MALALA TURNS 21:
She’s a global icon and an Oxford student who still takes her washing home. Christina Lamb joins Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on her latest humanitarian mission, and 21st birthday celebrations, in Brazil.
what life now looks like for Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai
Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain is one of the most beautiful spots on earth to spend a 21st birthday. The girl in candy pink watching a ballet performance on top of the mountain with Copacabana beach spread out below claps and smiles at her father next to her.
The pint-sized dancers in tutus are from one of Rio’s most violent favelas (slums), the ballet project a chance to dream in a place where their school is frequently closed because of shoot-outs between drug gangs and police. The birthday girl is from the other side of the world and she too knows about guns, having narrowly survived being shot on her school bus, her smile just a little lopsided as a result of damage to the nerve under her left eye.
The world’s most famous schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, is now a grown woman in lip gloss and designer heels, and these days being Malala is a full-time job requiring a posse of people. With her, apart from her doting dad, Ziauddin, is an entourage of bodyguards, a tigress-like American media manager who previously worked for Brad Pitt, and a trio of social media “influencers”. She is so famous she is known by just one name: Malala. When she was 16, her birthday, July 12, was officially declared Malala Day by the United Nations.
It’s been a remarkable journey from October 2012 when she woke from a coma far from home, in a UK hospital bed with a large teddy bear next to her, a tube in her neck and a bandage around her head where a Taliban bullet had narrowly missed her brain.
Six years on, she has just finished her first year at Oxford and counts as friends not only the students at Lady Margaret Hall, but Tim Cook, the Apple CEO; the Facebook COO,
Sheryl Sandberg; and the actresses Emma Watson and Emily Blunt. The Tesla tycoon Elon Musk tweeted her birthday greetings, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia helped build her website, and earlier this year she left US talkshow host David Letterman so in awe he was almost lost for words.
She is in Brazil because every birthday she goes somewhere with her organisation, the Malala Fund, to highlight the plight of girls struggling to get an education. The world’s ninth-biggest economy, with its modern buildings and beaches of vivacious women in dental-floss bikinis, seems an unlikely choice for her attention. But “people in Brazil kept asking me to come”, she says, pointing out that more than 1.5 million girls are out of school, denied education because of racism, poverty, child marriage and violence that saw 60,000 homicides last year.
The majority of these girls are Afro-Brazilian or indigenous. Brazil is 54 per cent non-white – some describe it as the biggest African country after Nigeria – and likes to boast of its “racial democracy”. Yet black Brazilians earn, on average, half that of whites, and make up two-thirds of the unemployed and three-quarters of the killings by police. Only 30 per cent of black children finish high school, compared with 70 per cent of whites.
We start the trip in Salvador, where nearly 80 per cent of the population is black or mixed-race. It is packed
for Malala, who is welcomed by the stirring sound of Olodum, the AfroBrazilian drumming group that was made famous by Paul Simon. One of their members is missing – the local activist Ana Paula Ferreira de Lima tells me the boy was cycling home after practice when he was shot by police because a woman had been assaulted nearby. “Police here shoot blacks first and ask questions later,” she shrugs.
Discrimination is even worse for Indians. While Malala lunches with activists in a nearby restaurant, a group of girls wait nervously in a cramped upstairs office, clad in grass skirts and feathers, red and black designs painted on their bodies. Most people think of the Amazon when they think of Brazilian Indians, but there are 60,000 living in the north-east coastal provinces, often in squalid conditions.
“It’s difficult for us indigenous girls to get education,” says Itocovoti, 17, from the Pataxo Ha-Ha-Hae tribe, who wears a headdress of blue feathers and tells me she is the only Indian in her school. “I go to a white school in a white city and face a lot of prejudice as the other kids and some of the teachers think the school is just for them. They look at the paint on my face and feathers in my hair and make faces.”
