photo © Michael Angelo
“Violence was never an option. We were prepared to even have our bodies walked on if it would bring about peace.”
—LEYMAH GBOWEE, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipient
“My work has taken me to many places, and I have never been to a place or a country on this earth where my curious eyes—and trust me, I look around—have not seen a situation in need of change, even in this great America, from homeless people, to teen mothers, to drug addicts, to corrupt political leaders, to military dictatorships,” said Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner who organized protests that helped end a bloody civil war in Liberia, during our interview in 2012. “All of these things, in these communities, make life very gray. For many individuals, a smile is difficult to come by. Hope is lacking in their vocabulary. Like Liberians a few years ago, many of those living in these places thought life has no true meaning.”
But Leymah Gbowee learned from historic male peacemakers, like Dr. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, about how to effectively use nonviolence as a weapon to create change. An even stronger influence for the Liberian Mass Action for Peace were female characters from the sacred texts who did great things, such as Esther, Deborah, and Rehab, the prostitute in the Bible, and Khadijah, the wife of the prophet Mohammad. “These women were the archetypes that inspired what the women of Liberia did to bring peace to their country, rather than an awareness of nonviolent political action in other countries,” Leymah said to me. “There was never a point during the Liberian uprising when us women considered using violence.”
This is just a sampling of the inspirational words and thoughts Leymah Gbowee expressed as Vassar College’s commencement speaker in 2012. It was the same year that my son was graduating from Vassar, and I was thrilled to hear that she was granting only one interview—and that was to me. I would get to interview her the day before the graduation ceremony in one of Vassar’s classrooms. I was then a contributor to The Huffington Post, and since my son was in the 2012 graduating class, she felt I was the best choice. While I considered myself fortunate, I was unaware of just how memorable this experience would be until I actually sat down with her.
When she arrived, she was dressed in her country’s traditional West African attire: a long and brightly colored wrap skirt, called a lappa, and a loose-fitting blouse called a bubba. Since Liberia lies fewer than five hundred miles from the equator, breathable clothing is necessary to keep cool. She also wore a head wrap, weaving a brightly colored pattern of pink, yellow, and blue.
The name Liberia comes from the English word “liberty,” which is particularly ironic since the country’s politics had been dominated by armed men since 1980. Further, Charles Taylor, Liberia’s twenty-second President, was charged with war crimes as a result of his involvement in the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002), when he illegally militarized children as young as nine years old. Since children were often the first to be sent out to the front lines, thousands were killed, while many others became victims of torture, abduction, and forced labor. Unsurprisingly, many of the militarized girls experienced the worst abuse by also being raped and sexually enslaved. The United Nations estimates that approximately 15,000 children were illegally militarized.
Leymah Gbowee, herself, was one person who enabled Liberia to live up to its name, and she did it through peace. Launching the women’s nonviolent peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, to help bring an end to the war, she and the women she mobilized released a campaign that called for nonviolence and peace. As its leader, Leymah wanted to take Liberia’s future into her own hands by saying no to violence and yes to peace. After forcing a meeting with President Charles Taylor where he agreed to attend upcoming peace talks in Ghana, the Liberian women also traveled to Ghana and surrounded the room. Dressed all in white, the women threatened to remove all of their clothes, which would have been considered a cultural dishonor. One of the reasons Leymah took this dramatic step was that the peace talks had gone on for months, after initially being scheduled to take only two weeks, and the fighting in Liberia was continuing to escalate. Further, just that morning, the American embassy in Liberia had been bombed, which fueled the women’s desperation to change the dynamic at the peace talks in Ghana. They also blocked all the doors and windows, preventing the men from escaping, until a peaceful resolution to ending the war was instituted.
Ultimately, these efforts resulted in a free election in 2005 that Leymah’s collaborator, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, won, and they were both awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize “for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
For a woman who has exhibited such strength and bravery, Leymah, who describes herself as “a warrior without a weapon,” spoke to me in a strong yet gentle voice. She recalled those desperate days during the Civil War where “the opposition did not know how to embrace our brokenness. We weren’t living at that time; we were only surviving. We were glad to wake up in the morning but scared to be alive, happy to see night fall but afraid to fall asleep.” Then, she spoke about the importance of moving beyond thinking only about one’s own personal comfort, instead placing a priority on the health and safety of others. “I recall the many days when I and my fellow protesters went without water, often in ninety-degree heat,” she said. “But when you get to a place where death is better than life, you have nothing to lose.”
