Leymah Gbowee would describe herself as an ordinary woman from an average suburb of Monrovia, the capital in Liberia. Up until the age of 17 she enjoyed a normal life in a supportive environment and was working towards further education and establishing a career for herself. In 1989, however, her world, along with that of 2.5 million fellow Liberians, was turned upside down when the first of two successive civil wars ripped through the country.
The war would become one of Africa’s bloodiest conflicts with an estimated 250,000 killed and over a million people displaced. The once stable and promising economy quickly nose-dived and soon the country’s natural resources were being pillaged, as diamonds and timber were sold in exchange for small arms and ammunition. Boys as young as seven or eight were recruited as child soldiers either by force or out of desperation and hunger. Soldiers were clothed and fed – highly desirable in a nation on the brink of famine – and the impressionable young boys were lured in by the seeming belief that power and survival came only to those who were armed.
“A common scene daily,” Gbowee later recalled, “was a mother watching her young one being forcibly recruited or her daughter being taken away as the wife of another drug-emboldened fighter.” The soldiers were encouraged to mutilate, kill and rape.
Gbowee bore witness to these horrors as a teenager and young mother and would spend the next few years fleeing Liberia to Ghana with her abusive partner, before returning alone with her children to be with her family, riding the bus for a week on credit because “I didn’t have a cent”. In 1996, towards the end of the first civil war, she trained as a social worker in a UNICEF scheme in order to help counsel those affected by the conflict.
Later she studied and worked her way towards an associate of art degree at the University of Ghana, achieving her bachelor degree in 2001. It was during her training and studying that she first came into contact with peace activists and was invited to take part in a meeting of Africa’s first regional Peace meeting organised by the West Africa Network for Peace-building (WANEP). Soon after, Gbowee was named as the coordinator of the Liberian Women’s Initiative.
By 2002 Gbowee was pursuing her career in trauma-healing work by day and spending her evenings as a voluntary leader of her women’s initiative. She was then a single mother of five, including an adopted daughter, and was living under one roof with her sister. Then one night while she slept in her office she dreamt that God spoke to her and said, “Gather all the women and pray for peace.”
This was the impetus that provoked the birth of Gbowee’s philosophical ‘peace-church’. In early 2003, “Seven of us women gathered in a makeshift office to discuss the Liberian civil war and the fast approaching war on the capital Monrovia. Armed with nothing but our conviction and ten United States dollars, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign was born.”
Gbowee realised the power that women could collectively wield, and so, with the help of her supporters and friends, she set about galvanising women and spurring them into protest. She called upon every able-bodied woman regardless of their religion, social status or ethnic group.
They campaigned outside mosques on Fridays, in the markets on Saturdays and outside churches on Sundays. They carried banners and handed out flyers which 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 created flyers with simple drawings to draw in women who could not read.
Once their group numbered several thousand they took their protest to the government buildings and held daily sit ins and protests. They took to wearing white T-shirts so that they would be recognisable and even held a sex strike which Gbowee admitted had no real political effect but it helped garner the women a huge amount of publicity.
Leymah Gbowee
“We worked daily, confronting warlords, meeting with dictators and refusing to be silenced in the face of AK 47 and RPGs. We walked when we had no transportation, we fasted when water was unaffordable, we held hands in the face of danger, we spoke truth to power when everyone else was being diplomatic, we stood under the rain and the sun with our children to tell the world the stories of the other side of the conflict. Our educational backgrounds, travel experiences, faiths, and social classes did not matter. We had a common agenda: Peace for Liberia Now.”
Soon it was no longer possible for Charles Taylor, the then Liberian dictator and warlord, to ignore them and he agreed to a face to face meeting where Gbowee put forward their case. “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?’” The women achieved what international diplomatic missions had failed to accomplish for years, to extract a promise from the President that he would hold peace talks with the rebels.
The women did not stop their movement there. They continued to sit outside the government buildings until the peace talks took place and even followed the politicians to Ghana where the talks were held. For days the women sat outside the swish hotels as a reminder to the politicians of their duty. But several weeks in, the talks showed no sign of progress. At this point Gbowee, angered and out of patience, led her women into the hotel forcibly where they locked arms around the conference hall and threatened to hold the men hostage until an agreement was reached. When the men attempted to leave, the women threatened to rip their clothes off, “In Africa, it’s a terrible curse to see a married or elderly woman deliberately bare herself.” The talks quickly changed from “circus-like to sombre”. A few weeks later, on August 18, 2003, the Liberian war officially ended.
