Have you seen this? If not, please see the trailer and find the movie! It is more than a movie. It is a moment in time documented by women showing how women peacefully brought to its knees the forces, guns and violence of patriarchy in Liberia that never caught the eye of mainstream media. It is a tribute to the power of FemUnity in action. If you don't know the story of these a-mazing* women, I encourage you to let yourself be inspired by their courage, wisdom, heart, resolution and fearlessness. The power of women together in unity is something that the world has yet to fully behold, but these women--mothers, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, christian and muslim alike--with nearly nothing but a deeply shared sisterhood beyond any male religion to which they subscribed, brought peace to Liberia. They ousted the corrupt and violent government of Charles Taylor as well as worked with the rebels that conscripted boys to become equally violent soldiers on the side of the opposition. These boys were taught to rape and torture without conscience, including inflicting this horror on family members. These a-mazing women showed the boys another way, and they began to see that the women were their mothers. They gave up their guns and allowed themselves to be embraced by love.
Liberia is a small country on the coast of western Africa that has been beseiged by war ever since it was founded by freed American slaves in the mid 1800's whose dominating government lorded over the indigenous people. Hard to imagine that freed slaves would do such a thing, but they did. Patriarchy does not know any cultural bounds. The small country had been war-torn for so many years that the women decided they had had enough. And that was that. It had been unheard of that people of different "faiths" would group together, but if anyone could do it, it would be women because the true essence of woman does not belong to any patriarchal religion. They tapped into their true essence, and found each other. And then they founded the real Liberia and brought to power the first elected female African president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in January of 2006. This documentary makes it very clear that global patriarchy is an everyday cultural battlezone for women, and that there are serious gender differences in views about how humans need to conduct ourselves for the good of all that do exist no matter how much they are denied. Women are the givers and caretakers of life. Men are not. And they need to relearn, as did the conscripted boys, as aboriginal men do, to live by women's law.
*this spelling is Mary Daly's and refers to undoing the maze of patriarchy
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