What the World Will Become
Welcome to What the World Will Become, a podcast about the humans who dedicate their lives to building a more free and just world. Over the course of this season, you’ll hear from women-identified and gender non-conforming activists from around the world who are carving out spaces for creative resistance and new possibilities in the context of profound difficulty.
Find out more about us at https://www.theinclusivegloballeadershipinitiative.org/wwwb
What the World Will Become
Episode 8: Championing Change and Peace - A Dialogue with Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee
From the tumultuous regions of Israel and Palestine to the terrains of Rwanda and Nepal, women are driving the fight for peace using innovative tactics. As we grapple with a violent world, how do we tap into our collective humanity? To gain some insight, we turn to those who have been tireless - and successful - in their fight for justice.
Leymah Gbowee shares how her upbringing, where she was taught the significance of education and standing up for her beliefs, paved the way for her to become a beacon of hope and change. From her youth as a spirited high school senator to a globally recognized peace activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, she demonstrates the formidable power of the human spirit and the immense potential of women in championing human rights and equity. Together we journey through the cataclysmic impacts of war, with unique emphasis on the pivotal role of women in bidding peace. We discuss the Second Liberian Civil War, the displacement it wrought, and the residual trauma that survivors grapple with. Despite these daunting realities, the spotlight remains on the unyielding courage of Leymah and the women who stood by her, protesting against the war - a testament to the potency of active nonviolence in instigating meaningful change.
A full video of Leymah's talk can be found here.
Music playing. Welcome to what the World Will Become, a podcast about the humans who dedicate their lives to building a more free and just world. My name is Marie Berry. I'm a feminist researcher and writer, and I've spent the better part of the past 20 years researching and thinking about how women experience war and its aftermath. I've done research in places like Rwanda, bosnia, kenya, nepal and Colombia, and I've interviewed hundreds of women whose lives have been shaped by violence Along the way. I have then repeatedly struck by two simultaneous truths the first is that violence is devastating, leaving those who survive it with trauma and grief that can last for years and even generations, but the second is that, even in the most bleak and impossible of situations, there is often a great beauty, a way that those who suffer from violence find love, joy and resilience that can creatively forge new paths forward, paths that offer us profound hope and possibility for building a more just and free world. Music playing. Hi, everyone, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Season 1 of what the World Will Become, and you're in for a real treat.
Speaker 1:This episode features Leymah Bowie, the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Liberia.
Speaker 1:In our conversation, leymah shares her story of growing up the horrors from when the Liberian Civil War broke out and how she eventually mobilized thousands of women to stop the war. In large part because of Leymah's effort, after the war ended, liberia elected the first woman head of state in Africa, ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In the years since, leymah has been an active participant in movements for peace across the globe. She was featured in the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell and wrote a beautiful memoir that I recommend to anyone who wants to make a change in the world. It's called Mighty Be Our Powers. Our conversation was recorded in September 2023 in front of a live audience at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver as part of an event that we hosted with our friends at World Denver. I hope you enjoy. So I want to just begin tonight by asking you, leymah, to share with us a little bit about your early life, your childhood and what it was like growing up in Liberia.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Good evening everyone. It's truly an honor to be here this evening and to see a full house on a Thursday night. Thank you all for coming. So I am the fourth of five girls. My mother never had a son, so you can imagine that for many years she was the ridicule of many people, because having a son is very important in many families.
Speaker 2:Our grandmother, who died in 2021 at the age of 115. So I'm here for a long time Was our primary caregiver and I tell people that she was our first feminist teacher. Ma, as we called her, was the one who taught all of us the alphabet. She had a fifth grade education and that's where she stopped and then she was married off, but that fifth grade education was what she used to start all of her grandchildren off in kindergarten. I tell people that my story and just this afternoon I was telling Eboniza Noma when he was driving me here, that I'm not the stereotypical African story, that story of oh, they never allow us to go to school, and they know I grew up empowered.
Speaker 2:I grew up hearing that you can do anything you want to do. I grew up hearing that education is important for your future and all of those things. I think literally my siblings and I, we had such self-confidence that we were just troublemakers, like we were sent to jail many times for fighting in the neighborhood, and it would probably be boys that were fighting. So I'm just laying this premise to say that even as girls and we had my grandmother was a member of every secret society in Liberia. So she was very powerful. So she was part of the male society, part of the female society. So if you're from West Africa or from Africa, you know when they have those societies it's primarily for men, for women, but she could go into any society. She was really very powerful. When it was time for us to go and do FGM, they came.
