Leymah Gbowee

It was 23 April 2003, in Monrovia, Liberia.

Outside the residence of President Charles Taylor, more than two thousand women were waiting. They wore white T-shirts.

Among them, a thirty-one-year-old woman spoke up. Her name was Leymah Gbowee.

She addressed the president of the Senate, Grace Minor. Her words were simple:

Leymah Gbowee was born on 1 February 1972, in central Liberia.

She was seventeen when the civil war broke out, in 1989. She would later say the war had turned her from a child into an adult in a matter of hours.

During the war, she became a mother. She trained in social work and in trauma counselling. She worked with former child soldiers.

She was a founding member of a network of women for peace, WIPNET, and its coordinator in Liberia.

It all began in 2002, in a fish market in Monrovia. Women came there to pray and sing for peace. Leymah Gbowee became their spokeswoman.

First she gathered Christian women. Then she joined forces with a Muslim woman. Christians and Muslims stood side by side.

The movement took a name: Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.

They prayed. They fasted. They held pickets and sit-ins.

Their pressure pushed Charles Taylor to accept peace talks. They took place in Accra, Ghana, in June and July 2003.

There, nearly two hundred women formed a human barricade. They meant to keep the delegates in the hall until there was an agreement.

The guards tried to arrest Leymah Gbowee. She threatened to undress. That, she said, would bring a curse on the men.

The mediator, Abdulsalami Abubakar, put it this way: the peace hall had been seized by "General Leymah and her troops."

A few weeks later, Charles Taylor gave up power and went into exile.

On 18 August 2003, the peace agreement was signed in Accra. Fourteen years of war came to an end.

Two years later, Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She was the first woman elected to lead an African country. The women's movement had opened the way for her.

In 2008, a documentary told their story: Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

In 2011, Leymah Gbowee received the Nobel Peace Prize. She shared it with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman. That same year, she published her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers.

In 2012, she founded a peace foundation in Monrovia that bears her name. That year, she also carried the Olympic flag at the opening of the London Games.

Leymah Gbowee comes from West Africa, with its own traditions. Her way of acting echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing: she never fought alone, but with thousands of women, Christian and Muslim, who stood side by side.

In Accra, in 2003, two hundred women stood side by side.

They were asking for peace.