I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (20 page)

I had done a lot of television interviews and enjoyed speaking into the microphone so much that my friends would tease me. But I had never done anything like this. ‘Be natural,’ Irfan told me. That wasn’t easy with a camera trained on me everywhere I went even as I brushed my teeth. I showed them the uniform I couldn’t wear and told them I was scared that if the Taliban caught me going to school they would throw acid in my face as they had done to girls in Afghanistan.

We had a special assembly that final morning but it was hard to hear with the noise of helicopters overhead. Some of us spoke out against what was happening in our valley. The bell rang for the very last time, and then Madam Maryam announced it was the winter holidays. But unlike in other years no date was announced for the start of next term. Even so, some teachers still gave us homework. In the yard I hugged all my friends. I looked at the honours board and wondered if my name would ever appear on it again. Exams were due in March but how could they take place? Coming first didn’t matter if you couldn’t study at all. When someone takes away your pens you realise quite how important education is.

Before I closed the school door I looked back as if it were the last time I would ever be at school. That’s the closing shot in one part of the documentary. In reality I went back inside. My friends and I didn’t want that day to end so we decided to stay on for a while longer. We went to the primary school where there was more space to run around and played cops and robbers. Then we played mango mango, where you make a circle and sing, then when the song stops everyone has to freeze. Anyone who moves or laughs is out.

We came home from school late that day. Usually we leave at 1 p.m. but that day we stayed till three. Before we left, Moniba and I had an argument over something so silly I can’t remember what it was. Our friends couldn’t believe it. ‘You two always argue when there’s an
important occasion!’ they said. It wasn’t a good way to leave things.

I told the documentary makers, ‘They cannot stop me. I will get my education if it’s at home, school or somewhere else. This is our request to the world – to save our schools, save our Pakistan, save our Swat.’

When I got home, I cried and cried. I didn’t want to stop learning. I was only eleven years old but I felt as though I had lost everything. I had told everyone in my class that the Taliban wouldn’t go through with it. ‘They’re just like our politicians – they talk the talk but they won’t do anything,’ I’d said. But then they went ahead and closed our school and I felt embarrassed. I couldn’t control myself. I was crying, my mother was crying but my father insisted, ‘You will go to school.’

For him the closing of the schools also meant the loss of business. The boys’ school would reopen after the winter holidays but the loss of the girls’ school represented a big cut in our income. More than half the school fees were overdue and my father spent the last day chasing money to pay the rent, the utility bills and the teachers’ salaries.

That night the air was full of artillery fire and I woke up three times. The next morning everything had changed. I began to think that maybe I should go to Peshawar or abroad or maybe I could ask our teachers to form a secret school in our home, as some Afghans had done during Taliban rule. Afterwards I went on as many radio and TV channels as possible. ‘They can stop us going to school but they can’t stop us learning,’ I said. I sounded hopeful but in my heart I was worried. My father and I went to Peshawar and visited lots of places to tell people what was happening. I spoke of the irony of the Taliban wanting female teachers and doctors for women yet not letting girls go to school to qualify for these jobs.

Once Muslim Khan had said girls should not go to school and learn Western ways. This from a man who had lived so long in America! He insisted he would have his own education system. ‘What would Muslim Khan use instead of the stethoscope and the
thermometer?’ my father asked. ‘Are there any Eastern instruments which will treat the sick?’ The Taliban is against education because they think that when a child reads a book or learns English or studies science he or she will become Westernised.

But I said, ‘Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.’ Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.

My mother used to tell me to hide my face when I spoke to the media because at my age I should be in purdah and she was afraid for my safety. But she never banned me from doing anything. It was a time of horror and fear. People often said the Taliban might kill my father but not me. ‘Malala is a child,’ they would say, ‘and even the Taliban don’t kill children.’

But my grandmother wasn’t so sure. Whenever my grandmother saw me speaking on television, or leaving the house she would pray, ‘Please God make Malala like Benazir Bhutto but do not give her Benazir’s short life.’

After my school closed down I continued to write the blog. Four days after the ban on girls’ schools, five more were destroyed. ‘I am quite surprised,’ I wrote, ‘because these schools had closed so why did they also need to be destroyed? No one has gone to school following the Taliban’s deadline. The army is doing nothing about it. They are sitting in their bunkers on top of the hills. They slaughter goats and eat with pleasure.’ I also wrote about people going to watch the floggings announced on Mullah FM, and the fact that the police were nowhere to be seen.

One day we got a call from America, from a student at Stanford University. Her name was Shiza Shahid and she came from Islamabad. She had seen the
New York Times
documentary
Class Dismissed in Swat Valley
and tracked us down. We saw then the power of the media and she became a great support to us. My father was almost bursting with pride at how I came across on the documentary. ‘Look at her,’ he told Adam Ellick. ‘Don’t you think she is meant for the skies?’ Fathers can be very embarrassing.

Adam took us to Islamabad. It was the first time I had ever visited. Islamabad was a beautiful place with nice white bungalows and broad roads, though it has none of the natural beauty of Swat. We saw the Red Mosque where the siege had taken place, the wide, wide Constitution Avenue leading to the white-colonnaded buildings of the Parliament House and the Presidency, where Zardari now lived. General Musharraf was in exile in London.

