Leymah Gbowee
Encyclopedia
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist
responsible for leading a women's peace movement
that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War
in 2003. This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia
, the first African nation with a female president. She, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize
"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
An article on Gbowee in O: The Oprah Magazine painted this backdrop:
on 1 February 1972. At the age of 17, she was living with her parents and two of her three sisters in Monrovia
, when the First Liberian Civil War erupted in 1989, throwing the country into bloody chaos until 1996. "As the war subsided.... I learned about a program run by UNICEF,... training people to be social workers who would then counsel those traumatized by war," wrote Gbowee in her 2011 memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers. She did a three-month training, which led her to be aware of her own abuse at the hands of the father of her two young children, son Joshua "Nuku" and daughter Amber. Searching for peace and sustenance for her family, Gbowee followed her partner, called Daniel in her memoir, to Ghana where she and her growing family (her second son, Arthur, was born) lived as virtually homeless refugees and almost starved. She fled with her three children, riding a bus on credit for over a week "because I didn't have a cent," back to the chaos of Liberia, where her parents and other family members still lived.
In 1998, in an effort to gain admission to an associate of arts degree program in social work at Mother Patern College of Health Sciences, Gbowee became a volunteer within a program operating out of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, where her mother was a women's leader and Gbowee had passed her teenage years. It was called the Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program (THRP), and it marked the beginning of Gbowee's journey toward being a peace activist:
As she studied and worked her way toward her associate of art degree, conferred in 2001, she applied her training in trauma healing and reconciliation to trying to rehabilitate some of the ex-child soldiers of Charles Taylor's army. Surrounded by the images of war, she realized that "if any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers". Gbowee gave birth to a second daughter Nicole "Pudu", making her the mother of four, as she engaged in the next chapter of her life's journey – rallying the women of Liberia to stop the violence that was destroying their children.
and works by "Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and the Kenyan author and conflict and reconciliation expert Hizkias Assefa."
By late 1999, "WANEP was actively seeking to involve women in its work and I was invited to a conference in Ghana," wrote Gbowee. At a follow-up WANEP conference in October 2000, Gbowee met Thelma Ekiyor of Nigeria, who was "well educated, a lawyer who specialized in alternative dispute resolution." Ekiyor told Gbowee of her idea of approaching WANEP to start a women's organization. "Thelma was a thinker, a visionary, like BB and Sam. But she was a woman, like me."
Within a year, Ekiyor had secured funding from WANEP and had organized the first meeting of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) in Accra, Ghana, attended by Gbowee:
in the United States, either as former students or (in Assefa's case) as an ongoing professor.
Following a WIPNET training session in Liberia, Gbowee and her allies, including a Mandingo-Muslim woman called Asatu, began by "going to the mosques on Friday at noon after prayers, to the markets on Saturday morning, to two churches every Sunday." Their flyers read: "We are tired! We are tired of our children being killed! We are tired of being raped! Women, wake up – you have a voice in the peace process!" They also handed out simple drawings explaining their purpose to the many women who couldn't read.
By the summer of 2002, Gbowee was recognized as the spokeswoman and inspirational leader of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
, described as a peace movement
that started with local women praying and singing in a fish market. Working across religious and ethnic lines, Gbowee led thousands of Christian
and Muslim
women to gather in Monrovia
for months. They prayed for peace, using Muslim and Christian prayers, and eventually held daily nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins in defiance of orders from tyrannical President Charles Taylor.
They staged protests that included the threat of a curse
and a sex strike
: "The [sex] strike lasted, on and off, for a few months. It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention." In a highly risky move, the women finally occupied a field that had been used for soccer; it was beside Tubman Boulevard, the route Charles Taylor traveled twice a day, to and from Capitol Hill. To make themselves more recognizable as a group, all of the women wore T-shirts that were white, signifying peace, with the WIPNET logo and white hair ties. Taylor finally granted a hearing for the women on April 23, 2003. With more than 2,000 women massed outside his executive mansion, Gbowee was the person designated to make their case to him. Gbowee positioned her face to be seen by Taylor but directed her words to Grace Minor, the president of the senate and the only female government official present:
to negotiate with the rebels from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
and another newer rebel group, MODEL.
In June 2003, Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to put pressure on the warring factions during the peace-talk process. At first the women sat in a daily demonstration outside the posh hotels where the negotiators met, pressuring for progress in the talks. When the talks dragged from early June through late July, with no progress made and violence continuing in Liberia, Gbowee led dozens of women, eventually swelling to a couple of hundred, inside the hotel. They then "dropped down, in front of the glass door that was the main entrance to the meeting room." They held signs that said: "Butchers and murderers of the Liberian people -- STOP!" Gbowee passed a message to the lead mediator, General Abubakar (a former president of Nigeria), that the women would interlock their arms and remain seated in the hallway, holding the delegates "hostage" until a peace agreement was reached. Abubakar, who proved to be sympathetic to the women, announced with some amusement: "The peace hall has been seized by General Leymah and her troops." When the men tried to leave the hall, Leymah and her allies threatened to rip their clothes off: "In Africa, it's a terrible curse to see a married or elderly woman deliberately bare herself." With Abubakar's support, the women remained sitting outside the negotiating room during the following days, ensuring that the "atmosphere at the peace talks changed from circuslike to somber."
