Skin-deep success

THE security guards barely shrugged when a small white man with tinted glasses, his African-American female companion and a bevy of Washingtonian movers and shakers swept through the faux-marble lobby of the Royal Grand Hotel in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. High-flying friends often drop in to see Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the country’s Nobel-prizewinning president. This time, on August 26th, it was Bono, an Irish singer turned philanthropist, and Condoleezza Rice, America’s former secretary of state, along with no fewer than seven American senators, who came to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the end of a civil war that once made Liberia a byword for barbarity.