Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Gbowee is a single mother of six, including one adopted daughter. Years ago she had been in an abusive relationship with one of the fathers of her children though she finally found the courage to walk away from the relationship and rebuild her life.

Leymah Gbowee was born on 1 February 1972 in central Liberia, as one of the four daughters born to her parents. She had a normal childhood and dreamed of becoming a doctor in future.

She had freshly graduated from high school and was looking forward to attending the university in 1989 when the First Liberian Civil War broke out and catapulted the country into a period of uncertainty and violence.

The war raged on for years and was finally subsiding in 1996 when she learned of a program run by UNICEF for training people to be social workers who would then counsel those traumatized by war.

She enrolled for the three-month training program during the course of which she realized that she herself was in the throes of an abusive relationship with a man. Already a single mother to young children, she decided to rebuild her life in order to beget a better future for herself and her family.

In 1998 she became a volunteer at the St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, serving within a program called Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Program (THRP). It was here that she realized that the purpose of her life was to become a peace activist.

She had been at the Trauma Healing project for a year when she met Samuel Gbaydee Doe who 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.

Motivated by Doe, she began reading widely in the field of peacebuilding. She was particularly influenced by ‘The Politics of Jesus’ by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder and works by Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.

She became involved with WANEP when she learned that the organization was actively seeking to involve women in its work. During this period she became acquainted with Thelma Ekiyor of Nigeria, a well-educated lawyer and visionary who secured funding from WANEP and organized the first meeting of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) in Accra, Ghana. Gbowee joined the WIPNET and quickly became its leader.

In 2002, she organized a women’s peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, in which thousands of women joined hands to hold nonviolent peaceful protests including the threat of a curse and a sex strike. In order to garner more attention the women wore white T-shirts with WIPNET logo and white hair ties.

She was eventually granted a meeting with Liberia’s President Charles Taylor where she demanded peace. As a result of her relentless efforts, the Liberian war finally came to an end with the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement on August 18, 2003.

She led the women’s peace movement, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which ultimately brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. The movement involved silent nonviolence protests including a sex strike by the women and the threat of a curse.