The Liberian war ended officially weeks later, with the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement on August 18, 2003. "But what we [women] did marked the beginning of the end."
In addition to bringing an end to 14 years of warfare in Liberia, this women's movement led to the 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia, the first elected woman leader of a country in Africa. Sirleaf is co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. In Sirleaf's re-election campaign of 2011, Gbowee endorsed her.
Gbowee expressed particular concern for the "psychic damage" borne by Liberians:
Amid the destruction and unending needs, Gbowee was appalled by the arrogance, ignorance and overall cultural insensitivity of the United Nations agencies dispatched to help disarm the country, keep the peace, establish procedures for democratic governance, and initiate rebuilding efforts. "People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they're not stupid (Gbowee's emphasis). They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked." Gbowee advocated for involving Liberian civil society, especially women's organizations, in restoring the country. She grew frustrated with the way the "UN was spending many millions of dollars in Liberia, but most of it was on [their own] staffing resources.... If they had just given some of that money to the local people, it would have made a real difference."
By the late fall and winter of 2003-04, "the world of conflict resolution, peace-building and the global women's movement" was calling Gbowee to write papers, come to conferences and otherwise explain the experience and views of WIPNET. Thelma Ekiyor encouraged Gbowee to overcome her lack of self-esteem among "highly intelligent people who held master's degrees and represented powerful institutions" by reading and studying further to understand the theories circulating in the world of peacebuilding. She read The Peace Book by Louise Diamond, known for advocating multi-track diplomacy
, and The Journey Toward Reconciliation and The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, both written by John Paul Lederach
, the founding director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University
. She went to a USAID conference in New York, her first trip out of Africa, to a conference in South Africa, and to Switzerland where she dealt with the Nigerian in charge of UN programs in Liberia.
Gbowee studied with Hizkias Assefa, whose writings she had read five years earlier when she first began working for St. Peter's Lutheran Church on trauma healing. She also studied with Howard Zehr
, "who taught me the concept of restorative justice," whereby healing occurred through the joint efforts of victims and offenders to repair the harms done. She thought restorative justice was particularly applicable to Africa: "Restorative justice was...something we could see as ours and not artificially imposed by Westerners. And we needed it, needed that return to tradition. A culture of impunity flourished throughout Africa. People, officials, governments did evil but were never held accountable. More than we needed to punish them, we needed to undo the damage they had done.... When I left EMU, I knew there was more here for me. Somehow I would find a way to come back."
She returned for a round-table called Strategies for Trauma Healing and Resilience in the summer of 2005 and then enrolled as a residential, full-time master's degree student in "conflict transformation and peacebuilding" at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding
in 2006-07:
In September 2006, just as Gbowee was embarking on her first full semester of graduate school, she went to New York City to address the UN on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the passage of Resolution 1325, which dealt with protecting women from gender-based violence and involving them in UN-linked peace efforts. While in New York, she received a call from Abigail Disney
, a descendant of the founders of the Walt Disney Company, a feminist, and a philanthropist. Disney and a collaborator, Gini Reticker, wanted to talk with Gbowee about their desire to make a documentary about how the women of Liberia rallied themselves to force the men to stop battling.
By the time Gbowee finished her coursework at EMU on April 30, 2007, and returned to her children in Liberia in May 2011 – where her parents had been caring for them – she realized that her nine months away "nearly broke all of us." In Virginia, she had lived with "a cold that never went away" and she "felt panic, sadness, and cold, swirling blackness" as she faced "being sued by former friends at WANEP over our desire to move in a new direction." Her impending graduate degree (conferred at the end of 2007), growing fame, and other changes in her life strained the relationship she had with a Liberian man named Tunde, an employee of international agencies who had functioned as a father figure for her children for a decade, from the early period of the Liberian women's peace movement through Gbowee's graduate studies at EMU (for which he had paid the tuition). They broke up and by early 2008 Gbowee was in a relationship with a Liberian information technology expert whom she identifies as James. He is the father of her sixth child, a daughter named Jaydyn Thelma Abigail (nicknamed "Nehcopee"), born in New York City in June 2009.
In April 2008, when Gbowee's family and friends gathered to celebrate the 14th birthday of her eldest daughter, Amber, it was clear that Gbowee had developed a serious alcohol problem. In her memoir, Gbowee explains that she had turned to alcohol for about a decade to cope with the loneliness of constant separations from her family, the strain of poverty and war-engendered trauma, and the stress of never-ending demands on her time. During Amber's birthday party, Gbowee's children noted that she drank 14 glasses of wine. The next day she passed out. When again conscious, suffering from an ulcer, she begged James to take her to the doctor: "Then I saw the kids gathered around us, their terrified, helpless faces. After all their losses, this would be the final one. No. Not possible. It might sound too easy, but that was the end for me. I still don't sleep easily and I still wake up too early, but I don't drink anymore."
