Ray Martin Toe

Nyono Sio Nyenbeju (“She Who Is Greater Than Men”): Hiah Zeay Karmbor Juah of Filorken

It is either historically significant or merely interesting that Leymah Gbowee, the celebrated Liberian female peace campaigner, was able to realize what she called the “untapped power of women” when in 2003 she led war-weary market women in Monrovia to persuade warlords to make peace. It had precisely been the failure of contemporary Liberian women to tap such power that for decades enabled Liberia’s politicians and warlords to plunge our beloved nation into savagery and moral degradation. Yes, the intervention of women in times of crisis, their sensitivity to human suffering, as was the Liberian tragedy, and the judicious exercise of their moral authority, can engender qualitative change and restore sanity, peace and human dignity to society. A subtle but powerful moral force squarely lies in the motherhood of women.

No wonder, Ms. Gbowee soon came to the limelight of western sensibility, leading to the production of the award-winning documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell by Abigail Disney. She was consequently awarded the Blue Ribbon for Peace by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Ms. Gbowee was also chosen as a recipient of the 2009 JFK Profile in Courage Award. Enumerating the “things unimaginable” that the Monrovia market women had done to bring to a dramatic end the internecine killings in their country, Leymah Gbowee, under  the glare of the western media, implicitly affirmed motherhood as the force that propelled them into action: “We are the mothers who can change everything”. But it was the tactics that the Gbowee-led women’s group employed during their rousing campaigns that apparently captured the attention of militant women groups in the west. The most unprecedented was public nudity, which Gbowee and fellow campaigners threatened to employ in Ghana, where Liberia’s elite politicians and warlords alike had been meeting to negotiate peace. These men had initially excluded ordinary women from the peace negotiations; but thanks to their threat to go publicly naked, the Liberian women were able to secure a seat at the peace table and soon became a formidable force to reckon with there. A comprehensive peace agreement with their active participation was thereby signed, subsequently leading to general elections in 2005, which coincidentally ushered in a woman to the Liberian presidency followed by a relative peace.

Nudity as a nonviolent tactic employed by African women to persuade head-strung, powerful men – which the American public commentator Bill Moyers seems to trace to ancient Greece –  is a centuries-old tactic in traditional African societies. When African women go nude in public, they do so in anger, protest and desperation; that is, when all other tactics have been exhausted in the face of male power and insensitivity. The tactic is not meant to deny men sex; it is rather meant to demonstrate the sacredness of motherhood. The clear message to insensitive powerful men is: Listen, whatever you think you are, a woman gave birth to you and she did so in nakedness. By our nakedness we are referring you not only to your childhood, but also to your mother’s labor that brought you into being. African men cower when a group of women go nude, in public believing that such a spectacle spells a curse. As Stephanie Horton credibly fictionalized in her writing, “What Will Happen To All That Beauty?”:

The women disrobed and rubbed their naked buttocks up against him from all sides, ululating their utter disrespect for his very existence, that a creature such as himself dared to masquerade as a human being. They repudiated him with a woman’s most profane curse, mocking his manhood by jeering at his privates and exposing their own genitals through which humanity is birthed. He was urinated on and smeared with menstrual blood. No man ever recovered from the shame. (http://archives-one.liberiaseabreeze.com/sh.html)

KPLIOLAND

Several decades before the Gbowee-led Monrovia market women woke up from their slumber and rallied the power of women, a formidable women’s movement had been born in the backwoods of southeastern Liberia – in a rugged central highland called Kplioland, about twenty miles away from the gorgeous Atlantic beaches of the Kru heartland in Grand Kru County. Situated on the bank of the Norh River, Kplioland is farmland – hence the bread basket of what used to be Kru Coast Territory.

Kplioland is comprised of four clans – Nyanabibken, Flenken, Topoe and Huwon, each of which pledges allegiance to a distinct ancestral figure. Yet the Kplio people are culturally and linguistically homogenous. Like most Kwa-speaking people, they settle in towns of patrilineal neighborhoods or lineages called torgba or panton. Most members of a torgba are blood related, and each torgba is a sort of socio-political unit which is represented by an elder or a group of elders at a council of elders. This all-male council is essentially a legislative body which serves as the custodian of Kplio values, mores, norms and customs.  It also confers traditional titles only on men, arbitrates disputes and makes final decisions following all-male mass meetings in the town square.

Of the dozen or so Kplio towns and villages that cluster the bank of the Norh River, Filorken is the single-most populous town, with several hundred subsistence rice farmers. It is the traditional headquarters of Nyanabibken (otherwise called Gbalakpo), the largest of the four Kplio clans. It was in this sprawling town that an unsung matriarch of women’s rights lived. Her name was Hiah Zeay Karmbor Juah; she also went by the nickname Nyono Sio Nyenbeju: “She Who Is Greater Than Men”. Born in the early 1900s, Karmbor Juah became the embodiment of the explosive women’s movement that had emerged from Wakpeken in the 1940s and raged on in the 50s, 60s and 70s across Kplioland. The story of how Karmbor Juah tapped the moral authority of women and advocated change amidst male domination in Filorken is worth telling because it affirms the power of women in traditional African society.

