Women, Peace & Security
Leymah Gbowee doesn’t scare easy. She survived the barbarism of Liberia’s second civil war and the despair of living as a refugee. She went nose-to-nose with that country’s president to bring peace, and stared-down a bullying husband to escape a brutal marriage.
So she probably exaggerated about how frightened she was last Friday afternoon when she emerged from a pharmacy in downtown Newark and walked into a sidewalk brawl between two groups of boys.
"I was saying, ‘Please, Jesus, please Jesus. Just lead me out of here," said Gbowee, an internationally celebrated women’s rights and peace activist, who told the story during a workshop at Newark Peace Education Summit.
On Saturday night, while walking back to the Robert Treat Hotel after dinner, she saw another fight. In both cases, the boys involved were egged on by their friends.
Gbowee said it reminded her of the child fighters in Liberia and other war-ravaged African nations.
"I always ask the same question: ‘Who is socializing these boys? Where are the mothers?’’
In a reverse from the long-held belief that the absence of fathers leads to chaos in the streets, Gbowee says women hold the key to changing violent behavior.
"We need to teach our boys to respect the life God gave them, and to respect the women who give that life," said she in an interview after workshop she held on "Reconciliation after Protracted Conflict."
On the bigger scale, women need a larger role in government, she said, to shape policies that alleviate poverty and other social sources of violence.
This is not just talk. She did it in her own country.
During the bloodshed of the Second Liberian Civil War, Gbowee brought together Christian and Muslim women to hold prayer sessions and other anti-violence protests.
The movement grew by the thousands, and the women held protests wearing signature white T-shirts and headdresses. They demanded a meeting with Liberian President Charles Taylor and a voice in the peace negotiations in Ghana. A peace came, as did the fall of Taylor, and the election of the African continent’s first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. This, of course, is the short version. The long version includes years of being alternately ignored and intimidated, or threatened with arrest.
"But we demanded our voice be heard and it was heard," she said.
The long version also includes Gbowee’s women showing compassion to the child soldiers at war’s end. At times, they had to nurse the same boys who killed their sons or raped their daughters, because reconciliation is critical to lasting peace.
Her organization has expanded across Africa, and she sees a need for a similar pressure exerted by American women in violent cities.
"When I come to the United States, I am sad to see the way people live in the inner cities. What I see is madness. The drugs, the violence. The images of young black men in prison. This should not happen in a country where you have so much. A mother here should only have to worry about a child being hit by a car, not by a bullet."
During the question and answer part of her session, a Newark woman got up and complained that the city power structure was unresponsive.
"Sister, then you are not being loud enough," she responded. "If you wait for the powers to acknowledge you, they will never acknowledge you. You must make them. It is not an easy thing, my dear. It is hard work to be the voice and conscience of your community. It is morning and night and morning and night."
Leymah Roberta Gbowee greets people
after a workshop during the Newark Peace Education Summit .
Gbowee is the executive director of the Women's Peace and Security
Network Africa.