Gbowee's exposure to the New York philanthropic social set, facilitated by Disney (who had become a close friend), appeared to open the door for a series of awards. The first, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, came in early 2006, and then they began to arrive in accelerated fashion: recognition by Women's eNews, the Gruber Prize for Women's Rights, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award, the Living Legends Award for Service to Humanity, and several more. In July 2011, EMU announced that Gbowee had been named its "Alumna of the Year." (Gbowee's eldest son, Joshua “Nuku” Mensah, entered EMU as a freshman in 2010, overlapping by one year with Sam Gbaydee Doe's eldest daughter, Samfee Doe, then a senior.) The crowning honor came in October 2011 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee made Gbowee one of three female recipients of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Gbowee told the EMU students that she went from being an angry, broke, virtually homeless, 25-year-old mother of four children with no idea of what her future might be, to listening to the voice of God in 1997. She said God spoke to her through a five-year-old boy, a son whom she had nicknamed Nuku. Comments made by Nuku made her realize that she had succumbed to “crippling hopelessness,” and that her low self-esteem and sense of helplessness were destroying her family, which was already under assault from Liberia’s brutal warfare. Gbowee said she began taking one tiny step at a time, asking for God’s help with each step. And that God sent her angels in the form of human beings who reached out a hand at just the moment when she was most desperate.
As suggested by the interfaith character of the Liberian women's movement, Gbowee noted that others may derive the same support from religious faiths different from hers:
In an interview with Odyssey Networks, Gbowee said that God could also be referred to as a "Higher Power." She stressed that with a Higher Power accompanying you, you can "rise up and do something to change your situation." She advised: "Don't wait for a Gandhi, don't wait for a King, don't wait for a Mandela. You are your own Mandela, you are your own Gandhi, you are your own King."
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
, which consists of scores of film and audio clips from the war period. It took Best Documentary Feature in the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It has been broadcast across the United States as part of the “Women, War & Peace” series, which aired over five successive Tuesdays in October and early November 2011 on public television stations. Pray has been used as an advocacy
tool in conflict and post-conflict zones, such as Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, South Africa, Rwanda, Mexico, Kenya, Cambodia, Russia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the West Bank: "The reaction was remarkably similar: no matter how different the country and the society, women recognized themselves and started talking about how they could unite to solve their own problems."
In the documentary, Gbowee emerges as someone able to laugh and enjoy life, despite what she has lived through: "Gbowee comes across as a sharply strategic, scrappy, political maestro interfaith mobilizer of merriment. Not the balloons-confetti-cupcakes-clown-type fun, but rather solidarity-inspiring conviviality. You see women dancing, singing, smiling, wearing beautiful, white-as-doves clothing, and you even see laughter during sit-ins and protests."
, Ghana
, which builds relationships across the West African sub-region in support of women’s capacity to prevent, avert, and end conflicts. She is a founding member and former coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). She also served as the commissioner-designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Peace activist
This list of peace activists includes people who proactively advocate diplomatic, non-military resolution of political disputes, usually through nonviolent means.A peace activist is an activist of the peace movement.*Jane Addams*Martti Ahtisaari...
responsible for leading a women's peace movement
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace is a peace movement started by women in Liberia, Africa thatbrought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Organized by social worker Leymah Gbowee, the movement started with local women praying and singing in a fish market...
that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War
Second Liberian Civil War
The Second Liberian Civil War began in 1999 when a rebel group backed by the government of neighbouring Guinea, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy , emerged in northern Liberia. In early 2003, a second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, emerged in the south, and...
in 2003. This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia
Liberia
Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
, the first African nation with a female president. She, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.-Background:According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who...
"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
An article on Gbowee in O: The Oprah Magazine painted this backdrop:
The Liberian civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 with only brief interruptions, was the result of economic inequality, a struggle to control natural resources, and deep-rooted rivalries among various ethnic groups, including the descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country in 1847. The war involved the cynical use of child soldiers, armed with lightweight Kalashnikovs, against the country's civilian population. At the center of it all was Charles Taylor, the ruthless warlord who initiated the first fighting and would eventually serve as Liberian president until he was forced into exile in 2003."
Early life
Leymah Gbowee was born in central LiberiaLiberia
Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
on 1 February 1972. At the age of 17, she was living with her parents and two of her three sisters in Monrovia
Monrovia
Monrovia is the capital city of the West African nation of Liberia. Located on the Atlantic Coast at Cape Mesurado, it lies geographically within Montserrado County, but is administered separately...
, when the First Liberian Civil War erupted in 1989, throwing the country into bloody chaos until 1996. "As the war subsided.... I learned about a program run by UNICEF,... training people to be social workers who would then counsel those traumatized by war," wrote Gbowee in her 2011 memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers. She did a three-month training, which led her to be aware of her own abuse at the hands of the father of her two young children, son Joshua "Nuku" and daughter Amber. Searching for peace and sustenance for her family, Gbowee followed her partner, called Daniel in her memoir, to Ghana where she and her growing family (her second son, Arthur, was born) lived as virtually homeless refugees and almost starved. She fled with her three children, riding a bus on credit for over a week "because I didn't have a cent," back to the chaos of Liberia, where her parents and other family members still lived.
