Mennonite Weekly Review

HARRISONBURG, Va. — Ley­mah Gbowee entered the world spotlight several years before coming to Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Leymah Gbowee speaks at Eastern Mennonite University. — Photo by Jim Bishop/EMU

Gbowee, a 2007 CJP graduate, and a group of ordinary women banded together to do the unimaginable — use nonviolent methods to confront Liberia’s despotic President Charles Taylor and his warlord opponents.

Both sides used child soldiers who terrorized the population, including raping a large percentage of Liberia’s women and girls.

The mothers dressed in white, held up signs saying “We Want Peace” and began to appear wherever the warring leaders could be found. They also told their husbands there would be no sex until the men did everything in their power to stop the war.

At one point the women linked arms and barricaded negotiators for the opposing sides in a conference room. Gbowee threatened to take off her clothes, followed by the other protesting women — an act that, in Liberian culture, would shame and disgrace the men — if the negotiators failed to stay at the table until they arrived at a peace agreement.

The women’s efforts succeeded, and a peace accord was signed in the summer of 2003, leading to U.N.-supervised disarmament beginning in the winter of 2003-04 and finally to the election of Africa’s first woman president in January 2006.

On behalf of the women she led, Gbowee has received a half dozen major awards, including one from Harvard University. She has been the subject of an article in Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, has appeared on Bill Moyers Journal and The Colbert Report and is the main figure in a documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Liberia was founded as a colony in the 1820’s as a place for freed slaves from the United States to emigrate to Africa. In 1847, they founded the Republic of Liberia, establishing a government modeled after the United States.

A military-led coup in 1980 overthrew then-president William R. Tolbert, launching a period of instability that eventually led to civil war.

Charles Taylor invaded the country in 1989. During his time in power, some 250,000 people were killed and over a million others displaced in a country of just over 3 million population.