Leymah Gbowee

In the spring of 1999, after Gbowee had been at the Trauma Healing project for a year,[5]^: 95 her supervisor, Reverend Bartholomew Bioh "BB" Colley, a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Liberia, introduced her to Samuel Gbaydee Doe (no relation to the former Liberian president by the same first and last name),[5]^: 98 a "passionate and intelligent"[5]^: 107 Liberian who had just earned a master's degree from a Christian university in the U.S. that specialized in peace-building studies.[24] Doe was the executive director of Africa's first regional peace organization, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP),[25] which he had co-founded in 1998 in Ghana.[26][27] Encouraged by the Lutheran reverend she calls "BB", Gbowee began reading widely in the field of peacebuilding, notably reading The Politics of Jesus by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, and works by "Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and the Kenyan author and conflict and reconciliation expert Hizkias Assefa."[5]^: 88

By late 1999, "WANEP was actively seeking to involve women in its work and I was invited to a conference in Ghana," wrote Gbowee.[5]^: 101 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."[5]^{: 107–108} 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."[5]^: 109

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, which Gbowee attended:

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.[5]^: 112

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 her newborn baby for a week because she had no money to pay the bill and nobody to help her.[5]^: 113 "No one else in Africa was doing this: focusing only on women and only on building peace."[5]^: 113 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.[5]^{: 114–115} Gbowee's "peace-church" philosophical orientation likely can be traced to this era – Thelma Ekiyor, Rev. "BB" Colley, Samuel Gbaydee Doe, and Hizkias Assefa are all connected to Eastern Mennonite University in the United States, either as former students or (in Assefa's case) as an ongoing professor.[28]

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.[5]^: 148 Falling asleep in the WIPNET office one night, she awoke from a dream where she says God had told her, "Gather the women and pray for peace!"[5]^: 122 Some friends helped her to understand that the dream was not meant for others, as Gbowee thought; instead, she realized that it was a necessary for her to act upon it herself.[5]^: 122[29]

Following a WIPNET training session in Liberia,[5]^: 124 Gbowee and her allies, including a Mandingo-Muslim woman named Asatu, began by "going to the mosques on Friday at noon after prayers, to the markets on Saturday morning, to two churches every Sunday."[5]^: 126 Their flyers read: "We are tired! We are tired of our children being killed! We are tired of being abused!! 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.[5]^: 127

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.[30] 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 the tyrannical president at that time, Charles Taylor.[5]^{: 128, 135}

They staged protests that included the threat of a curse and a sex strike. Of the strike, Gbowee says, "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."[5]^: 147 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.[5]^: 136 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.[5]^: 136 Taylor finally granted a hearing for the women on 23 April 2003. With more than 2,000 women amassed outside his executive mansion, Gbowee was the person designated to make their case to him.[5]^: 140 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?"[5]^: 141

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.[5]^: 149 The protesting women extracted a promise from President Charles Taylor to attend peace talks in Ghana to negotiate with the rebels from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy[31][32] and another newer rebel group, MODEL.[5]^: 155

In June 2003, Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to put pressure on the warring factions during the peace-talk process.[33] At first the women sat in a daily demonstration outside the posh hotels where the negotiators met, pressuring for progress in the talks.[5]^{: 154–156} 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 hundred, inside the hotel, where they simply "dropped down, in front of the glass door that was the main entrance to the meeting room."[5]^: 161 They held signs that said: "Butchers and murderers of the Liberian people -- STOP!"[5]^: 161 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."[5]^: 162 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."[5]^: 163

The Liberian war ended officially weeks later, with the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement on 18 August 2003.[5]^: 164[34] "But what we [women] did marked the beginning of the end."[5]^: 163

In addition to helping bring 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 along with Gbowee and Tawakel Karman. The three were awarded the prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."[2] In Sirleaf's re-election campaign of 2011, Gbowee endorsed her.[35]

Recognizable in 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.[5]^: 167 Yet Gbowee wrote of their unceasing nervousness about the fragility of the peace 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.[5]^: 167

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.[5]^: 168

In an interview for the International Women's Day, Gbowee also expressed:

The Liberian women peace movement demonstrated to the world that grassroots movements are essential to sustaining peace; that women in leadership positions are effective brokers for peace; and the importance of culturally relevant social justice movements. Liberia's experience is a good example to the world that women—especially African women—can be drivers of peace[36]

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."[5]^: 171 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."[5]^: 173

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.[5]^: 177 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.[5]^: 177 She went to a USAID conference in New York, her first trip out of Africa,[5]^{: 174–175} to a conference in South Africa, and to Switzerland where she dealt with the Nigerian in charge of UN programs in Liberia.[5]^{: 174–176}

In the late spring of 2004, about eight months after the Ghana-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."[5]^: 178 Her first stint at EMU – four weeks at its annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute – were "a transformative time for me."[5]^: 178

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.[5]^: 178 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."[5]^{: 178–179}

Gbowee 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:[28]

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.[5]^: 179

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.[5]^: 179 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.[5]^: 212

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.[5]^: 187 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.[5]^: 189 WANEP was now led by another graduate of the MA in conflict transformation program at EMU, Emmanuel Bombande of Ghana,[37] who did not agree that the three women owned the WIPNET branch of WANEP and thus would not let it spin off.[5]^{: 188–189} As a result, Gbowee and her two colleagues started a new organization, Women in Peace and Security Network (WIPSEN), also based in Accra, Ghana."[5]^: 189[38] 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.[5]^: 202

By the time Gbowee finished her coursework at EMU on 30 April 2007, and returned to her children in Liberia in May 2007 – where her parents had been caring for them – she realized that her nine months away "nearly broke all of us."[5]^: 194 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."[5]^{: 200–201} 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[5]^{: 203–204} (for which he had paid the tuition[5]^: 198). They broke up and by early 2008 Gbowee was in a relationship with a Liberian information technology expert whom she identifies as James.[5]^{: 205–205} He is the father of her sixth child, a daughter named Jaydyn Thelma Abigail, born in New York City on 2 June 2009.[5]^: 223

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 she suffered from, 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."[5]^{: 208–209}

• 2019 – Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Peter Gabriel.[51][52]
• 2016 – Community of Christ International Peace Award
• 2014 – Oxfam America Right the Wrong Award [53]
• 2013 – The New York Women's Foundation Century Award [54]
• 2013 – Barnard College Medal of Distinction [55]
• 2012 – Olympic flag bearer in the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony
• 2012 - James Parks Morton Interfaith Award
• 2011 – Nobel Peace Prize laureate
• 2011 – University of Massachusetts Lowell Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies[56]
• 2011 – Villanova Peace Award from Villanova University
• 2011 – Alumna of the Year, Eastern Mennonite University[57]
• 2010 – Living Legends Award for Service to Humanity[58]
• 2010 – John Jay Medal for Justice from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice[59]
• 2010 – Joli Humanitarian Award from Riverdale Country School
• 2009 – Gruber Prize for Women's Rights
• 2009 – John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.[60]
• 2009 – "Honor Award for Courageous Commitment for Human Rights of Women" by the Filmfestival Women's Worlds, TERRE DES FEMMES, Germany.
• 2008 – Women's eNews Leaders for the 21st Century Award[61]
• 2007 – Blue Ribbon for Peace from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

• 2018 – Honorary Doctorate of International Affairs from American University
• 2012 – Honorary Doctorate by Rhodes University[62]