Leymah Gbowee.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee has overcome tremendous adversity. A teenager at the start of the civil war in her native Liberia, she and her family were forced to go on the run, first within the country and then to Ghana. Along the way, she witnessed terrible atrocities and narrowly escaped harm herself. During the birth of her third child, she was forced to spend a week on the hospital floor with her newborn because her then partner failed to pay the dues. (She recounts all this in her searingly honest memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.)

Gbowee refused to give up, however. In the late 1990s, she enrolled in college and started volunteering as a social worker. Gbowee's activism became increasingly political. She mobilized women in large numbers to bring about an end to the Liberian conflict and to hasten dictator Charles Taylor's exit. Gbowee led sit-ins, bravely spoke out during a meeting with Taylor, and even almost stripped as a protest against stalled peace talks.

Gbowee's work first received wide attention when she and her group were featured in a 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which has been shown on U.S. public television and internationally. Gbowee started getting invited all over the world to advise on conflict resolution and trauma healing. Her global recognition culminated in the Nobel Peace Prize last year, which she shared with her country's president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Yemeni democracy campaigner Tawakkul Karman "for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work," in the words of the Nobel Committee.

I met Gbowee at the end of May in Houston, where she was a keynote speaker at an international educators' conference. She took time off from her hectic schedule to chat with me in the break room. Later that afternoon, she gave her talk. "Our task is to unfold our arms and make the world a better place," she emphasized. "Find your passion--your arms will unfold and your drive will not stop." Her own turning point, she said, was meeting Liberian child soldiers. She initially despised them but then realized that "the real demons were the ones who made them demons," she said. To a standing ovation, she concluded, "You need angry American people to unfold their arms and rise up."

Q: What made you an activist?

Leymah Gbowee: First, my upbringing. I grew up in a home where my grandmother did not tolerate any kind of disrespect, suppression, or oppression. She told us the story of her life. She was married at the age of fifteen. The first time she experienced domestic violence, she left him. She never backed down. Very atypically for an African woman, she left her child with the man. Growing up in that home, every time somebody did something, if you went to her, she said to go back and fight for yourself.

Our home was always a place for political conversation. As time passed and the war came on, I got interested because it was part of my life. What really revved up my activism was my anger at the state of affairs in Liberia. Once that formed, I started being really interested in unfolding developments. It hasn't stopped till today.

Q: Could you describe for us some of what you witnessed during the civil war?

Gbowee: During the war--like in many...