In 1998, in an effort to gain admission to an associate of arts degree program in social work at Mother Patern College of Health Sciences, Gbowee became a volunteer within a program operating out of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, where her mother was a women's leader and Gbowee had passed her teenage years. It was called the Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program (THRP), and it marked the beginning of Gbowee's journey toward being a peace activist:
The THRP's offices were new, but the program had a history. Liberia's churches had been active in peace efforts ever since the civil war started, and in 1991, Lutheran pastors, lay leaders, teachers and health workers joined with the Christian Health Association of Liberia to try to repair the psychic and social damage left by the war.
As she studied and worked her way toward her associate of art degree, conferred in 2001, she applied her training in trauma healing and reconciliation to trying to rehabilitate some of the ex-child soldiers of Charles Taylor's army. Surrounded by the images of war, she realized that "if any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers". Gbowee gave birth to a second daughter Nicole "Pudu", making her the mother of four, as she engaged in the next chapter of her life's journey – rallying the women of Liberia to stop the violence that was destroying their children.
Starting with trauma healing
In the spring of 1999, after Gbowee had been at the Trauma Healing project for a year, her supervisor, Reverend Bartholomew Bioh "BB" Colley, introduced her to Sam Gbaydee Doe (no relation to the former Liberian president by the same first and last name), a "passionate and intelligent" Liberian who had just earned a master's degree from a Christian university in the US that specialized in peace-building studies. Doe was the executive director of Africa's first regional peace organization, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), which he had co-founded in 1998 in Ghana. Encouraged by the Lutheran reverend she calls "BB", Gbowee began reading widely in the field of peacebuilding, notably The Politics of Jesus by Mennonite theologian John Howard YoderJohn Howard Yoder
John Howard Yoder was a Christian theologian, ethicist, and Biblical scholar best known for his radical Christian pacifism, his mentoring of future theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, his loyalty to his Mennonite faith, and his 1972 magnum opus, The Politics of Jesus.-Life:Yoder earned his...
and works by "Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and the Kenyan author and conflict and reconciliation expert Hizkias Assefa."
By late 1999, "WANEP was actively seeking to involve women in its work and I was invited to a conference in Ghana," wrote Gbowee. At a follow-up WANEP conference in October 2000, Gbowee met Thelma Ekiyor of Nigeria, who was "well educated, a lawyer who specialized in alternative dispute resolution." Ekiyor told Gbowee of her idea of approaching WANEP to start a women's organization. "Thelma was a thinker, a visionary, like BB and Sam. But she was a woman, like me."
Within a year, Ekiyor had secured funding from WANEP and had organized the first meeting of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) in Accra, Ghana, attended by Gbowee:
How to describe the excitement of that first meeting...? There were women from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo – almost all the sixteen West African nations. In her quietly brilliant way, Thelma had handwritten an organizer's training manual with exercises that would draw women out, engage them, teach them about conflict and conflict resolution, and even help them understand why they should be involved in addressing these issues at all.In the sympathetic setting of other women hungry for peace, Gbowee told the painful parts of her life story for the first time, including sleeping on the floor of a hospital corridor with a newborn baby for a week because she had no money to pay the bill and nobody to help her. "No one else in Africa was doing this: focusing only on women and only on building peace." Ekiyor became Gbowee's trainer and friend. She also was the one who announced the launch of WIPNET in Liberia and named Gbowee as coordinator of Liberian Women's Initiative. Gbowee's "peace-church" philosophical orientation likely can be traced to this era – Thelma Ekiyor, Rev. "BB" Colley, Sam Gbaydee Doe, and Hizkias Assefa are all connected to Eastern Mennonite University
Eastern Mennonite University
Eastern Mennonite University is a private liberal arts university in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, affiliated with one of the historic peace churches, the Mennonite Church USA. Its main campus is on the edge of the small city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, about three miles from state-owned...
in the United States, either as former students or (in Assefa's case) as an ongoing professor.
Leading mass women's movement
In the spring of 2002, Gbowee was spending her days employed in trauma-healing work and her evenings as the unpaid leader of WIPNET in Liberia. Her children, now including an adopted daughter named Lucia "Malou" (bringing the number of children to five), were living in Ghana under her sister's care. Falling asleep in the WIPNET office one night, she awoke from a dream where God had told her, "Gather the women and pray for peace!" In the morning at her workplace, she told BB and two Lutheran women workers, including a respected evangelist named Sister Esther, of her dream. They helped her to understand that the dream was not meant for others, as Gbowee thought; it was a necessary for Gbowee herself to act upon it.Following a WIPNET training session in Liberia, Gbowee and her allies, including a Mandingo-Muslim woman called Asatu, began by "going to the mosques on Friday at noon after prayers, to the markets on Saturday morning, to two churches every Sunday." Their flyers read: "We are tired! We are tired of our children being killed! We are tired of being raped! Women, wake up – you have a voice in the peace process!" They also handed out simple drawings explaining their purpose to the many women who couldn't read.
By the summer of 2002, Gbowee was recognized as the spokeswoman and inspirational leader of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace is a peace movement started by women in Liberia, Africa thatbrought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Organized by social worker Leymah Gbowee, the movement started with local women praying and singing in a fish market...
