His full name was William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, but to 1.5 million Liberians he was simply "Old Daddy." As President for 27 years of the Ohio-size West African rubber republic, he was the oldest, established, permanent, doting, elected patriarch on the continent. Indeed, so popular was Old Daddy with his subjects that the only thing that could oust him from office was death. The ouster came last week, when the 75-year-old President succumbed to complications following a prostate-gland operation in a London hospital.
To Westerners, Tubman was a faintly improbable figure in...
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