We went to shops where I bought school books and Adam bought me DVDs of American TV programmes like
Ugly Betty
, which was about a girl with big braces and a big heart. I loved it and dreamed of one day going to New York and working on a magazine like her. We visited the Lok Virsa museum, and it was a joy to celebrate our national heritage once again. Our own museum in Swat had closed. On the steps outside an old man was selling popcorn. He was a Pashtun like us, and when my father asked if he was from Islamabad he replied, ‘Do you think Islamabad can ever belong to us Pashtuns?’ He said he came from Mohmand, one of the tribal areas, but had to flee because of a military operation. I saw tears in my parents’ eyes.

Lots of buildings were surrounded by concrete blocks, and there were checkpoints for incoming vehicles to guard against suicide bombs. When our bus hit a pothole on the way back my brother Khushal, who had been asleep, jerked awake. ‘Was that a bomb blast?’ he asked. This was the fear that filled our daily lives. Any small disturbance or noise could be a bomb or gunfire.

On our short trips we forgot our troubles in Swat. But we returned to the threats and danger as we entered our valley once again. Even so, Swat was our home and we were not ready to leave it.

Back in Mingora the first thing I saw when I opened my wardrobe was my uniform, school bag and geometry set. I felt so sad. The visit to Islamabad had been a lovely break, but this was my reality now.

14

A Funny Kind of Peace

W
HEN MY BROTHERS
’ schools reopened after the winter break, Khushal said he would rather stay at home like me. I was cross. ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are!’ I told him. It felt strange to have no school. We didn’t even have a television set as someone had stolen ours while we were in Islamabad, using my father’s ‘getaway’ ladder to get inside.

Someone gave me a copy of
The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it’s at home. I loved that book and read it over and over again. ‘When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,’ it says. I don’t think that Paulo Coelho had come across the Taliban or our useless politicians.

What I didn’t know was that Hai Kakar was holding secret talks with Fazlullah and his commanders. He had got to know them in interviews, and was urging them to rethink their ban on girls’ education.

‘Listen, Maulana,’ he told Fazlullah. ‘You killed people, you slaughtered people, you beheaded people, you destroyed schools and still there was no protest in Pakistan. But when you banned girls’ education people spoke out. Even the Pakistan media, which has been so soft on you till now, is outraged.’

The pressure from the whole country worked, and Fazlullah agreed to lift the ban for girls up to ten years old – Year 4. I was in Year 5 and some of us pretended we were younger than we were. We started going to school again, dressed in ordinary clothes and
hiding our books under our shawls. It was risky but it was the only ambition I had back then. We were lucky too that Madam Maryam was brave and resisted the pressure to stop working. She had known my father since she was ten and they trusted each other completely – she used to signal to him to wind up when he spoke for too long, which was often!

‘The secret school is our silent protest,’ she told us.

I didn’t write anything about it in my diary. If they had caught us they would have flogged or even slaughtered us as they had Shabana. Some people are afraid of ghosts, some of spiders or snakes – in those days we were afraid of our fellow human beings.

On the way to school I sometimes saw the Taliban with their caps and long dirty hair. Most of the time they hid their faces. They were awkward, horrible-looking. The streets of Mingora were very empty as a third of the inhabitants had left the valley. My father said you couldn’t really blame people for leaving as the government had no power. There were now 12,000 army troops in the region – four times as many as their estimates of the Taliban – along with tanks, helicopters and sophisticated weapons. Yet seventy per cent of Swat was under Taliban control.

About a week after we had returned to school, on 16 February 2009, we were woken one night by the sound of gunfire. Our people traditionally fire rifles in celebration of births and weddings but even that had stopped during the conflict. So at first we thought we were in danger. Then we heard the news. The gunfire was in celebration. A peace deal had been struck between the Taliban and the provincial government, which was now under the control of the ANP, not the mullahs. The government had agreed to impose sharia law throughout Swat and in return the militants would stop fighting. The Taliban agreed to a ten-day truce and, as a peace gesture, released a Chinese telephone engineer who they had kidnapped six months before.

We were happy too – my father and I had often spoken in favour of a peace deal – but we questioned how it would work. People
hoped that the Taliban would settle down, go back to their homes and live as peaceful citizens. They convinced themselves that the
shariat
in Swat would be different to the Afghan version – we would still have our girls’ schools and there would be no morality police. Swat would be Swat just with a different justice system. I wanted to believe this but I was worried. I thought,
Surely how the system works depends on the people overseeing it? The Taliban
.

And it was hard to believe it was all over! More than a thousand ordinary people and police had been killed. Women had been kept in purdah, schools and bridges had been blown up, businesses had closed. We had suffered barbaric public courts and violent justice and had lived in a constant state of fear. And now it was all to stop.

At breakfast I suggested to my brothers that we should talk of peace now and not of war. As ever, they ignored me and carried on with their war games. Khushal had a toy helicopter and Atal a pistol made of paper, and one would shout, ‘Fire!’ and the other, ‘Take position.’ I didn’t care. I went and looked at my uniform, happy that I would soon be able to wear it openly. A message came from our headmistress that exams would take place in the first week of March. It was time to get back to my books.

Our excitement did not last long. Just two days later I was on the roof of the Taj Mahal Hotel giving an interview about the peace deal to a well-known reporter called Hamid Mir when we got the news that another TV reporter we knew had been killed. His name was Musa Khan Khel, and he had often interviewed my father. That day he had been covering a peace march led by Sufi Mohammad. It wasn’t really a march but a cavalcade of cars. Afterwards Musa Khan’s body was found nearby. He had been shot several times and his throat partly slit. He was twenty-eight years old.