, described as a peace movement
Peace movement
A peace movement is a social movement that seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war , minimize inter-human violence in a particular place or type of situation, often linked to the goal of achieving world peace...
that started with local women praying and singing in a fish market. Working across religious and ethnic lines, Gbowee led thousands of Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
and Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
women to gather in Monrovia
Monrovia
Monrovia is the capital city of the West African nation of Liberia. Located on the Atlantic Coast at Cape Mesurado, it lies geographically within Montserrado County, but is administered separately...
for months. They prayed for peace, using Muslim and Christian prayers, and eventually held daily nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins in defiance of orders from tyrannical President Charles Taylor.
They staged protests that included the threat of a curse
Anasyrma
Anásyrma , also called anasyrmós, is the gesture of lifting up the skirt or kilt. It is used in connection with certain religious rituals, eroticism, and lewd jokes, see e.g. Baubo. The term is used in describing corresponding works of art...
and a sex strike
Sex strike
A sex strike is a strike, a method of non-violent resistance in which one or multiple persons refrain from sex with their partner to achieve certain goals...
: "The [sex] strike lasted, on and off, for a few months. It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention." In a highly risky move, the women finally occupied a field that had been used for soccer; it was beside Tubman Boulevard, the route Charles Taylor traveled twice a day, to and from Capitol Hill. To make themselves more recognizable as a group, all of the women wore T-shirts that were white, signifying peace, with the WIPNET logo and white hair ties. Taylor finally granted a hearing for the women on April 23, 2003. With more than 2,000 women massed outside his executive mansion, Gbowee was the person designated to make their case to him. Gbowee positioned her face to be seen by Taylor but directed her words to Grace Minor, the president of the senate and the only female government official present:
We are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children. Because we believe, as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask us, "Mama, what was your role during the crisis?"In her book, Gbowee reveals that Grace Minor quietly "gave a great deal of her own money... at enormous personal risk" to the women's protest movement. The protesting women extracted a promise from President Charles Taylor to attend peace talks in Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
to negotiate with the rebels from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy
The Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy was a rebel group in Liberia that was active from 1999 until after the peace accords that ended the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003...
and another newer rebel group, MODEL.
In June 2003, Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to put pressure on the warring factions during the peace-talk process. At first the women sat in a daily demonstration outside the posh hotels where the negotiators met, pressuring for progress in the talks. When the talks dragged from early June through late July, with no progress made and violence continuing in Liberia, Gbowee led dozens of women, eventually swelling to a couple of hundred, inside the hotel. They then "dropped down, in front of the glass door that was the main entrance to the meeting room." They held signs that said: "Butchers and murderers of the Liberian people -- STOP!" Gbowee passed a message to the lead mediator, General Abubakar (a former president of Nigeria), that the women would interlock their arms and remain seated in the hallway, holding the delegates "hostage" until a peace agreement was reached. Abubakar, who proved to be sympathetic to the women, announced with some amusement: "The peace hall has been seized by General Leymah and her troops." When the men tried to leave the hall, Leymah and her allies threatened to rip their clothes off: "In Africa, it's a terrible curse to see a married or elderly woman deliberately bare herself." With Abubakar's support, the women remained sitting outside the negotiating room during the following days, ensuring that the "atmosphere at the peace talks changed from circuslike to somber."
The Liberian war ended officially weeks later, with the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement on August 18, 2003. "But what we [women] did marked the beginning of the end."
In addition to bringing an end to 14 years of warfare in Liberia, this women's movement led to the 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia, the first elected woman leader of a country in Africa. Sirleaf is co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. In Sirleaf's re-election campaign of 2011, Gbowee endorsed her.
Consolidating the peace
Recognizable when wearing their white WIPNET T-shirts, Gbowee and the other Liberian women activists were treated as national heroines by Liberians in the streets for weeks following the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Yet Gbowee wrote of their unceasing nervousness about the fragility of the peace that they had helped birth:A war of fourteen years doesn't just go away. In the moments we were calm enough to look around, we had to confront the magnitude of what had happened in Liberia. Two hundred and fifty thousand people were dead, a quarter of them children. One in three were displaced, with 350,000 living in internally displaced persons camps and the rest anywhere they could find shelter. One million people, mostly women and children, were at risk of malnutrition, diarrhea, measles and cholera because of contamination in the wells. More than 75 percent of the country's physical infrastructure, our roads, hospitals and schools, had been destroyed.
Gbowee expressed particular concern for the "psychic damage" borne by Liberians:
A whole generation of young men had no idea who they were without a gun in their hands. Several generations of women were widowed, had been raped, seen their daughters and mothers raped, and their children kill and be killed. Neighbors had turned against neighbors; young people had lost hope, and old people, everything they had painstakingly earned. To a person, we were traumatized.",
Amid the destruction and unending needs, Gbowee was appalled by the arrogance, ignorance and overall cultural insensitivity of the United Nations agencies dispatched to help disarm the country, keep the peace, establish procedures for democratic governance, and initiate rebuilding efforts. "People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they're not stupid (Gbowee's emphasis). They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked." Gbowee advocated for involving Liberian civil society, especially women's organizations, in restoring the country. She grew frustrated with the way the "UN was spending many millions of dollars in Liberia, but most of it was on [their own] staffing resources.... If they had just given some of that money to the local people, it would have made a real difference."