She insists she will not be deterred from her dream of studying biomedicine. “I see it as part of the ladder to climb,” she says. Her school, she tells me, is 10 miles away from her village; when it rains, the roads wash away in mudslides and she cannot go.
Our conversation gives way to a commotion. Malala has arrived. The Indian girls dance and chant and present her with necklaces of red seeds and a fertility gourd before they all sit around in a circle. Now the girls seem struck dumb by her presence, but Malala speaks softly, asking about their lives. Marielle, 16, says she has to get up at 4am to go to school because there are no high schools in the indigenous areas. Itocovoti’s eyes fill with tears as she tells Malala that her dad and other elders did not go to school themselves, but risked their lives to fight for their land to be recognised and for education for their children. “This is a very big country and it seems to us they invest in the World Cup but not education,” she says.
The next stop, Rio de Janeiro, is a two-hour flight away. At the airport, Malala entertains everyone with magic tricks using playing cards and giggles at their confusion.
It’s winter and we wake the next morning to a thin grey veil of rain over Copacabana beach. But the sun is never far away in Brazil and as we head up a winding road to Tavares Bastos, one of the favelas that dot the hills above Rio, it breaks out. Among the breeze-block slums, we start seeing walls painted with colourful murals, including one of Malala in pink, her
favourite colour. Waiting at the top is Panmela Castro, 37, known as the Graffiti Queen. Last night, she stood in the rain for four hours painting the Malala mural. Panmela runs a project using graffiti to help combat Brazil’s domestic violence, which sees a woman beaten by a man every 15 seconds and an average of 12 women murdered every day. “By Malala’s age I was married to a man who abused me, and when I was 24 he beat me badly then locked me at home for a week,” she says. “Finally I managed to call my mum and she rescued me, but even then he persecuted me. I was at university and well educated, yet I still thought, as a woman, I had to accept the situation.”
At the time, she was teaching art at a school and some of her students invited her to go graffitiing with them (street art on designated city property has been legal in Rio since 2014). She took to it immediately and has now painted on four continents.
Panmela realised that graffiti could be used to empower women in shelters and reach girls to teach them women’s rights. “They see the graffiti as cool,” she says. She conducts weekly workshops in schools. Each involves two hours of graffiti and an hour of women’s rights. More than 5000 girls have been through her programme.
Several of Panmela’s girls have come to meet Malala and, one after another, they stand in front of a mural they painted and tell us about their lives. We hear from Andrea Bak, 17, who has painted an Orixa – an Afro-Brazilian spirit – as a symbol of how African religions are demonised in Brazil. She performs a self-assured rap about being black in Brazil, saying “they made our colour small”, then tells us she wants to be a dentist.
Priscilla Roxo, 17, stands in front of a purple face and flower she describes as a metaphor for feminism and the struggle women are facing. Malala asks her why the girl is looking to one side. “It’s as if she has fear of looking straight ahead,” says Priscilla. “Since I was young I’ve had problems with men abusing me. Graffiti is my escape valve.”
After lunch it’s back to the beach for football with a girls’ team that this year won Brazil’s Street Child World Cup. Like nearly a quarter of Rio’s population, they live in favelas. They tell us how football saved them from being sucked into drug gangs and showed them they could do more with their lives.
They beg Malala to join in and she does, though she baulks at removing her heels. The Malala of 21 is more poised and stylish than the one of 16, but one thing hasn’t changed, much to her annoyance. She compensates for her short stature with towering heels.
It can’t be easy being Malala, everyone wanting something of you and always having to watch what you do. When she was photographed in skinny jeans in Oxford, she was trolled on social media and caused an outcry in Pakistan. As the co-author of her memoir, I Am Malala, I get endless people wanting her to speak at their schools, companies or charities, and her dad tells me she gets about 5000 invitations a year. She shrugs. “I think I’m having a normal life. Everyone
– my parents, teachers, the fund team, friends – has been so supportive, I feel comfortable going to events. If I hadn’t been shot, then right now I would be at university in Pakistan. Not for a second did I think I’d be living in the UK or visiting Brazil, but things happen.”