Speaker 2:I remembered were very young and there was a lot of whispers in the living room and my dad came outside and said my daughters are not going and he stood up to it. We did not. If anyone tried to take my daughters to do the female genital mutilation, I'll kill them. So on one end we have these women who were telling us you can do anything, and on the other end we have this man who was telling us I will protect you from tradition and culture. So that was the life that we grew up with.
Speaker 2:We grew up our grandmother used to say when you get married, if your husband brings rice, you should be able to bring the charcoal to cook the rice. And the way I now understand it because I've been able to take that statement unpack, do my own analysis. And literally what she was saying to us was you must dominate your space. Don't ever allow anyone to dominate your space for you. You have to um the space that God has given you on this earth. You must be the author of your story. You must be the champion of your game. You must be the soldier in your battle.
Speaker 2:So that was the mindset I went into life with, and so, high school, I went into politics. In high school, I was senator for my school. 2019, we celebrated our 30th high school reunion, and I will end with that. And there was this one girl who said to me you know, I hated you so badly in high school. And I said why? She said because you came in that high school at 10th grade and I had been there all my life, but the first week of you being in that school, the entire school knew you. And then I said I'm so sorry that you hated me, but unfortunately I never saw you.
Speaker 1:So, if I do the math right, the 2019 30th high school reunion marked exactly 30 years since 1989. And in 1989 in Liberia, which is, I think most are familiar with, a very small country about five million people in West Africa, in 1989, a person named Charles Taylor invaded the country and basically started a war, and that war lasted until 1997, when Charles Taylor was eventually then elected president shortly thereafter and we'll get into the details of this, but I wanna know what changed that moment. It was right around the time you graduated from high school that the war began.
Speaker 2:Exactly one day, my graduation was December 23rd 1989. In December 24th 1989, the war started, and I tell people that we took it for joke. From December to March to April to May to June, I started college, science college. My dream was to become a pediatrician. See how far I am from that. My dream was to become a pediatrician.
Speaker 2:And then one morning all hell broke loose, and the way I like to describe it is that I woke up, a 17 year old girl, and by 6 pm I was an adult at the twink of an eye, because my mother had gone to work, my father had gone to work, my other siblings had all left to go to work or to university.
Speaker 2:I had a late class and then that morning, like really loud shooting and my younger siblings were home I'm the older of my siblings at home, nieces and nephews. By 5 pm, over 25 internally displaced people from our church had come, and then my aunt is looking at me and saying to me I can't take any decisions. This is your father's house. You are the only one of his children here. You have to decide. In that moment I'm deciding who sleeps where she's whispering to me. There are documents, there are jewellery. There should be this you need to. So, yeah, am I carefree, basketball loving nightclub, going teenager and all of a sudden I have to think about documents and solidifying the future of our home, thinking about how 25 people will eat.
Speaker 1:And that was the beginning of me taking care of people, and I haven't stopped here today, a huge rupture right Between the way that life was before and the way that life then proceeded, and it sounds, having read so much about you over the years, that it fundamentally changed the course of your career, your studies and your life.
Speaker 2:Totally, totally. I mean, one of the defining moments for me was a young man. A young man, we were all internally displaced to get at the church and he left and said he was going to the Taylor side. So the country had been divided into different factions and we were still on the government side. My mom kept saying to him don't go, and he kept saying I can't stay here. So he went and by 4 pm that day, strangely, we're listening to focus on Africa BBC and the presenter was saying that they had just killed a group of young men and that he formed this ID and he literally called this young man's name and then my classmate that was very close to him and all of his siblings had been killed. So we're just hearing news of people who had future.
Speaker 2:One minute, this person and I told myself what is the use of going to college, then to med school, I mean when one tiny object can undo everything that you sacrifice for? So I'm not going back to school. I got angry at God. No one should call God name where I'm seated. I'm not going to pray, I'm not going to do anything, I'm not like literally. I was just in beast mode, angry, looking for food, wake up in the morning, my mom lost her mind. So one day she's sitting, she's the people. Because my dad was in the government, we still had food and she had such confidence in the government that my sister had come home one day and said she was working medical records at the government hospital and people had come to look for the medical records of 100 children. And she said no one brought 100 children. Yeah, so to check emergency everything no children. Eventually we heard that the government soldiers had taken those 100 children and thrown all of them in a well. My mom refused to believe that, so that was a point of contention between her and my sister. So this day all along, she's still saying the government soldiers are the good guys. This day I'm going to look for greens and other things. We still have rights, but we have money, so I have to go and look for other food.