By the late fall and winter of 2003-04, "the world of conflict resolution, peace-building and the global women's movement" was calling Gbowee to write papers, come to conferences and otherwise explain the experience and views of WIPNET. Thelma Ekiyor encouraged Gbowee to overcome her lack of self-esteem among "highly intelligent people who held master's degrees and represented powerful institutions" by reading and studying further to understand the theories circulating in the world of peacebuilding. She read The Peace Book by Louise Diamond, known for advocating multi-track diplomacy
Multi-track Diplomacy
The term multi track diplomacy evolved over a 10 year period. Mr. Joseph Montville, US foreign service officer coined the phrase “Track Two Diplomacy” in an article he wrote for “Foreign Policy” magazine in . Track one, as he described it, was government to government interaction in the field of...
, and The Journey Toward Reconciliation and The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, both written by John Paul Lederach
John Paul Lederach
John Paul Lederach is Professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, and concurrently Distinguished Scholar at Eastern Mennonite University. He has written widely on conflict resolution and mediation. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University...
, the founding director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University
Eastern Mennonite University
Eastern Mennonite University is a private liberal arts university in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, affiliated with one of the historic peace churches, the Mennonite Church USA. Its main campus is on the edge of the small city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, about three miles from state-owned...
. She went to a USAID conference in New York, her first trip out of Africa, to a conference in South Africa, and to Switzerland where she dealt with the Nigerian in charge of UN programs in Liberia.
Seeking master's degree in peacebuilding
In the late spring of 2004, about eight months after the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, Gbowee made a decision to take college-level courses in the field in which she had been working: "I'd heard about Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), an American college with a well-known program in peace-building and conflict resolution. It was a Christian school that emphasized community and service; it had a long-standing relationship with WANEP and a history of recruiting Africans to study there." Her first stint at EMU – four weeks at its annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute – were "a transformative time for me."Gbowee studied with Hizkias Assefa, whose writings she had read five years earlier when she first began working for St. Peter's Lutheran Church on trauma healing. She also studied with Howard Zehr
Howard Zehr
Howard Zehr is Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Zehr previously served 19 years as director of Mennonite Central Committee’s Office on Crime and Justice...
, "who taught me the concept of restorative justice," whereby healing occurred through the joint efforts of victims and offenders to repair the harms done. She thought restorative justice was particularly applicable to Africa: "Restorative justice was...something we could see as ours and not artificially imposed by Westerners. And we needed it, needed that return to tradition. A culture of impunity flourished throughout Africa. People, officials, governments did evil but were never held accountable. More than we needed to punish them, we needed to undo the damage they had done.... When I left EMU, I knew there was more here for me. Somehow I would find a way to come back."
She returned for a round-table called Strategies for Trauma Healing and Resilience in the summer of 2005 and then enrolled as a residential, full-time master's degree student in "conflict transformation and peacebuilding" at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding
Center for Justice and Peacebuilding
Center for Justice and Peacebuilding is an accredited graduate-level program founded in 1994; it also offers non-credit training. It specializes in conflict transformation, restorative justice, trauma healing, equitable development, and addressing organizational conflict...
in 2006-07:
At graduate school, I could feel my mind expand, my comprehension deepen. I realized I now could put a formal name, "strategic peacebuilding," to what I'd done instinctively in Liberia.... Many of the other students at EMU had lived through conflict, and there was relief in being among them.... In Harrisonburg, a small old city in the Shenandoah Valley, far from Liberia and its sorrows and people who expected something from me, I didn't have to be strong. Every now and then – for instance, when I saw a mother with her children – I would burst into tears. No one at EMU thought that was strange. I met an old man who'd lost his entire family in the Rwandan genocide.
In September 2006, just as Gbowee was embarking on her first full semester of graduate school, she went to New York City to address the UN on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the passage of Resolution 1325, which dealt with protecting women from gender-based violence and involving them in UN-linked peace efforts. While in New York, she received a call from Abigail Disney
Abigail Disney
Abigail E. Disney is a filmmaker, philanthropist, and scholar known for her documentary films focused on social themes.- Biography :Abigail E. Disney was born in 1960 and was raised in North Hollywood, California. She is the daughter of Roy E. Disney and granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder...
, a descendant of the founders of the Walt Disney Company, a feminist, and a philanthropist. Disney and a collaborator, Gini Reticker, wanted to talk with Gbowee about their desire to make a documentary about how the women of Liberia rallied themselves to force the men to stop battling.