The women not only succeeded in ending the conflict but also paved the way for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to go on to become president of Liberia in 2005, the first female leader of an African country. In 2011 Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and since then has campaigned tirelessly around the world to educate and activate women and political leaders into action. Earlier this year, in between a busy schedule of giving talks and campaigning, Gbowee granted us the honour of speaking to her privately.
How did you become involved in political activism?
As an African feminist, I’ll just sum it up to you: the personal is political. There’s no way you can separate your personal life from your politics, especially if you live on the continent called Africa. Even the sexuality of women is politicised so there is nothing that is not political. [For example], the practice of FGM [female genital mutilation] which you have heard about. Some [community] leaders have decided that we will cut a woman’s clitoris to minimise her sexual drive. Even though it is personal, but it is also political. There are a lot of things that are political when it comes to women’s sexual health.
I learnt from a very early age that there is no grey area when it comes to where you stand with different issues. When I started working for peace, I realised that peace is not a single standard. It includes many things like justice, provision of basic social services – all of these things are linked very closely to peace. Even the politics of our time is linked to peace because it goes back to the history of Africa. A lot of the issues that we have dealt with in Africa have been leadership issues that have also led to serious war.
Was it relatively peaceful when you were younger?
It was! It was. I grew up in what I would say is my ideal world. I grew up in a community that probably had 13 of Liberia’s 16 ethnic groups, and people coexisted very well. The community was predominantly made up of Christians with Muslim groups. There was a respect for religious differences. People supported each other. Women were respected.
Growing up, I saw men stand up to other men who were known for battering their wives or children. Children belonged to the community – anyone could discipline you as well as everyone loved you or showed you some form of affection. I would say growing up my socialization was basically one of a peaceful world. It was the Liberian civil war that showed me the contrary.
So what was it that sparked it all off?
Well, if you read the history and leadership of Liberia, I would say ours is a nation of many contradictions. Our history within itself is a source of conflict. When you read the history books, you read that free slaves founded Liberia in the 1800s. The question you need to ask yourself is that when the free slaves came to Liberia, were there people living there? If the answer is yes, then of course it wasn’t founded by free slaves – there were people already there. Then the free slaves go into Liberia and treat the indigenous Liberians in the same manner as what had been done to them by their slave masters. The nation in its founding of the republic experienced a great deal of conflict and tension.
In 1980, there was a coup and a whole lot of reprisal killings. Thirteen of the most powerful Liberians who were part of the freed slave descendants were publicly executed. A lot of the descendants of freed slaves fled Liberia into exile. But some organised and formed different groups that would be anti-government leading to the formation of the National Patriotic Front (NPF), the leading rebel group. People have different reasons for the start of the civil war in Liberia. Some attribute it to oppression, the lack of justice and accountability, corruption. People will say different reasons depending on which side of the nation you find yourself standing; you’ll get a different perspective.
How do you go about standing up to this kind of militia and dictators?
Well, the one thing you need to understand is that when you get to a place in your life where you see no way out from the dark and the terror – when death is better than living – sometimes it’s good that you try, even though you know that you’ll die, rather than sit and die the death of a “coward”. For us, the women of Liberia, when we decided to stand up, we had lost everything; we were down.
We have a local saying: “He who is down feels no fall”. So you’re already down, you’re knocked down. There’s no more falling that can happen so you might as well try to get up, or die trying to get up. That was the situation we put ourselves in.
In terms of fear, when you live from 17 up until 31 through intense fear sometimes you end up becoming immune to fear. That was the situation I found myself in.
And how was your initial idea to start a women’s mass movement greeted by the people around you?
Well what most people believed was that when we started the mass action it was my idea but actually it was a group of Muslim women who came to me and said let’s do something. And they appointed me as their head and so I sat down with my colleagues and started to think about the strategy and what we should do. I can’t take all of the credit, it was a collaborative work. Even the ones who weren’t writing papers or writing petitions, they were there backing us with their prayers so it was a joint effort. What I was just blessed to have been, and it was something that was given to me by the women, was to have become the face and the voice of our protest.
And were you taken seriously?