“LET US REFER THE MATTER TO THE POLES”

A traditional Kplio house rests on four poles, with two poles on each side of the one-room shelter. The husband always sits under the first pole on the left-hand side. Adjacent to the husband’s pole, immediately after the fire hearth, is the pole under which the wife sits while preparing meals and chatting with her husband.  Under the first of the two poles on the right-hand side is where a visitor sits; children sit near the other pole near the wife’s.

It was under the right-hand poles in the Kplio home that Kplio women wielded power. Not only did they express their views on pertinent issues, but they also exerted enormous influence on their husbands’ – some of whom were towering public figures. Although Kplio women earned no titles, remained in the background in public affairs, and barely attended mass meetings in the town square, their views were largely taken into consideration in decision-making and policy-formulation. Whenever men reached a deadlock on a difficult issue during a mass meeting, they would always say: “Let us refer the matter to the poles”, meaning, let us elicit views from our women.

By the 1930s, Wakpeken had been founded through the instrumentality of President Edwin Barclay. The Liberian president ordered the founding of the town following recurring inter-clan feuds over the piece of land where it is now situated. To restore lasting peace among the warring Kplio clans, the president further recommended that representative members of every clan be resettled in the town. This central hilly town was later renamed Barclayville by the Kplio, in honor of the president. By the 1940s, Barclayville had become not only a melting pot of Kplio culture but also a beacon of the women’s movement that was to engulf major Kplio towns for nearly seven decades.

No Kplio woman embodied the spirit of that movement and used women’s  power so well than Hiah Zeay Karmbor Juah of Filorken. She assumed leadership of Filorken women at her prime, around 1943, when Nyanabibken was a full chiefdom in the then Kru Coast Territory. Once a leader, she tapped into the moral authority of women and wielded that collective power to carve a crucial role for women in the decision-making process of their male-dominated rural community.  For four decades, she provided effective leadership which elevated Filorken women from under the poles to the town square, thereby asserting them as a formidable power bloc in Nyanabibken.

I saw Hiah Zeay Karmbor Juah in action during the 1970s when I was a teenager growing up in Filorken.  She was a woman of medium height with penetrating eagle eyes. I still remember her thunderous voice of protest and advocacy reverberating in the town as she either sat on a bamboo bench in front of her house, carried a bucket of water or a load of firewood on her head from the Doe River or the farm, or as she engaged in heated discussions with men in the courtyard – yelling out a slogan, commenting, and eliciting public opinion on a pertinent issue of the day – be it a political, social or even legal issue. She was an eloquent opinion leader, a great organizer of women, an indomitable advocate for women’s rights and a shrewd powerbroker in Filorken. Public figures would cower in her ubiquitous presence.

Karmbor Juah had genuine concerns for issues that affected women in general. She forcefully brought these issues to the Filorken courtyard. She ensured that those who verbally, physically and/or sexually abused women and girls were heavily fined, and women became the enforcers of laws that sought to protect them. She invariably advocated for the preservation of traditional values, respect for women, and equal participation in the affairs of the community.

Filorken women influenced the distribution of power in Nyanabibken. They had zero tolerance for the machinations of public figures whom they found unscrupulous, and they would do anything to demoralize them in the public arena.  Hence, they played a pivotal role in influencing the outcomes of the heated chieftaincy campaigns waged in Nyanabibken in the 1940s and 50s. For example, when Saygbe Hiah of Filorken and Teah Kuleh of Jekwiken vied for the chieftaincy in 1944, President Tubman had to appoint Toe Weh Bellor as a  neutral person for the post, partly because Filorken women did not lend their unanimous support to any of the two contenders. When Chief Bellor died, Jarbeh Doe of Filorken and Kplio Sayon of Jekwiken emerged in 1955 as contenders to fill the post. Kplio Sayon won and assumed the chieftaincy due to the influence of the women because Jarbeh Doe did not win their favor. Since then, Filorken women have been influential opinion leaders, formidable stakeholders and enforcers of law and order on par with their men.

While Leymah Gbowee, an educated, westernized Liberian woman, recognized the power of women and used it to help influence peace in modern Liberia, her feminist forebear, Hiah Zeay Karmbor,  an illiterate Kplio woman, earlier grasped that moral authority and utilized it to give voice to generations of women of her rural community. She has left a legacy of women’s empowerment in Filorken. Her name should be known and celebrated.