What has been the highlight? “Lots of things have happened,” she replies. “From big, serious ones like winning the Nobel Peace Prize to going round the world and visiting refugee camps and meeting leaders to push for 12 years of education for all, and then starting a completely new life at university. It’s the first time I’ve left home and started living on my ownish. You don’t have your mum coming to your room and waking you up to say, ‘Breakfast’s ready,’ then calling you to go to school or for dinner. Now it’s life, having to manage things yourself.”
Do you do your own laundry? She laughs sheepishly. “I take it home – but I’m nearly there! I was a bit worried, how would they treat me at Oxford? Would they treat me as the celebrity Malala they know or as a student? And I am so happy they welcomed me as a student like them.”
I tease her about the fact that, in all her chat about life at university, she doesn’t mention the work. She is studying politics, philosophy and economics (PPE). “I do work!” she laughs. “I even go to lectures, though I don’t like getting up in the mornings. I love the course. The one part I found hard was economics, as it has lots of maths.”
PPE is the degree of choice for many political leaders, from the late prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, to former British
“If I hadn’t been shot, then right now I would be at university in Pakistan.”
prime minister David Cameron, but Malala says politics is not on her radar.
“Right now, I don’t think I am interested in going into politics. I do see some of my PPE friends are, and when you go to the Oxford Union, you can see the coming Boris Johnson or future David Cameron, but for me it’s about learning the subject, not thinking about politics.” Her father told her, “You will never get these three years again,” and she has thrown herself into Oxford life.
“I go often to the Oxford Union,
I’ve joined the cricket society, I’m a spokesperson for the Pakistan Society, I’m on the college ball committee for our ball next summer and I’m on the freshers’ committee. I signed up for so many things. I think it’s a good learning experience.”
She has yet to go punting. Apart from going to cafés in Oxford for hot chocolate and walking in the college gardens, she says she likes staying up late listening to music and spending time with friends, including her Zimbabwean neighbour, Varaidzo Kativhu, with whom she went to a Caribbean restaurant on a friends’ date for Valentine’s Day. “Sometimes we’re talking and talking and when I look at the clock it’s 3am,” she says.
Among the things they discuss is the #MeToo movement and revelations that she says left her shocked at inequalities in the West. “In Pakistan we were thinking America and the UK were perfect for women, that women are safe, they can do any job, they are equally represented in parliament and on boards. So I was shocked to see women are not paid as equally as men, that they don’t have equal representation in science and technology or as CEOs or directors.
“When people talk about violence against women or discrimination, they usually talk about developing countries, it’s not something they usually talk about for developed countries. So I think it’s important this is being highlighted in the West and I’m happy we have now come to a point where women in the West are connecting to women globally and sharing what they are going through.”
Malala believes it is time to go beyond talking. “It’s not just about a hashtag, but actually taking action,” she says. To her, it all starts with education. “It’s disappointing to me that there are still 130 million girls around the world who are out of school, even in this age when we have so much excess and technology, resources and growing economies.”
I ask about her own future. “I want to finish my degree and then go around the world and meet more young girls and listen to their stories and raise awareness about the issues they are facing. The World Bank released this report that showed if we invest in both primary and secondary education for girls, it could add up to $30 trillion to the world economy. If we ignore girls’ education, it’s a huge loss.”
Though Malala clearly has little free time, she has been working on a book about refugees that will come out in January. “It’s focusing on girls I have met during my travels to different camps, from Lebanon and Jordan to Dadaab,” she explains. “It’s telling their stories, highlighting the difficulties they are going through and how their education is ignored. It’s also reminding people that most refugees are in developing countries, not in Europe, not in the US, and how those countries have welcomed them even though they have poor economies.”
The book will start with her own story. “We didn’t choose to come to the UK,” she says. “We came because of what happened, and I know how difficult it was to leave our home.” It was particularly hard for her mother, Toor Pekai, who spoke no English, and her brother Khushal, who was angry at leaving friends behind and having to change schools several times.