Speaker 2:I come back and my mom is just sitting there like she's lost her mind and she's crying and saying I killed a man, I killed a man, I killed a man. I'm wondering how did you kill someone? And then she said this guy was digging in the garbage and she got up and there was a wire fence. So she went and stood at the fence and said to him what are you looking for? He said I'm looking for palm kernels. She said to do what he said to take home for my children and I will crack it and eat it. She said you don't have food. He said no. So she went inside and brought five cups, five or 10 cups of rice and handed it to him.
Speaker 2:In that moment the soldiers came. She went back and sat down and they asked him who gave you the rice? He's afraid to say her, because she would be in trouble. He's just standing there and in those days they used to call rice gold dust. It's either you were a rebel if you had rice or you work with government. In any case, anyone who had rice was in danger of being killed. And this man stood there looking, looking, looking. He couldn't say she gave it to me. They took the rice from him and point blank executed him right there. So when I came, she had no ability to make decisions on let's eat this, let's go here. So not only did I lose my childhood and everything, I then became a caregiver for someone who was mentally unstable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is such a tremendous weight to carry, the caregiving also to see your mother in that, in that condition, and to have so much of your family to also be thinking about. And I know that there was so much displacement during the war and I'm wondering if you can tell us or share us a little bit about what you witnessed and experienced in terms of how the war didn't only come to people's homes but caused mass of numbers of people to flee everything that they knew, every bit of safety that they had.
Speaker 2:We were before the war, 3 million people 1 million were internally displaced, just to give you an idea 500,000 became refugees, and these are all estimated figures. We had to move more than 10 times. Like you come to this place, you sleep this night and then there's a missile attack. Then you have to move to another place and you move again. So we're persistently moving. One neighborhood we went to the bedroom was the size of the stage. We were 50 people, 5-0. So at night, if you manage to find a spot, you sleep for like three hours and then someone will come and tap you. You have to go and sit outside or someone else to come and sleep. That's how we slept for probably a week, because at that time we were separate from our father, so we didn't know where he was. He didn't know where we were. People went and told him they had killed all of us. We heard that he had been killed. So those were the kinds of things that we're dealing with Families just moving endlessly, aimlessly, people sleeping outside Anyone can offer you a place to sleep.
Speaker 2:When I think back and a lot of the memories from the war have suppressed for good reasons but when I think back, this is something that I don't wish on my worst enemy. Recently, last year, we went to Poland and entered Ukraine, and so while we were in Poland, they said let's go to the refugee center. We got there and just seeing the sheets like that dividing the room, I lost it. I cried the entire time on live TV. There was nothing that could get out of me. All of the prepared statement went out the window because just that divided sheet. It brought back memories that I thought had gone away, and so that's how you live when you've been through what we've been through in Liberia.
Speaker 1:It's gutting thinking about the scale of displacement today. I think the number now is that there's 110 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, inside and outside of their countries of origin, and that's just that scale. You think about all the rooms, like the room you were in and it just it catches your breath.
Speaker 2:The one thing you need to also understand is that the war lasts so long that at one point I was carrying my nieces and nephews as refugees. Then at another point I was carrying my own children. That's the progression. So at one stage is family members like nieces and nephews. At another stage is me with two very young children pregnant on a ship that is about to sink, trying to find our way out of Liberia. Togana so many different parts of the story that you don't want to wish on.
Speaker 2:Your worst enemy went to the largest refugee camp in Jordan a few years ago. It was a long convoy, very important people, presidents and all of that, and we were the small people on the delegation and at some point they said the convoy needs to leave. And who's holding the convoy up? Leima? Because I'm seated on the sidewalk and I see me in a young girl with hopes and dreams of becoming a translator at the UN and she's talking so passionately. She has perfected her English, so everyone is calling her to talk. I'm glued, I'm stuck there and they're like come, come, come. We need to leave, we need to leave, but I'm not seeing this girl anymore. I'm seeing myself.