Receiving acclaim, yet struggling personally
During 2006-07 Gbowee also began talking with Ekiyor and Ecoma Alaga (a Nigerian, like Ekiyor) about splitting WIPNET from WANEP, believing the parent organization to be controlled financially by men and wanting the three of them to be fully in charge. The founding director of WANEP, Gbowee's old friend Sam Gbaydee Doe, was sympathetic to the three women's desire for structural independence, but he had left WANEP to pursue a PhD in England. WANEP was now led by another graduate of the MA in conflict transformation program at EMU, Emmanuel Bombande of Ghana, who did not agree that the three women owned the WIPNET branch of WANEP and thus would not let it spin off. As a result, Gbowee and her two colleagues started a new organization, Women in Peace and Security Network (WIPSEN), also based in Accra, Ghana." Abigail Disney stepped up to help Gbowee raise funds for launching WIPSEN among philanthropists in New York, enabling her to secure $50,000 in seed money.By the time Gbowee finished her coursework at EMU on April 30, 2007, and returned to her children in Liberia in May 2011 – where her parents had been caring for them – she realized that her nine months away "nearly broke all of us." In Virginia, she had lived with "a cold that never went away" and she "felt panic, sadness, and cold, swirling blackness" as she faced "being sued by former friends at WANEP over our desire to move in a new direction." Her impending graduate degree (conferred at the end of 2007), growing fame, and other changes in her life strained the relationship she had with a Liberian man named Tunde, an employee of international agencies who had functioned as a father figure for her children for a decade, from the early period of the Liberian women's peace movement through Gbowee's graduate studies at EMU (for which he had paid the tuition). They broke up and by early 2008 Gbowee was in a relationship with a Liberian information technology expert whom she identifies as James. He is the father of her sixth child, a daughter named Jaydyn Thelma Abigail (nicknamed "Nehcopee"), born in New York City in June 2009.
In April 2008, when Gbowee's family and friends gathered to celebrate the 14th birthday of her eldest daughter, Amber, it was clear that Gbowee had developed a serious alcohol problem. In her memoir, Gbowee explains that she had turned to alcohol for about a decade to cope with the loneliness of constant separations from her family, the strain of poverty and war-engendered trauma, and the stress of never-ending demands on her time. During Amber's birthday party, Gbowee's children noted that she drank 14 glasses of wine. The next day she passed out. When again conscious, suffering from an ulcer, she begged James to take her to the doctor: "Then I saw the kids gathered around us, their terrified, helpless faces. After all their losses, this would be the final one. No. Not possible. It might sound too easy, but that was the end for me. I still don't sleep easily and I still wake up too early, but I don't drink anymore."
Gbowee's exposure to the New York philanthropic social set, facilitated by Disney (who had become a close friend), appeared to open the door for a series of awards. The first, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, came in early 2006, and then they began to arrive in accelerated fashion: recognition by Women's eNews, the Gruber Prize for Women's Rights, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award, the Living Legends Award for Service to Humanity, and several more. In July 2011, EMU announced that Gbowee had been named its "Alumna of the Year." (Gbowee's eldest son, Joshua “Nuku” Mensah, entered EMU as a freshman in 2010, overlapping by one year with Sam Gbaydee Doe's eldest daughter, Samfee Doe, then a senior.) The crowning honor came in October 2011 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee made Gbowee one of three female recipients of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Giving credit to God
Leymah Gbowee expresses devotion to her Christian faith. She opened the acknowledgment section of her memoir with these words: "All praise, glory and honor to God for His unfailing love and favor toward me." She told students attending an EMU chapel in 2009:I didn't get there by myself... or anything I did as an individual, but it was by the grace and mercy of God.... He has held my hands. In the most difficult of times, he has been there. They have this song, "Order my steps in your ways, dear Lord," and every day as I wake up, that is my prayer, because there's no way that anyone can take this journey as a peacebuilder, as an agent of change in your community, without having a sense of faith.... As I continue this journey in this life, I remind myself: All that I am, all that I hope to be, is because of God.
Gbowee told the EMU students that she went from being an angry, broke, virtually homeless, 25-year-old mother of four children with no idea of what her future might be, to listening to the voice of God in 1997. She said God spoke to her through a five-year-old boy, a son whom she had nicknamed Nuku. Comments made by Nuku made her realize that she had succumbed to “crippling hopelessness,” and that her low self-esteem and sense of helplessness were destroying her family, which was already under assault from Liberia’s brutal warfare. Gbowee said she began taking one tiny step at a time, asking for God’s help with each step. And that God sent her angels in the form of human beings who reached out a hand at just the moment when she was most desperate.
As suggested by the interfaith character of the Liberian women's movement, Gbowee noted that others may derive the same support from religious faiths different from hers:
It could be Jesus, it could be Mohammed, it could be Buddha, but there is no way that you can effect change in people's lives if there is not someone that you can rely on as the "divine intervenor" or the "divine one" that you can call on every day.... God is faithful, whoever you know him to me.... Take a step of faith and God will see to the rest.
In an interview with Odyssey Networks, Gbowee said that God could also be referred to as a "Higher Power." She stressed that with a Higher Power accompanying you, you can "rise up and do something to change your situation." She advised: "Don't wait for a Gandhi, don't wait for a King, don't wait for a Mandela. You are your own Mandela, you are your own Gandhi, you are your own King."
Appearing in a documentary
Leymah Gbowee is the narrator and central character in the 2008 documentary filmDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a documentary film directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abigail Disney. The film premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Documentary. The film had its theatrical release in New York City on November 7, 2008.The film documents...
