Women can do anything

MIGHTY BE OUR POWERS: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War by Leymah Gbowee

My rating:  4 of 5 stars

Last year, I read a riveting memoir written by a man who escaped the horrors of the Congolese Civil War and made a new life for himself as a United States Marine and successful businessman. Recently, I read another compelling memoir of an individual who survived the atrocities of civil war in Africa. This time the setting is Liberia, and the individual in question is a woman -- Leymah Gbowee -- recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Ms. Gbowee has an amazing story to tell, and she does so in a way that educates and inspires.

Before reading Mighty Be Our Powers, I had only peripheral knowledge of the events in Liberia during the decade of the 1990’s. At that time, rebels led by Charles Taylor invaded the country from the Ivory Coast. As the fighters moved south intent on deposing the tyrannical President Doe, years of tribal hatreds were unleashed, leading to widespread massacres in which women and young children were murdered in devastating numbers. Gbowee was 17 years old when she witnessed her first murder and was forced to flee with her family. Because her father was a radio technician who worked at the U.S. embassy, he was eventually able to secure passage for his family on a transport ship to Ghana. When Gbowee arrives with her mother and siblings, however, they are forced into a camp with 50,000 refugees where they lived under deplorable conditions. She begins a relationship with a physically abusive man from the camp, and by the time she is 19 she has two children with him. As the fighting continues to rage on in Liberia, Gbowee enters a UNICEF program to train in social work, but ultimately she is ground down by years of degradation and deprivation at the hands of her abusive husband and his family. After bearing her fourth child, Gbowee reaches her breaking point and returns to Liberia where she re-connects with a supportive man whose constant encouragement helps her continue her education and fulfill her potential.

Eventually, Gbowee becomes involved with the Trauma Healing Project working to help the victims of the Liberian strife. The core ideal of the project is that lasting resolution of civil conflicts can only come when there is true reconciliation between the victims and the perpetrators. Her fieldwork begins with workshops aimed at helping the disabled child soldiers, who were universally reviled, to reintegrate into society. Over the next seven years, Gbowee takes on more responsibility with the project, and begins to question why all the team leaders are men, when so much of the devastation of these civil conflicts is borne by the women of the war-torn nations.

In 2000, Gbowee meets Thelma Ekiyor, a Nigerian lawyer, and a lifelong relationship between the women is formed as they become sisters in the fight for women’s rights on the African continent. One of the pivotal moments in their movement is a mass action that they organize to put pressure on leaders negotiating an end to the Liberian conflict. The sit-in that began with just a few hundred women ultimately numbered in the thousands, and included a “sex strike” in which the women of Liberia vowed to withhold relations until the fighting ceased. The mass action, covered by the BBC, helped to empower the women of the African continent as they witnessed how a nation could be changed as the women themselves learned what they were capable of accomplishing. The efforts of Gbowee and women like her were the catalyst to progress in the stalled peace talks taking place in Ghana.

Reading Gbowee’s story from the comfort of my living room easy chair, I could not help but be floored by the tenacity and spirit her life embodies. It seems almost unfathomable to me that she was able to rise above the horrors she endured as her country disintegrated around her. It was truly inspiring to watch her grow into her own as an independent woman against seemingly insurmountable odds.

This was a book that I had a hard time reading knowing that it was a work of non-fiction, and at the same time, I had a time putting it down because it was told in such an accessible way. In addition to recounting the details of the Liberian conflict, Gbowee takes the reader inside the workings of non-profits, exposing the less than altruistic motives that occasionally account for individual players’ actions. I found it interesting to read her take on how divisions in the movement erupted once the movement gained substantial notoriety, and the attacks leveled at her lifestyle that arose as she rose to prominence in the human rights arena.

I heartily recommend Mighty Be Our Powers to those who enjoy memoirs that are about more than just the writer. There are lessons to be taken from Gbowee’s story about the role of women in the world, the need to respond to armed conflicts in ways other than the traditional, and the efforts we should make to find strength in ourselves in order to effect real change in our own lives and the lives of those around us.

I received an advance reader’s edition of Mighty Be Our Powers from the publisher, Beast Books/Perseus Books Group.