Speaker 1:That's. It's such a powerful I mean I can't even imagine. I, I, the, we get to the late 1990s and the first Liberian war comes to an end and there's an election of Charles Taylor to the presidency of the country. Two years later there's an invasion, there's kind of another sort of emergence, outbreak of conflict as a group of rebels decides to challenge Taylor's regime. What, what was this?
Speaker 1:what was it like for you when there was this breather in some ways, a couple of years where things were more peaceful at some level or they weren't. Tell us then.
Speaker 2:It was never peaceful. It's. I mean people assume that when the guns are silent then there's peace, and my definition of peace is not the absence of war but the presence of conditions that dignify all. If in those days there were checkpoints, you could get beaten terribly or even killed if your car light was too bright at a checkpoint. The soldiers were ruthless. They could come in your community and take anything. Those were the conditions.
Speaker 2:People, the way people some guy put it this way, say 65% of the population over where Millet voted for Charles Taylor and asked him to lead us. And he decided to be a ruler and so things were very well. And then he was still meddling in Sierra Leone, he was still doing everything evil in any other place that he could do whatever he needed to do. And so these people came, the war started again and before we knew it we were running. But I was very, very angry and when we decided that we needed to do something to end the war, it was that moment in the lives of all of the women who. Your child is seven years old and that child is going to school. Imagine a seven-year-old child and if someone takes him or her, puts them in a pickup truck that night, gives them an AK-47, teaches them how to shoot and the next morning send them to the war front. So people children going to school were being taken. People, daughters were being taken, mothers were saying what do we do? And so I said we were pushed so far back to the war that we either go through the war or we fight back. And our way, the protesting, was to fight back. In those days you read CNN, you watch CNN, you read New York Times. All you will hear about is the blood diamonds, charles Taylor, and no one was talking about the women which is still the same today who were suffering as a result of the war. And so when we stepped out, we decided we wanted the narrative to change. So we had no clue, please. None of us went to any institution to learn active non-violence, to learn anything. We were just going by our head. We started with $10 from someone's handbag and the rest of it is history. If someone said let's go pick it there, we went there. If someone said go block this place, we went there.
Speaker 2:There was this one time the UN sent a delegation to Liberia and they were the International Crisis Contact Group on Liberia for peace and we get to where they were with our statement. So we had this statement, we had laminated it and we kept it in our clothes, like you tie your lappa and you put it in there. And so we get there and the soldiers were driving us and this Swedish guy comes and stands at the gate of the UN compound. Next thing he goes in, several white folks come, goes in several, and one of the young women, very brave said to me boss, I'm crossing the street. I said well, those boys have AK-47,. She said these white people are there and they won't allow him to shoot me.
Speaker 2:So she crossed the street and they were trying to push her back and this guy from Sweden said no, let her through. And she handed them the statement. I said do you have more like that? We handed the statement, but those were the things the US Embassy would decide. So they know what would work. We'll just go and lie there and block the place. So our protest action was there's a need for us to change the trend of how the world is discussing this war. Everyone was too focused on the warlords and not the women and the children that were being killed, that were being adopted, and we decided it's time for us to shift that. So when we got out, it was our pain, our shame, everything that we had gone through that we put out there and protested.
Speaker 1:So when I read a bit about the first days of this movement, there really were just a handful of women.
Speaker 2:We started with seven, $10, a press statement that we put out in the newspaper, but I think the reason why it gained traction was because we signed our names. Don't like the morning day activists behind their computers who say we the people, no, it was not we the people. All of us signed. And so the next day the media wanted to know who were these crazy women. Immediate, unconditionally fire. Charles Taylor had said he will fight until the last soldier died. Peaceful dialogue he said he was a Legitimate government. He could not negotiate with the rebels the deployment of an intervention force. Liberia was a sovereign nation and who not allow foreign troops on the soil. So everything he said he would not do was everything we had in that document. And at that moment, when we signed, people were asking is this your death wish, because this is one of the most notorious Authorized government in the world? How do you sign your names to this? From seven to 60 to 65 to 200, 250, a thousand? The day we came out to protest, over 10,000 women.
Speaker 1:Tell me what happened next.
Speaker 2:Well, we, we had some crazy moments just recently. We celebrated 18 years of the signing of the peace agreement in Liberia, august 18. I mean, we celebrated 20 years 18. August 18 was 20 years of the signing and we sat down to reminisce, group of the sisters and I, after we protested the first day, taylor did not stop because we protested outside, close, on an open field. Second day, we didn't see him. Third, they would decide it's time to take the message to him. We did seven letters. His wife, his brother, his office himself, parliament, just about anyone we knew knew him. We send this letter to him so he couldn't say. And then after several weeks he decided he will meet us.