She also warned of people’s tendency to believe that they will always be protected from the violence that afflicts others. “Let me tell you something,” she continued. “If you think there are social problems and you are comfortable inside your fence, trust me, if you don’t help to address those problems, they’ll come knocking at your door. We were concerned about one thing—securing a future for Liberia by creating a safe space for our children to grow up and be what we, the parents, could not be for many reasons.” So with no budget, no international backing, and no previous experience as activists, they stepped out to change their children’s lives by repeatedly shouting from the streets, “Peace for Liberia Now!”
And these four words not only became their nonviolent “battle cry,” but the armor that ultimately shrouded them in safety. In fact, it was their refusal to bear arms that proved the most disarming to their oppressors.
Leymah Gbowee relayed all of this to me in what turned out to be the perfect setting. Founded in 1861, Vassar has a history of bravery and independence as well, defying patriarchal-imposed restrictions while maintaining its identity and true purpose. Only the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the United States, the college was created to provide an education equal to Harvard and Yale, considered the best men’s colleges at that time. One of Vassar College’s crowning glories, in fact, is The Great Window, a massive stained-glass window measuring sixty-seven feet long by twenty-four feet wide in the Thompson Memorial Library, which represents one of the most memorable events in women’s higher education. It depicts the conferring of the first Doctorate of Philosophy degree to a woman, Lady Elena Lucretia Cornaro-Piscopia (in 1678) by the University of Padua, who was previously denied the examination for the doctor of theology degree.
The importance of women’s education isn’t lost on Leymah. Considering it to be a primary vehicle for the future of Liberia’s children, she told me that she is “continually reminded about the promise of education in creating bright futures for our children.” She then relayed an experience that had occurred only a few days earlier. “While in Thailand for the Rotary International 106th Convention, I was being driven to the convention center, and the young lady who was responsible for protocol asked me, ‘Leymah, how do you as a young woman respond to bosses who have a problem with smartness?’ I told her, ‘Keep being smart. Don’t apologize to anyone for your intelligence.’”
In tribute to Leymah’s work, Vassar College, in partnership with Leymah’s foundation, the Gbowee Peace Foundation, granted full scholarships to two West African women entering as freshman in 2012, which would not only help them earn their college degrees, but would cover all expenses necessary for these students to study at Vassar for four years. “Scholarship unlocks intelligence,” Leymah said. “And not nearly enough women in West Africa have support to follow their dreams.” She is particularly pleased that Vassar is providing full four-year scholarships to two women rather than the more common one-year scholarships offered to more women by some other colleges, often leaving these students without the funding to complete their degree. “I believe in quality over quantity, since the girls who graduate can then provide a strong symbol of hope for other girls that they can achieve too,” she said. “This, I feel, provides the strongest impact.”
Still, while Leymah’s positive outlook of hope for those who have been impacted the most by violence has enabled her to make such a difference in the lives of others, her humility does not allow her to take full credit. “If you look very closely in the poorest of communities, you will see everyday heroes and ‘sheroes.’ They are the ones who are symbols of hope. They are the only ones who can extract a smile from a mother who has no idea where she will get money for medication and money for food,” she said. “These are men and women who have committed their lives to bringing relief to those in pain. Some are doctors, bankers, corporate managers, community workers, or peace activists; these are men and women who know where they have been planted, and their purpose is to blossom.”
As such, during her commencement speech to the graduating Class of 2012, she urged them to follow their callings. “It is a known fact that people who feel a sense of calling in a particular field will bring more enthusiasm to their work than those who are performing nine-to-five, get-on-with-it, make my money and go home jobs,” she said. “There are clear distinctions in the way they perform their duties. The ones who feel a sense of calling blossom, while the ones who feel it’s nine-to-five work make money. In most instances, they leave trails of dead leaves.”
She further spoke about her own determination that stopped the violence in her country, and of the sacrifices made by many other ordinary women, in her speech. “No one took a salary, no one was coerced, and everyone came to the action willingly, knowing that they had been planted at that point to make change. Many of the women abandoned their businesses to be involved. Protesting was a way of life for many months.”
She ended her speech by telling the graduates, “It is my hope and prayer that the dreams of changing the world that many of you had in your head when you left high school and entered college will still be the driving force and passion as you deliver services in whatever field you have been called to impact.”
And when I asked her, just before the ending of our interview, what she had done to celebrate her own honor as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, she said she had not done so yet, choosing instead to view this time as one of reflection. “I want to be able to look back on this honor and see women who are now standing on their own because of me,” she told me. “Now that I got it, I have to earn it!”