Maternal Bodies in Militant Protest: Leymah Gbowee and the Rhetorical Agency of African Motherhood

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Leymah Gbowee and other Liberia Mass Action for Peace (LMAP) activists drew on the cultural power of African motherhood to engage in militant protest. Framing the movement as one motivated by a concern for their children, these women employed three specific rhetorical tactics to demand an end to the fourteen-year civil war: (1) repositioning women and children as the war's real victims; (2) threatening to bare their bodies in deliberate public nakedness; and (3) constituting the political agency of ordinary women both in Liberia and around the world. These militant maternal protests positioned the LMAP activists as coherent political agents empowered by their literal and symbolic participation in Liberian performances of African motherhood. Their actions suggest the rhetorical potential of militant maternal protests in countries that exclude women from political involvement.

Keywords:

• Africa
• Liberia Mass Action for Peace
• Liberian Civil War
• peace activism
• Nobel Peace Prize
• women in politics

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Shelby Bell for their support of this project and Joan Faber McAlister, Belinda A. Stillion Southard, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback during the revision process. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Notes

Important exceptions include Moran's “Our Mothers Have Spoken” and Stillion Southard's “ ‘Can a Woman President Effect Feminist Change?’ ”

The film was produced by philanthropist Abigail Disney, the grandniece of Walt Disney, who learned of the LMAP movement while in Liberia with a delegation from Harvard University's Women and Public Policy Program. Surprised that major news sources had not covered the story, Disney approached Gbowee with the idea of the documentary in 2006 (Conley). Although she agreed to talk briefly with “these two white girls [Disney and director Gini Reticker],” Gbowee thought little would come of the meeting, later stating that she wondered if the film would consist of “animated cartoon characters.” Over time, however, Disney and Reticker convinced Gbowee that they wanted to document the extraordinary actions of the LMAP protestors precisely because Western media outlets had ignored the protests. “We realized there was a reason for that, right?” Disney later recounted. “The women had been defined out of the frame. So we decided to put them back where they belonged” (Brown).

Although Gbowee's small publisher could not afford a cross-country book tour, Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio offered to finance one with personal funds after meeting Gbowee at a luncheon in New York City. Captivated by Gbowee's story, Riggio volunteered to help her “get her message out” and “talk about the struggle for peace and social justice in Africa” (Bosman). After the book's release in September, Gbowee traveled to eight U.S. cities to use her experience to emphasize the vital role women play in peace building and social change (Hoffman).

In her important study of labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Mari Boor Tonn documents how “maternal roles were particularly apt rhetorical strategies for female labor union agitators because agitation and mothering often share two essential dimensions: nurturing and militancy” (2). Although Tonn's essay focuses on one specific case study, it advances a broader framework for understanding how motherhood and militancy can effect political and social change. As such, “militant motherhood” can take on many forms, with mothers acting on behalf of their biological children or, like “Mother” Jones, women adopting a maternal persona to advocate for the oppressed. Regardless of whether women speak and act on behalf of their biological offspring or as guardians of a larger community, militant maternal protests follow “a long line of women activists” in the United States and around the world (Hayden 196; Fabj; Tibbetts; Kaplan, “Naked Mothers”; Jetter, Orleck, and Taylor). Although some scholars have expressed concerns over labeling these types of protest as maternal (thus reifying gender inequalities and oppression of women within the family structure) it is clear that the rhetorical strategy of “militant motherhood” has been successful (York; Kaplan, “Woman as Caretaker”). Moreover, as Sara Hayden notes, although there is a “potential for maternal politics to be strategically ineffective and to reinforce problematic gender norms,” this does not mean that all such appeals lead to such ends (198). Instead, I argue that militant maternal appeals not only offer women a unique way to enter certain political discourses but can also provide the most symbolically strategic avenue of protest in certain situations. The example of Gbowee and the women of Liberia illustrates this claim.

According to Oyewumi, “Centering African experiences of motherhood reveals that motherhood is not merely an earthly institution: it is pregestational, presocial, prenatal, postnatal, and lifelong” (“Abiyamo” 3). Moreover, these familial ties “link the mother to the child and connect all children of the same mother in bonds that are conceived as natural and unbreakable” (“Family Bonds” 1097).

Explaining how African troops sent by ECOWAS contributed to the sexual violence, Kenneth Cain wrote: “While I was in Liberia, peacekeeping forces were also responsible for sexual violence. In 1996, my colleagues and I investigated—and confirmed—reports of child prostitution. In one instance, an ECOMOG contingent in the city of Buchanan was trading rice for sex with 9- and 10-year-old girls from a nearby displaced persons camp. Then a contingent from another ECOMOG country arrived. Its soldiers offered the girls more rice and a little money. So the girls started frequenting that camp. Soon thereafter, the bodies of young girls started appearing along the path that led to the newcomers’ camp. The girls had been decapitated and their heads inserted in between their legs. According to the United Nations security officer who investigated the deaths, this was a message to the girls that it wouldn't be worth it to frequent the newcomers for the sake of a little extra rice. And these are our peacekeepers of choice in Liberia today” (“Send in the Marines”).

This method of protest is not new, and other mothers have resorted to public stripping in other situations. See Kaplan, “Naked Mothers” on the Aba Women's War of 1929, Tibbitts on the 1992 hunger strike of Kenyan mothers, and Eames on the cultural symbolism of deliberate public nakedness.

Several scholars have noted that Liberia has a long history of female political leaders, including the first female president of a national African university and women serving in “ministerial positions, judgeships and other positions of power, both elected and appointed, since at least the 1960s” (Moran, “Our Mothers Have Spoken” 59; Moran and Pitcher). Although some women were involved in political leadership prior to 2005, many Liberian women did not see themselves as legitimate political agents and refrained from political participation. My analysis reveals how Gbowee and other LMAP activists convinced ordinary women that they had an important role to play in the 2005 presidential election. See Bauer; “Girl Power”; Polgreen.

For more information on Johnson Sirleaf 's election, see “Two Women Lead the Way”; Bauer; Cooper; Dukulé; Polgreen and Rohter; Stillion Southard, “‘Can a Woman President Effect Feminist Change?'”.