Speaker 2:But the instruction that he gave his soldiers was that if we were less than 25, they should not allow us in. Because there was such a politics of fear. And that's where the world is today, from the US to everywhere. If you want people not to take action, just instill fear in them. So that politics of fear of him saying if anyone got on the streets to protest, even if his mother was amongst they, should beat the hell out of them. So that was the politics that he was playing.
Speaker 2:So they did expect that that 25 women would be brave to show up. So when I got to the executive mansion that day, I asked the guy I say you said 25 if we're less than 25. And I said what if we're more than 25? And he looked at me and smirk Let me see. So I said okay, I whipped out my phone and told the women Form your line and calm down. 2,500 women show up that day and as the women were coming, down was like sea of white. He was like, oh my god, these women are serious. Then we get a message from him that oh no, he can't see 25 women. I mean, he can't see all of us. 10 of us should come into his office. I said no.
Speaker 2:So back and forth, back and forth, and they said, oh, the president want to see. I told the women sit down, I'm going up and tell him. Gave him a piece of my mind because I was just in beast mode and so, as I was going, they said no, no, no, no, no. He changes mine. And the security kept saying to me why do you want to go to jail? Why do you want to be killed? And so he said no. He said he's coming. So he came downstairs and he's sitting like this and they put the podium. But the way they set the podium man back would have been to him and that statement is supposed to be read to him. So I said turn the podium. The guy was like, just read the thing. I said no, so by myself I turned the podium around so that he could see me reading whatever I had to read and then the offer us seats. So he's sitting there with all of his people and they offer us seats. And when they offer us the seat, we got there, push the seat and sat on the floor. That was our way. So once we left after that meeting with him, he agreed to go to the peace talks and then it was another journey we went for. We thought it was going to be for seven days. We had five thousand dollars. We went and mobilized other women from Ghana, seven of us, when the number seven is very significant to all of the things that we did. We went to Ghana mobilized with me.
Speaker 2:The one week, ten days of peace talks, turned to three months. We ran out of money. We were sleeping. We didn't have hotels anymore. We're sleeping on the floor. I had a tiny house there we're sleeping on the floor in the house, but every morning we were committed to going.
Speaker 2:The talks were going nowhere and so one day I was losing interest because I was getting angry. And when you're doing non-violence work, anger is the last thing you want to have in you, because it you can't think, you can't focus. That morning I went to read the news every morning, that was my routine and this young girl had just given birth and she went out to hang her baby diapers and two little boys, who were the ages of my two sons at the time, were brushing their teeth In a misaligned that in kill or three of them. I watched that video over and over and I'm crying. Then I called my mentor sugar scooper and said sugars, get more women. We're coming to do something today. We get to the peace hall, I sit down. We sent for more women. I told them women lack arms, lack arms in front of the door. So the delegates are in, like this room, and so we sit to all of the entry point and we lack arms. And then I write a hostage note and send it in to say that the piece was tapped on this and this Nigerian general came and took it in and all we could hear on the overhead speaker was distinguished ladies and gentlemen, the piece hall has been seized by General Leima and her people. So they said they're coming to arrest me because I was obstructing justice. So I decided I was strip naked and by the time I started the police left me and they started telling us oh, some of the men are jumping out the window. So we fortified the place. The mediator then came and negotiated with us.
Speaker 2:But I tell anyone that Liberia has seen 20 years of peace is because, first, god led us to do that action, because afterwards, less than two weeks later, august 18th, they signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Did we end there? No, we went to Liberia, took the peace agreement apart. And the reason why I'm taking my time to tell this is because most times when you're doing peace work, people tend to think that, oh, after they signed the peace agreement, peace arrived.
Speaker 2:No, we were determined, because that was like the 16 or 15th peace agreement that we've signed. So we were determined to ensure that we implemented it to the letter. We took it apart, went to Liberia, sat down 80 women leaders. We set benchmarks from this time to this time, this time to this time, and we were determined to ensure that everything was implemented. At the end of the day, in October we got Africa's first female president because of the hard work and the way Christiana Amanpou sometimes would say to me layman, without you and the work the women did, president Sarlif would not have been President of the Republic of Liberia, and I believe it. I tell people her elections was the icing on the cake that we already baked with the peace work that we did. So that's how we've come now to 20 years of uninterrupted shooting.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna call it peace, thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1:You know if we can go back, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about something that I think you get asked about a lot, which you mentioned, and I think when you mentioned I stripped naked, right.