Initially when we started, people thought we were just trying to get attention; we were met with a lot of the stereotypes associated with standing up to oppression, you know, “You can’t take them seriously; they are looking for money, for donations, once they get it they are going to return to their backwaters,” so that was difficult.
You also have to consider at the time I was unmarried, I was very young so it was difficult to be taken seriously. And obviously men, who most times were egotistic, were thinking okay this is about our ego, the men’s ego, and these women will come in and play on their intelligence or whatever so they tried to make us step aside. But we confronted them and were not frightened away by their tactics. Soon they realised that we were not going away any time soon.
Female oppression is still a massive issue around the world although it is portrayed as being worse in Africa than in most other continents. Is this fair or is it just that we don’t hear about what is happening on our own doorstep?
I think there’s a lot of attention on Africa and its oppression of women, but if you are looking at things like wife-beating and you come to the U.S. or Great Britain, you find it! You find all of these different things out there… the problem is because that category is underdeveloped and under-reported.
In Africa, you have a lot of “women for women” groups that are forcing issues to be recognised. If you ask the ‘developed countries’ how many women die inside them it’s just too embarrassing for them to talk about in their “modern society”. I don’t think it’s worse anywhere; there is no level of weight that you can give to compare the oppression of women. My take on it is that regardless of whether it’s this group or that group or wherever it exists, there needs to be work to stop it.
Do you think it would be possible to train other women in other countries to do like you’ve done, to become a vehicle for peace?
Well one of the things that I tell people is that what we did in Liberia was context-specific. Every region, every country, every community has different issues – even if the issues are similar, the contexts are totally different. The one thing that I recognise as I travel around the world is that to me, all the communities possess a level of strength. In Liberia it took us 14 years to get to that place. In some of these communities, it’s just about time.
In other communities, it’s happening already, but are those stories being reflected in the mainstream media? The answer is no. So what we did in Liberia, I can’t say it was something that we intended – we were walking in the shoes of the women in Nigeria in the 60s or in the footsteps of women around the world who in the early 1900s fought for their freedom. We are walking in the shoes of women who throughout time have stood up fiercely and fearlessly to power, to oppression, to suppression and other issues.
It is something that is still going on today in other places, it is something that happens every day on a community level. You still have women in communities fighting to enforce legal action against the perpetrators of rape, you still have very strong women who are doing something every day to fight. Heroes, who we never get to see in the media, people who are doing the kind of work that makes a difference to the community.
Readers of articles such as this often feel moved but powerless to help. What would you suggest to, say, average women like myself, or men – is there anything that they can actually do to help internationally?
This is something I feel very strongly about. What I say to people, internationally, is that it’s very “sexy” for newspapers and magazines to continue to write about the ills. But it’s very difficult to get newspapers and magazines to really get down, down, down … back, move back from the confines of Africa, beyond the confines of politics, beyond them and us, and to make people think about our shared humanity. Not seeing things in terms of ‘that problem is happening in that country or that country, I can’t help’. All women have the power to do great things.
When we were in a village in Liberia, we had a group of women who would communicate with and bring cases to the police for prosecution. The cases ranged from domestic violence to rape, to land issues, to financial issues. They had a little office and that is where they used to work for the community. They were doing something.
I have to ask you: how will you use your pen to provide the inspiration to women to develop themselves, beyond the high streets in London or the Buckingham Palace area? In all communities, there is a little girl, in some old looking apartment, who says, “I can be what I can be.” The question is how are women, who consider themselves ‘ordinary’, mentoring these girls to be great people? There is a lot of work that each and every one of us can do, and should be doing.
My son recently spoke to a group of his friends at his high school in New York, and he said, “Women are very special, I have not seen one woman who lacks a special quality.” And he said to his young friends – boys who are courting girls – “don’t sneer at them with insults, consider them a privilege, because someone is recognising your ability to do great things.” So, I don’t think there are any ordinary women; they are all great – every one of us has the potential to do the work that great women are doing.
I think that that’s a very, very important message. My final question: what are the most important lessons that you’ve learnt along the way?
It is something that I’ve now taken to be my personal mantra: never despise humble beginnings. In my life, my work, everything that I do – even today – starts from very small beginnings. There is nothing that is too small to think of for you to tackle, and there is nothing too small that you can tackle that cannot be great.
by Nicola Kavanagh
Taken from the Glass archive – issue 16