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Leymah Gbowee

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Leymah Gbowee in 2011

Leymah Roberta Gbowee (born 1 February 1972) is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a women's peace movement that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003 that led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president. In 2011, she was one of three women awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Quotes

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  • Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies.
    • Interview for Women's E News, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century (2008)
  • Regardless of whom you pray to, during war our experiences as a community and as mothers are the same.
    • Gruber Foundation, Women's Rights Prize (2009)
  • If any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers.
    • Gruber Foundation, Women's Rights Prize (2009)
  • We are all responsible. We are all complicit. White T-shirts catch the light. What matters is what we then do with that light. (The peace activists wore white t-shirts during their protests.)
    • Interview for The Daily Beast (April 5, 2010)
  • We have a saying: “A single straw of a broom can be broken easily, but the straws together are not easily broken.” So here are three things African women can do to support their sisters and daughters:
    1. Join the support network even if your own community is not plagued with conflict or violence. Most women only take action ::when their own communities are threatened. This must stop if we are to tackle the ills that are plaguing our African ::society. We must ignite the spirit of “Ubuntu”—“I am what I am because of who we all are.”
    2. Develop a solid and consistent leadership base. The leadership of most African women’s initiatives functions very well ::during times of crisis, but tends to disintegrate after a huge success is scored. Movement leaders, even myself, made our ::own plans for self-advancement. It is time that the leadership of African women’s initiatives plans for succession.
    3. Reach out to the un-converted. My final point comes from my 12-year-old daughter. For her, the feminist message is not ::filtering very well to potential victims, perpetrators, and government leaders. She believes—and I agree—that we speak ::loudest at women’s conferences and other spaces already filled with the converted. But we must speak to everyone, ::everywhere, about the struggles of African.
  • Because it’s not that women are more peaceful. Women are more thoughtful. So in solving conflict, most times the conversation is primarily around militarism, power and all of those things. And women are the ones who come to the table with conversations about reopening hospitals and schools and providing food and shelter and safety zone for the vast majority of the people.
  • Women bring the human side of the conflict on the table.
  • Peace for me is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of conditions that give dignity to all of us – conditions like housing, everything – peace is the presence of those conditions that give dignity to all.
  • It's not the vices that we live through that define who we are.
  • There are many women who would never have the opportunity to sit on this couch, that are constantly doing work to transform their communities. They wake up every morning without any funding, without any opportunity to travel. Some of them operate in spaces where they don’t even have food, where the security is at risk, but they keep at it. They keep at it because for them, this is the insurance policy for their daughters and for their sons.
  • Most times I look at these women and I tell myself, if they, with all of the challenges in their lives, are not giving up, who am I to give up? That thought alone is all of the energy booster that I need to keep going because I recognise that I’m a part of a community of women who are moving in spite of their circumstances. I too have to keep moving.
  • The world is at a place now where we have to move away from our silo kind of operations into a more collaborative. I think you can’t talk peace without teachers.
  • It's important for teachers to interact with people of all fields so that there’s an understanding that we are mentoring, we are raising, the next generation of young people who understand what dignity is. Because in the absence of dignity, people get disenchanted.
  • Your passion is the fuel or the vehicle. Your anger is the fuel that you need to move from one point to the other.
  • If you’re coming to be an activist because you want to make money: NO!
  • My hope is that we will see less and less conflicts in our world, but that women will not have to consistently make cases for why they’re necessary for peace, for justice, for politics.
** Her hopes for the future. Nobel Peace Prize 2011
  • Every human has the right to live, to express themselves, to worship the way they want to worship. An effective government is one that enables and empowers its citizens to contribute to their communities. When people are allowed to be part of every process that affects their lives, that is true peace, true freedom from fear and violence. My work is to ensure that no group is left out of making the decisions that affect their lives.
  • Girls are the first casualties of war through forced marriage, rape, sexual assault, and unplanned and forced pregnancy. They are barred access to school and to opportunities, among other realities that consort to restrict and eviscerate girls’ abilities to define their future. Peaceful and inclusive societies expand the arc of possibility for individuals and families.
  • I am a local girl with a global platform. The prize has led to the recognition that women play a pivotal role in peacebuilding at the grassroots level.
  • I am one representative of the thousands of Liberian women who stood with me in the rain, sat with me in the sun, and joined me in protest.
  • The prize has provided me a global platform to broaden the conversation about war, peace, and stability.
  • Women and girls have always been affected by war. The Nobel Peace Prize has helped all of our efforts to define true peace—one that is not only the absence of war but is inclusive of opportunity.
  • Liberia has given me a lot and the war took so much away.
  • My hope is that girls and women never have to know the effects of war or the absence of peace in their lives—that they can invest in themselves because there is a future that will recognize their talents and provide an outlet for their contributions.
  • Dealing with youth is a demographic nightmare but also a demographic dividend.
  • Education must be connected to opportunities in the job market.
  • Youth by nature are energetic and curious. It is up to us—the adults, the leaders in the public and private sector—to channel that energy and curiosity positively.
  • Unrest and disillusionment conspire to weaken peace and security.
  • The problem of youth unemployment is a destabilizing factor. But it is not all bleak. Youth breeds optimism.
  • I work with many young people and their commitment to improvement is the greatest resource we cannot afford to squander.
  • "All across Africa, even in the midst of the deepest and darkest civil war, women are still proving that we can hold communities together."
  • 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
    • Gbowee, Leymah; Mithers, Carol (2011). Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War: A Memoir. New York: Beast Books. ISBN 978-0-9842951-5-9. OCLC 751747258
  • 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
    • Gbowee, Leymah; Mithers, Carol (2011). Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War: A Memoir. New York: Beast Books. ISBN 978-0-9842951-5-9. OCLC 751747258
  • 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
  • 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.
    • Gbowee, Leymah; Mithers, Carol (2011). Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War: A Memoir. New York: Beast Books. ISBN 978-0-9842951-5-9. OCLC 751747258
  • 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
  • It could be Jesus, it could be Mohammed, it could be Buddha, but there is no way that you can effect change in people's lives if there is not someone that you can rely on as the "divine intervenor" or the "divine one" that you can call on every day.... God is faithful, whoever you know him to me.... Take a step of faith and God will see to the rest.
  • 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.
    • Gbowee, Leymah; Mithers, Carol (2011). Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War: A Memoir. New York: Beast Books. ISBN 978-0-9842951-5-9. OCLC 751747258
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