Speaker 1:There's this. This is quite a famous story now about you, and there's some video of it too, of you really holding your ground and, in a powerful way, shaming these men in that room for daring to be so stubborn as to not continue negotiating and hammering out the hard work of peace. Can you tell us a little bit more about the types of strategies that you've seen yourself and others in the movement use in these ways that were really I think you know both specific to the context that you were in? I think it's important to note that this is a way of shaming kind of men the sing the naked body of a mother, kind of shaming men in this context. That's one of many tools that you used in this movement and I'm curious if you can just share anything that might inspire. You know others that are looking around the globe at their own work and their own activism.
Speaker 2:Well, someone asked this question why do you think a group of men who allegedly ordered the rape of maybe an approximate or alleges 65% of the population, why do you think they would care when they've had for a few handful of women stripped naked? Someone, one of the warlords said the moment he stood at that door and saw us trying to disrobe. The only question he asked himself what have we done to bring our mothers to the place where they would give up their dignity? And for me, that action in that moment. Culturally, it was bad luck for them to see our naked bodies, but for me everything that I talk about. At the beginning of my grandmother socializing me. The socialization was that the strong would protect the weak and all of the different things. I saw it crumble in that moment and so my disrobing was to tell them that the last shred of my dignity I'm giving it to you all in protest. The other strategy we used was that Liberia was so polarized and long ethnic religious, so our movement was made of Christian and Muslim women and one of the slogans we used was can the bullet tell a Christian from a Muslim? Our movement also made use of women at the community levels, but we never went into those communities to tell them how to carry out their activities, because we were very much aware that, in as much as we're all Liberians, we're all living through war. Every context had different story. Every community was a different war context, so we dealt with every group at a different level. So all of these different things.
Speaker 2:So there when I look at different movements 2008 I was in Israel. We screened the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. When we came out of the room, some of the Israeli women came to me to say I'm sorry, this is not our reality. 2008, we went to Palestine, we went to the West Bank and we screened the documentary there. Some of the young women from Palestine were so upset and say why are the older women not doing what you all did? We should take up and do this kind of thing.
Speaker 2:In 2013,. Israel had those 14 days of war and a woman said to me her two sons had been. They joined the army, so their wives were at home with them with their very young children, and her husband is a retired army personnel. They're sitting in the basement of the house, these two young women and these children. She said, and they dawn on her that if these boys die on the front, this is us right here. She got up, went upstairs, put on a white T-shirt, wore a jeans trousers, took a poster and wrote we want peace. And as she was leaving the house, she saw someone, a guy. He said where are you going? She said I'm going to stay in the street corner to protest, even if it is just me. He said no, it's not just you. There are a group of women standing there at Netanyahu's house. They are apparently protesting.
Speaker 2:That was the birth of the women wage peace. Eventually, women wage peace got in touch with Palestinian women, and 2014, they asked me can you come Pray the devil back to hell? Had become an inspiration for them. I went in 2016 and they had that march from community to community, tens of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women banding together to say we want peace in this nation. So the point that I'm making is that at some point, when people start to talk yes, you can only use Liberia's experience as an inspiration. You can't copy and paste, and that's the problem I have with the UN when it comes to peace, peace building, peace processes, because they think every peace process is copy and paste. There must be contextual analysis. People must know that this, this and this.
Speaker 2:So we use many different strategies, including sex strike. In our rural areas. The sex strike was effective because the women told the men that they needed to fast and pray for peace. So if, as they were fasting, they couldn't have sex. So they spent all their nights and days in the churches and in the mocks, and their husbands agree. In Monrovia they had a different strategy. We started seeing spiked in domestic violence. So we told the women you can end your strike, but the rural community in one community. On the day that they ended their protests I saw all these old men who would be going on a farm coming with roses, and I was asking one of the women. I said why are they giving you all flowers? They said, oh, tonight we're in the sex strike, so they have to be nice to us.