, which consists of scores of film and audio clips from the war period. It took Best Documentary Feature in the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It has been broadcast across the United States as part of the “Women, War & Peace” series, which aired over five successive Tuesdays in October and early November 2011 on public television stations. Pray has been used as an advocacy
Advocacy
Advocacy is a political process by an individual or a large group which normally aims to influence public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions; it may be motivated from moral, ethical or faith principles or simply to protect an...
tool in conflict and post-conflict zones, such as Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, South Africa, Rwanda, Mexico, Kenya, Cambodia, Russia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the West Bank: "The reaction was remarkably similar: no matter how different the country and the society, women recognized themselves and started talking about how they could unite to solve their own problems."
In the documentary, Gbowee emerges as someone able to laugh and enjoy life, despite what she has lived through: "Gbowee comes across as a sharply strategic, scrappy, political maestro interfaith mobilizer of merriment. Not the balloons-confetti-cupcakes-clown-type fun, but rather solidarity-inspiring conviviality. You see women dancing, singing, smiling, wearing beautiful, white-as-doves clothing, and you even see laughter during sit-ins and protests."
Awards
- 2007 Blue Ribbon for Peace from the John F. Kennedy School of GovernmentJohn F. Kennedy School of GovernmentThe John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country... - 2008 Women's eNewsWomen's eNewsWomen's eNews is a nonprofit online news service based in New York City. It publishes international news articles specializing in coverage of women's lives.- History :...
Leaders for the 21st Century Award - 2009 Gruber Prize for Women's Rights
- 2009 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage AwardProfile in Courage AwardThe Profile in Courage Award is a private award given to recognize displays of courage similar to those John F. Kennedy described in his book Profiles in Courage...
. - 2010 Living Legends Award for Service to Humanity
- 2010 John Jay Medal for Justice from the John Jay College of Criminal JusticeJohn Jay College of Criminal JusticeThe John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a senior college of the City University of New York in Midtown Manhattan, New York City and is the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice and forensic focus in the United States. The college offers programs in Forensic Science and Forensic...
- 2010 Joli Humanitarian Award from Riverdale Country SchoolRiverdale Country SchoolRiverdale Country School is a co-educational, independent, college-preparatory day school in New York City. One of the most competitive private schools in the nation, it is located on two campuses covering more than in the Riverdale section of The Bronx, New York.-History:Founded in 1907 by Dr...
- 2011 Villanova Peace Award from Villanova UniversityVillanova UniversityVillanova University is a private university located in Radnor Township, a suburb northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States...
- 2011 Alumna of the Year, Eastern Mennonite UniversityEastern Mennonite UniversityEastern Mennonite University is a private liberal arts university in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, affiliated with one of the historic peace churches, the Mennonite Church USA. Its main campus is on the edge of the small city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, about three miles from state-owned...
- 2011 Nobel Peace PrizeNobel Peace PrizeThe Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.-Background:According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who...
Laureate
Education and training
- Associate of Arts degree in social work (2001) from Mother Patern College of Health Sciences in Monrovia, Liberia.
- Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation (2007) from Eastern Mennonite UniversityEastern Mennonite UniversityEastern Mennonite University is a private liberal arts university in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, affiliated with one of the historic peace churches, the Mennonite Church USA. Its main campus is on the edge of the small city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, about three miles from state-owned...
in Harrisonburg, VirginiaHarrisonburg, VirginiaHarrisonburg is an independent city in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia in the United States. Its population as of 2010 is 48,914, and at the 2000 census, 40,468. Harrisonburg is the county seat of Rockingham County and the core city of the Harrisonburg, Virginia Metropolitan Statistical... - Certifications: Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Training at the United Nations Institute for Training, the Healing Victims of War Trauma Center in Cameroon, and Non-Violent Peace Education in Liberia
Professional career
Leymah Gbowee is the executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa, based in AccraAccra
Accra is the capital and largest city of Ghana, with an urban population of 1,658,937 according to the 2000 census. Accra is also the capital of the Greater Accra Region and of the Accra Metropolitan District, with which it is coterminous...
, Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
, which builds relationships across the West African sub-region in support of women’s capacity to prevent, avert, and end conflicts. She is a founding member and former coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). She also served as the commissioner-designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Works
- Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, Beast Books (September 13, 2011), ISBN 978-0984295159
See also
- Black Nobel Prize laureates
- List of female Nobel laureates
- List of women who led a revolt or rebellion
- Sex strikeSex strikeA sex strike is a strike, a method of non-violent resistance in which one or multiple persons refrain from sex with their partner to achieve certain goals...
- LysistrataLysistrataLysistrata is one of eleven surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War...
External links
- WIPSEN-Africa
- WIPNET
- Masters program alumni profile
- Leymah Gbowee at Women, War & Peace at PBS
- Leymah Gbowee Discusses Women, War & Peace on Tavis Smiley', 'WNETWNETWNET, channel 13 is a non-commercial educational public television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey. With its signal covering the New York metropolitan area, WNET is a primary station of the Public Broadcasting Service and a primary provider of PBS programming...
, full video of 5 October 2011 interview - Interview with Leymah Gbowee in SGI Quarterly "Unleashing the Power of Women"