mother, after a cruel stint with her first settler family, was claimed by another warder and raised generously — in part because of her nearly white skin.