Speaker 1:Lama, I've been very privileged in so many ways to do work in many places around the world that have been impacted by war, including in Israel and Palestine, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Colombia, in Sri Lanka, in Nepal, in a lot of places, and I cannot tell you how many times women I'm interviewing say have you seen pray the devil back to hell? I've heard this in rural parts of Colombia, I've heard this in Ramallah, I've heard this in Rwanda, I've heard this in rural Bosnia, and it's something about the model of standing strong and fiercely demanding peace in unison with other women that I think really has launched generations of activists around the world. It's I'm grateful for that film, I think, because it really catalyzed the story, and, of course, then, a few years later, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Can you tell us a little bit more about your work, sense, those things and what you've witnessed and what you've seen around the world? And maybe, to start, what sorts of movements or work that women have been doing have you seen and thought that's really important, that's really impressive.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think. Everywhere I've been, I'm always blown away by the strength, the tenacity of women. I'll take you back to Congo, DRC. I went there and those were the days the headlines were saying Congo was the rape capital of the world. And sitting with the women, they said the sort of accent what's the biggest problem you all have here? And the answer was women's leadership. And I said what about rape? Rape is as a result of leaders feeling to implement all of the policies and laws that we have here. But if we had a lot of women in those seats? So then, prioritize the problems. Women's leadership came first. Women's economic empowerment came second, Because one of the things they said is, if we had our own money, even for ourselves, our daughters would not be forced into early marriages and if you are abused, you can leave and go somewhere.
Speaker 2:So all of those different things, but one of the things that I saw in Congo that just blew me away they had this circle of women who had been sexually abused. They were survivors of sexual violence and they were about 100 in a group. Every time they heard that some new person had been violated and was taken to Ponzi, these women would go there, and those who had clothes will offer clothes, those who have food will offer food, and once that person was discharged, someone was giving the tax of staying with that person to bring them back to life. So when we were having this meeting, there was this very cute baby and I held him, played with him Because if you want to get me bring a baby around, Even after nine children, I'm still looking for more and so playing with him. And then the mother started to tell her story that she was in a mine and she was raped repeatedly. When they phoned her, she was almost dead and then she was pregnant, but there was no way they could terminate the pregnancy. She would have lost her life. So when she came through, these women brought her this one woman she was assigned to. She now calls her mother, nurse her back to life yes, the baby. And so at that moment she was strong enough now to start a business. So they needed for someone to give her a seed grant for her to do her business. So I was the person who did the seed grant. But she said the biggest sadness that she carries is tomorrow. If her son asks her who is my father, what answer will she give to her child, but those women, just that circle of support that they have around each other.
Speaker 2:Then I go to Libya where, after Gaddafi leaves, no one could talk about rape publicly. So I'm in meetings, these women are talking hush, hush, hush, hush, hush. Something terrible happened here. So even in public gathering, when government officials stood up to talk, this is something terrible. Dr Abu Lash, who is a Palestinian doctor, and I were on that trip, so I was like that. He said I'm just angry, he was angry, I was angry, I was ready to go to jail. So there's one day I'm to deliver the keynote.
Speaker 2:I get on stage in front of the highest council of everything, from president to prime minister, to chief justice, to justice minister Very few women and international partners there and I stood up. When I said rape, you could hear the gaps in the room and I ended my speech to say if nothing was done, then those in charge was no different from Gaddafi, and I walk off the stage. I was like, girl, you're going to jail. Did you just compare these people to Gaddafi? You're going to jail. So anyway, we left.
Speaker 2:And then we were in Congo in the middle of a press conference. When I get a call on my cell phone. It was the justice minister of Libya and he said to me I'm about to leave this job, but something you said in this place has haunted me. I've done a law for survivors of rape and I need you to help me for this law to be passed. Everyone taught the Muslim council who have been the most difficult. They passed it at a heartbeat. Parliament was our problem. We took that law to the UN, to this place, to that place, to the other place. Eventually it got passed.
Speaker 2:For me, one of the greatest joy of that law was that women who conceived as a result of sexual violence could go and apply for passport, Because in most African countries, if your father's name is not on your birth certificate, you can't get passports.
