Prayer Warrior

By Leymah Gbowee, Monrovia, Liberia

As appeared in

I felt like God had abandoned me.

I was hundreds of miles away from my home, the West African nation of Liberia. I was camped outside a hotel with a few other Liberian women in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, a luxury hotel where we Liberians could never afford to stay.

Inside were polished tile floors, columned entryways, a crystal-clear swimming pool and—this was why we were there—a plush conference hall hosting peace talks between Liberia’s military dictatorship and the armed rebels who, for 14 years, had turned my country into a bloody battleground.

You’d think the prospect of peace would fill me and all Liberians with hope. But that morning, a hot July day in 2003, I’d run out of hope. The peace talks were failing. Liberia was in flames. Did God care what was happening to my country? I did not think so. I felt worse than hopeless if that is possible.

Together with the women outside the hotel, plus thousands more back in Liberia, I was part of the reason these peace talks were even happening. I was the head of an activist movement called Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.

We had started small several years ago, almost by accident. And yet we grew large and strong because the women of Liberia were tired of being terrorized by soldiers and watching their children conscripted into rebel armies. They were tired of the fear that had gripped our country ever since a military strongman named Charles Taylor started his armed rebellion in 1989, setting off a deadly civil war. More than 200,000 Liberians were dead. More than one million were in refugee camps.

The women of Liberia began protesting this war, gathering on the grounds of a fish market in our capital city of Monrovia to pray and sing for peace and wave signs at Taylor’s motorcade as it passed on its way to the presidential palace. Taylor ignored us for many weeks.

Eventually, however, our numbers grew too great and he was forced to grant us an audience. We demanded he enter peace talks. To our astonishment he agreed. We raised money and a few of us followed him to Ghana, where the international community hosted the talks on neutral ground. We thought we had won a great victory.

We were wrong. And that terrible morning, almost eight weeks after the talks began, I felt like giving up. I had awakened earlier in the tiny two-bedroom house where I was staying with seven other women from Monrovia, along with my four children, my mother, my brother, my sister and her daughter—all accompanying me because Liberia was so dangerous. I was tired of living in this cramped poverty while I knew those rebel warlords were waking up in luxury rooms with views of the ocean.

I felt like a fool. The peace talks dragged on not because the issues were complex, as I at first assumed. No, these strongmen never intended to make peace.

One day after the talks began, Charles Taylor was indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal. He fled back to Liberia, leaving his henchmen to negotiate for him. Sensing weakness, the rebels ordered their forces to attack the Liberian capital, hoping to overthrow Taylor before any peace agreement could be imposed. Each day these hypocrites pretended to negotiate for peace even as they phoned their commanders back in Liberia to order more attacks.

That morning I did not put on my white T-shirt with our movement’s logo, our uniform. White was for peace, and I knew peace was not coming. I avoided our picket line outside the hotel and headed to the office of a peace organi­zation in Accra to check e-mail and read news headlines on a computer.