Leyman Gbowee, a woman who weaves peace

“Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden,” Leyman Gbowee says. “We are also the ones who nurture societies.”

By the age of 17, Leyman Gbowee had come to realize that “if any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers.”

Leyman Gbowee was one of the founders and organizers of the Women in Peacebuilding Program / West African Network for Peacebuilding, and in March 2003 she became the spoke-person and leader of the movement.

Liberia had been ravaged by a decade long civil war: on a daily basis the country underwent violence, rapes, murders. Children soldiers were used by both sides, the depotic president Charles taylor and his opponents.

The courage and determination of about 3,000 ordinary women, Christian and Muslim working together, brought the civil war to an end. Lead by Leyman Gbowee women initially held workshops and devised slogans such as  “Women as strategic thinkers”, and “Women building bridges for reconciliation”. They stopped consulting their men and joined beyond their differences to establish peace.

Women dressed in white held signs saying: “We want peace”, organized sit-ins and other forms of resistance , went together to talk to warring leaders, until they brought the president Charles Taylor to meet with the rebels in Ghana, barricading them in a conference room. They used all sort of strategies, from declining to have sex with their men, to threatening to get naked in public, an act that would bring shame to their men, according to the Liberian mores.

“We stepped out and did the unimaginable” she says, “No one thought that we could sustain a protest fro two and a half years. No one thought that with all of the problems we had and little education we could challenge structures.” Thanks to their effort a peace accord was signed in the summer of 2003.

Listen to Leyman Gbowee speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008, about the award-winning documentary Pray the devil back to hell that depicts the Liberian women’s struggle. Hear the strength these women were able to summon.

After the war the women’s movement was active in the demilitarization efforts and in supporting Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became  the president of Liberia, the first female president of an African country.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia and Lyeman Gbowee

In 2005 Leyman Gbowee earned an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

I think that Africa is a country rich in natural resources, but its most precious resource are the women. In spite of all the insults and the violence they had to undergo (in Liberia alone, 40% of the women had been raped in the course of the civil war), African women, represent the hope and the strength of the continent.

Leymah Gbowee’s remarks of on accepting the 2009 Profile in Courage Award, May 18, 2009.

Close your eyes and imagine a mother leaving her baby half dead by the roadside because she can’t stand to see that child died of hunger. Close your eyes and imagine a mother brutally raped and several objects inserted in her privates. Close your eyes and imagine a group of fighters with guns, betting on the sex of the child of a pregnant woman, and in order to find out who wins the bet, cutting her and taking the child out. Close your eyes and imagine a group of women in white, no shoes, … under heavy rain trying to push a group of world leaders with a statement that, “We too have a stake in this peace process,” being pushed back by security because they were security threats to these world leaders.

Open your eyes and then close your eyes and dream of a world where babies no longer die by the roadside, where women are no longer brutally raped with impunity, where the U.N. is going into villages to find women from rural areas to sit at the peace table, where President Obama goes to Liberia and says, “I want to consult with the rural women first.” Do you see that future?

A Natural History of Peace

My point of departure is a story told by the professor Robert Sapolsky, who teaches Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Stanford University, California.

Since he was a graduate student, Sapolsky spent a few months each year in Kenya, studying the social behavior of a troop of baboons.

A tourist lodge was build next to their territory and the most aggressive Forest troop males went to the garbage pit for food.

In 1983 an outburst of tuberculosis occurred, from infected meat in the dump, 46% of adult males died. Only females (now double the number of males) and less aggressive males had survived.

Ten years after the Forest troop was found out to have a much gentler social system, in spite of the fact that by then even the more docile males died of old age. Other males had transferred to the troop as adolescents, the typical custom of baboons, and had found a tolerant and gregarious social style. Males had high rates of affiliative behaviors, and low-ranking males were subject to low rates of aggressive attack and subordination by high-ranking males, and experienced much less stress.

You can watch the video, where you see Professor Sapolsky telling the story and  briefly commenting on it. It lasts just three and a half minutes

The question posed in the video is:

How can we create a better society, that promotes human flourishing?

The final comment of Prof. Sapolsky:

If baboons are able to, in one generation, transform what is supposed to be textbooks social systems, sort of engraved-in-star, we don’t have an excuse when we say there is sort of inevitability about human social systems.

Here below find extracts from Prof Sapolsky’s article on the subject (he is a very captivating writer, so I recommend reading it all) published in Foreign Affairs January-February 2006 (see http://www.truthout.org/article/robert-m-sapolsky-a-natural-history-peace

In the early 1980s, “Forest Troop,” a group of savanna baboons I had been studying – virtually living with – for years, was going about its business in a national park in Kenya when a neighboring baboon group had a stroke of luck: its territory encompassed a tourist lodge that expanded its operations and consequently the amount of food tossed into its garbage dump. Baboons are omnivorous, and “Garbage Dump Troop” was delighted to feast on leftover drumsticks, half-eaten hamburgers, remnants of chocolate cake, and anything else that wound up there. Soon they had shifted to sleeping in the trees immediately above the pit, descending each morning just in time for the day’s dumping of garbage.

[… ]Soon afterward, tuberculosis, a disease that moves with devastating speed and severity in nonhuman primates, broke out in Garbage Dump Troop. Over the next year, most of its members died, as did all of the males from Forest Troop who had foraged at the dump. (Considerable sleuthing ultimately revealed that the disease had come from tainted meat in the garbage dump, which had been sold to the tourist lodge thanks to a corrupt meat inspector).

[…]  The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy am

ong the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, mor

e typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings.

[…] What was key was not just the predominance of females, but the type of male that remained.

[…] But the largest surprise did not come until some years later. Female savanna baboons spend their lives in the troop into which they are born, whereas males leave their birth troop around puberty; a troop’s adult males have thus all grown up elsewhere and immigrated as adolescents. By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after. In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. […]

Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

Another interesting article, where Professor Sapolsky states:

Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick ourselves.

Article describing the story in academic terms.