Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Gbowee - On Understanding Trauma After War in Liberia

View Leymah’s full oral history and transcript at the Georgetown University Library.

Leymah Gbowee was born in 1972 in central Liberia. At 17, she lived with her family in Monrovia when the First Liberian Civil War broke out in 1989. She talks about how the civil war impacted her life and set her on a path to becoming a peacemaker. A mother of four children, she joined the Lucian Church Trauma Healing program which led her to attend conferences with the Women Peacebuilding Network in 1999. She became heavily involved with the network and led women in nonviolent protests to facilitate a ceasefire, intervention forces, and negotiations between the government and the insurgents.