Leymah Gbowee and the power of ideas

As soon as I heard that Leymah Gbowee’s memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, was published, I bought it with a single click. A few days later Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope this means that her memoir sells well. It’s a great story.

You may have seen Leymah in the documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the Liberian Peace Women who sat in the sun and rain and corridors of power until the warring factions that had savaged their country agreed to stop fighting. She was the group’s spokesperson, the one who threatened to strip naked in order to get somebody to pay attention. They finally did and 11 years of civil war came to an end and the last of a series of brutal leaders fled the country (I believe Charles Taylor is still on trial at the Hague).

After a transition, Liberia elected Africa’s first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf , who shared the Peace Prize with Leymah and a Yemeni peace activist. Although Sirleaf is now facing a runoff in her bid for a second term, her opponent is apparently an honorable man. A real choice between two good candidates is a rarity anywhere, especially in Africa. Although Liberia is still licking its war wounds and only now beginning to pull itself together economically, structurally, and socially, it definitely falls into the “good news” column.

My interest in the memoir was personal. I spent a few weeks in Liberia in 2008 with a peacebuilding organization, helped collect stories from former child soldiers, and found that the country, its struggles, the astounding stories of both war and peace, and the people I met there unlocked something in me that I’m still puzzling over. Simple word for it—love, related in some way to Africa. It is leading me to pursue new friendships and ties through things like the Congo Cloth Connection.

But what struck me in Leymah Gbowee’s memoir was the connection of ideas, how ideas make their way around the world and connect us into some kind of community.  Ideas are personal, not separate from the people who originate and perpetuate them.

There in her memoir was a mention of John Howard Yoder’s 1972 book The Politics of Jesus, which I had just reread—a book that was as formational for a young African woman in the middle of a civil war as it was for a little Mennonite girl in a sedate, rural community on the other side of the world.

Later she comes in contact with the leaders of a West African peace group, some of whom I have met, and I recognize the ideas that are stirring her imagination. Many of these folks have gone through Eastern Mennonite University’s peacebuilding and conflict resolution seminars, and they are putting into action the ideas of people like John Paul Lederach and Howard Zehr.

I remember talking with Tornolah Varpilah, one of Leymah’s mentors who is now a deputy minister of health in Liberia. He was enthusiastically describing how he was applying the “early warning” system developed by Lederach to watch for signs of instability in communities. Leymah also mentions this idea. Later, when she gets to EMU herself, she is drawn to Zehr’s victim-offender reconciliation theories, which she realizes is what she had been trying to do in her work with former child soldiers.

Totally aside from the fact that I dated Howie Zehr in high school, all this warms my heart.  I believe in the power of ideas, especially when they are transmitted through real, human ties and put to work in real, human situations, even the very worst ones.