Earlier this year, she convinced her family to go back to Pakistan for the first time since she was shot. “We’d been waiting more than five years, and looking at the politics in Pakistan, you would hardly find the right time, there’s always something happening. So I thought, I don’t care, I want to go back to my home, to meet my friends and family.”
The Pakistan Taliban, which was responsible for her shooting, has not gone away, so the trip was short – only four days in March – amid high security. Malala’s home country is ambivalent about its Nobel prizewinner. She was the subject of a torrent of abuse on social media, accusing
“I don’t think I am interested in going into politics.”
her of being a CIA agent or faking being shot. However, she says it was “the most beautiful time of my life. I remember every second. We went to Swat in a helicopter and it was the first time I saw it from a bird’s-eye view and it was just beautiful, mountains and rivers; it’s a paradise on earth. We landed in the same place from where I was flown to the hospital in Peshawar after being shot, and then went to our home and saw my room with my old school trophies and books and paintings. We also met my neighbours, my friends Safina and Moniba and my old school rival Malka e-Noor.”
I wonder if that first journey back had prompted any flashbacks. She has always said she does not remember the men stopping her school bus after her exam and shooting her. “I am just grateful I don’t remember that incident because I don’t think back,” she says. “I don’t feel it was part of me, it’s like that bit of my life is a blank space.”
The man who ordered her death, Maulana Fazlullah, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed by an American drone strike in June and
I ask if she now feels safer. “Fazlullah wasn’t just responsible for targeting me and Shazia and Kainat [the two girls shot with her], but killing and injuring thousands in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” she says. “The fact that he is dead I don’t think makes anyone feel more or less safe. It’s not about targeting an individual, it’s about fighting an ideology – the ideology of using violence and extremism against people.”
She and her father are so close, I wonder how he feels about her going off to university. “Oxford has changed her,” Ziauddin says. “She’s more confident, more independent and stronger, and it’s such a beautiful thing, it makes me happy.” Watching a child turn 21 is a key moment for any parent, but particularly so when, almost six years ago, he was sitting at her hospital bed, thinking he had lost her. “I’ve enjoyed every moment of this journey with my daughter,” he says. “From when she was a toddler in the classroom of my first school, talking to the empty chairs as if she were the teacher, to taking part in my meetings with activists in Swat, expressing herself, and seeing her now on the world stage.”
One astonishing thing is how Malala has stayed so down-to-earth amid all the attention. “I’ve always found her bigger than worldly things,” Ziauddin says. “She’s not interested in fame or celebrity stuff and she always listens to people who she thinks are valuable to her, not who others think are important.” She is also kept in her place by teasing from her two younger brothers, Khushal, 19, and Atal, 13. “My little brother forgot my birthday,” she complains to me. At least he has stopped asking her: “Malala, what do you actually do?”
On Malala’s 21st there were no lavish presents. Her dad gave her a card in Portuguese that said, “May you get back in double what you give to others”. Her mum wrote her a poem in Pashto and sent a video of her reading it.
Does Ziauddin worry she will come home from Oxford with a boyfriend? “It hasn’t happened yet, but this is a natural course of life,” he tells me. “I also married for love. I have told her it’s your decision. My only advice is never go for a person who doesn’t respect your freedom or yourself.
If one wheel is a tractor and one is of a scooter, the car doesn’t go.”
Indeed, these days the man who advocates letting daughters fly says she tells him what to do. “Now, when I tweet, I send it to her first and she stops me and says, ‘Aba, you can’t change the world.’ I say, ‘Jani [dear], I didn’t clip your wings, but you have tied my legs.’”
Before we leave Rio, I see Malala and her father returning to the hotel, eyes shining. For once she had managed to sneak out – in baseball cap and big sunglasses – and be a normal tourist, taking photos of the Corcovado.
“No one spotted me,” she grins.