Speaker 2:But that law states that women who had children as a result of sexual violence could apply for passport and no one would stand in their way. And they set up some fund to contribute to the well-being of people. So that, again, is just one fact. But the one thing that I want to say, and the reason why I'm giving all of these examples, is not top level that has made these things to happen for people, and whether it's Congo, whether it's Rwanda, whether it's Burundi, wherever there has been crisis, Nigeria, where you see Boko Haram and all of these things is at the community level. Women at the community level are determined to survive, to live. So, whether or without donors' money, whether or without the UN's permission, whether or without all of the things that we're doing here, these women are determined every morning that we get up, we work for peace, because this is our insurance policy for our children.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. That's amazing. I want to pick up on something in your last answer, just briefly, because you mentioned Ponzi in Congo, which is Dennis Macquegay's organization that has been really working towards addressing sexual violence, and you've also mentioned going to Israel and Palestine for women wage peace, and I've seen pictures of you crossing the demilitarized zone in between the Koreas in 2015 with folks like Gloria Steinem, on these really important examples of cross context solidarity and collaboration, and I'm wondering, maybe, just what you can tell us about the importance of that kind of global approach, about trying to build coalitions across boundaries of place and of nation.
Speaker 2:I mean, one of the things I've learned is that when people have lived in war contexts, there are different myths and misconceptions that people have about the place, about the people, about different things. You know, when people say, oh, I'm from Liberia prior to the Nobel, or even now, people ask me where did you learn English? Liberia, you know, but different things. So people have formed different impression about different places. I tell you one of my proudest moments coming back from North Korea. I was coming back into the US, and so I was so stressed that, okay, north Korea, us, I'll get to the immigrations. I don't have a green card. I still come into this country on visa because I love being Liberian, regardless of. So I'm thinking maybe they will call me into that room and ask me questions what did you go to do to North Korea? And then I get to the security point and the guy opened my passport and say, oh, you just came from North Korea, I am so proud of you. That you see is crowning dead, horrible people that you see, suffering people that you see. And I was just standing there like gosh and he just went on and, oh, you are so brave to be, congratulations, you are strong. And I'm like, oh, but again, in as much as we have our own mindset about how people live in these different spaces, it's important for us to engage. Prior to going to Korea, the number of death threats are got emails. People were so angry that we had been bought by the regime in North Korea. Like I'm, like, my visa is $10. These people, as a Liberian, paid $10 to go. They have no interest in me and I have no interest in them. We were going on a citizen to citizen mission. To answer your question is very important for us. And if you go on the internet, I gave a speech at Dartmouth one year and I call it the open mind challenge, and I think this is what we need in the world today Open mind to engage and embrace. Because it's only by crossing over to the other Me coming and asking people living here in Denver, how do you do it? And you asking me that we can truly come to understand that we are more united than we imagine. We share one thing and that's our collective humanity, and I think if each and every one of us was focused on the collective humanity, it would be so easy for us to engage and embrace. I'll give you a short story again.
Speaker 2:I went to India last year to Kalash Satyati, my Nobel brother the favorite brother of the Nobel's, don't tell the others, yeah, that's right. And I was at the Balashram where he rescues children who had been taken into slavery, and this night the children were playing. Every night at Balashram is a party, so I'm sitting there and they were dancing, dancing, and this child came and stood next to me. He's probably eight, nine and he's just looking at me, looking at me.
Speaker 2:I don't speak Hindi, I don't speak any of the languages, but I saw a longing for a mother's touch, so I shifted in my seat and said to him come and sit next to me. And he came and sat. Next thing he showed me is a scar like a low soul on his foot and the motion that he was playing foot ball. He fell and then I touched it and said sorry, and he kept looking at me and something within me said just give him a hug. So then I told him to, because I didn't know what was appropriate, because as an African I would have put him in my lap, give him a hug, but I was scared before they say you know, they cancel me Because this is the cancel culture. So I hugged him and we sat down.
Speaker 2:In my native tongue they say, when they say mothers, a desire for mother, they say Neewaali. So I named him Neewaali for the rest of the time that I was there that he has a desire for mommy, and so every but that night after I gave him that hug when he was going to bed, you could see he came back and I gave him that hug again. Every day while I was at Balashram he would come for his hug. That is what the world needs. You don't need to speak the language, you don't need to look the same An understanding of our collective humanity.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Thank you, Thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of what the World Will Become. We are really grateful to those of you who have followed along with us this season. If you enjoyed the podcast, do us a favor and subscribe or rate us wherever you downloaded it. It helps other people find it and it helps us know me know whether we should make another season. I'm Marie Barry and, if nothing else, I hope that the activists we featured on the podcast this season give all of you listening the courage and the inspiration to stand up for peace, justice and human rights every single day. The world needs it now more than ever.
