I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (26 page)

The way bin Laden was found was like something out of the spy movies my brother Khushal likes. To avoid detection he used human couriers rather than phone calls or emails. But the Americans had discovered one of his couriers, tracked the number plate of his car and followed it from Peshawar to Abbottabad. After that they monitored the house with a kind of giant drone that has X-ray
vision, which spotted a very tall bearded man pacing round the compound. They called him the Pacer.

People were intrigued by the new details that came every day, but they seemed angrier at the American incursion than at the fact that the world’s biggest terrorist had been living on our soil. Some newspapers ran stories saying that the Americans had actually killed bin Laden years before this and kept his body in a freezer. The story was that they had then planted the body in Abbottabad and faked the raid to embarrass Pakistan.

We started to receive text messages asking us to rally in the streets and show our support of the army. ‘We were there for you in 1948, 1965 and 1971,’ said one message, referring to our three wars with India. ‘Be with us now when we have been stabbed in the back.’ But there were also text messages which ridiculed the army. People asked how we could be spending $6 billion a year on the military (seven times more than we were spending on education), if four American helicopters could just sneak in under our radar? And if they could do it, what was to stop the Indians next door? ‘Please don’t honk, the army is sleeping,’ said one text, and ‘Second-hand Pakistani radar for sale . . . can’t detect US helicopters but gets cable TV just fine,’ said another.

General Kayani and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, were called to testify in parliament, something that had never happened. Our country had been humiliated and we wanted to know why.

We also learned that American politicians were furious that bin Laden had been living under our noses when all along they had imagined he was hiding in a cave. They complained that they had given us $20 billion over an eight-year period to cooperate and it was questionable which side we were on. Sometimes it felt as though it was all about the money. Most of it had gone to the army; ordinary people received nothing.

*

A few months after that, in October 2011 my father told me he had received an email informing him I was one of five nominees for the international peace prize of KidsRights, a children’s advocacy group based in Amsterdam. My name had been put forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was a great hero of my father for his fight against apartheid. My father was disappointed when I didn’t win but I pointed out to him that all I had done was speak out; we didn’t have an organisation doing practical things like the award winners had.

Shortly after that I was invited by the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, to speak in Lahore at an education gala. He was building a network of new schools he calls Daanish Schools and giving free laptops to students, even if they did have his picture on their screens when you switched them on. To motivate students in all provinces he was giving cash awards to girls and boys who scored well in their exams. I was presented with a cheque for half a million rupees, about $4,500, for my campaign for girls’ rights.

I wore pink to the gala and for the first time talked publicly about how we had defied the Taliban edict and carried on going to school secretly. ‘I know the importance of education because my pens and books were taken from me by force,’ I said. ‘But the girls of Swat are not afraid of anyone. We have continued with our education.’

Then I was in class one day when my classmates said, ‘You have won a big prize and half a million rupees!’ My father told me the government had awarded me Pakistan’s first ever National Peace Prize. I couldn’t believe it. So many journalists thronged to the school that day that it turned into a news studio.

The ceremony was on 20 December 2011 at the prime minister’s official residence, one of the big white mansions on the hill at the end of Constitution Avenue which I had seen on my trip to Islamabad. By then I was used to meeting politicians. I was not nervous though my father tried to intimidate me by saying Prime Minister Gilani came from a family of saints. After the PM presented me with the award and cheque, I presented him with a long list of
demands. I told him that we wanted our schools rebuilt and a girls’ university in Swat. I knew he would not take my demands seriously so I didn’t push very hard. I thought,
One day I will be a politician and do these things myself
.

It was decided that the prize should be awarded annually to children under eighteen years old and be named the Malala Prize in my honour. I noticed my father was not very happy with this. Like most Pashtuns he is a bit superstitious. In Pakistan we don’t have a culture of honouring people while they are alive, only the dead, so he thought it was a bad omen.

I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture. Were she to break that tradition, men and women would talk against her, particularly those in our own family. She never said she regretted the work my father and I had undertaken, but when I won prizes, she said, ‘I don’t want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn’t exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world.’

My father argued that all he had ever wanted was to create a school in which children could learn. We had been left with no choice but to get involved in politics and campaign for education. ‘My only ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able. But when half of your leaders tell lies and the other half is negotiating with the Taliban, there is nowhere to go. One has to speak out.’

When I returned home I was greeted with the news that there was a group of journalists who wanted to interview me at school and that I should wear a nice outfit. First I thought of wearing a very beautiful dress, but then I decided to wear something more modest for the interview as I wanted people to focus on my message and not my clothes. When I arrived at school I saw all my friends had dressed up. ‘Surprise!’ they shouted when I walked in.
They had collected money and organised a party for me with a big white cake on which was written
SUCCESS FOREVER
in chocolate icing. It was wonderful that my friends wanted to share in my success. I knew that any of the girls in my class could have achieved what I had achieved if they had had their parents’ support.

‘Now you can get back to school work,’ said Madam Maryam as we finished off the cake. ‘Exams in March!’

But the year ended on a sad note. Five days after I got the award, Aunt Babo, my mother’s eldest sister, died suddenly. She wasn’t even fifty years old. She was diabetic and had seen a TV advert for a doctor in Lahore with some miracle treatment and persuaded my uncle to take her there. We don’t know what the doctor injected her with but she went into shock and died. My father said the doctor was a charlatan and this was why we needed to keep struggling against ignorance.

I had amassed a lot of money by the end of that year – half a million rupees each from the prime minister, the chief minister of Punjab, the chief minister of our state Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Sindh government. Major General Ghulam Qamar, the local army commander, also gave our school 100,000 rupees to build a science laboratory and a library. But my fight wasn’t over. I was reminded of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is won. I began to see the awards and recognition just like that. They were little jewels without much meaning. I needed to concentrate on winning the war.

My father used some of the money to buy me a new bed and cabinet and pay for tooth implants for my mother and a piece of land in Shangla. We decided to spend the rest of the money on people who needed help. I wanted to start an education foundation. This had been on my mind ever since I’d seen the children working on the rubbish mountain. I still could not shake the image of the black rats I had seen there, and the girl with matted hair who had been sorting rubbish. We held a conference of twenty-one girls and
made our priority education for every girl in Swat with a particular focus on street children and those in child labour.

As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of paper with a pencil to account for the oranges she had sold as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was going to fight.

18

The Woman and the Sea

A
UNT NAJMA WAS
in tears. She had never seen the sea before. My family and I sat on the rocks, gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea. It was such a big expanse, surely no one could know where it ended. At that moment I was very happy. ‘One day I want to cross this sea,’ I said.

‘What is she saying?’ asked my aunt as if I were talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head round the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for thirty years and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach, and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea because she could not read.

I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free. In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely on men. My headmistress Maryam was a strong, educated woman but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.

In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should
be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.

‘You are a million miles away,
Jani
,’ said my father interrupting my thoughts. ‘What are you dreaming about?’

‘Just about crossing oceans,
Aba’
, I replied.

‘Forget all that!’ shouted my brother Atal. ‘We’re at the beach and I want to go for a camel ride!’

It was January 2012 and we were in Karachi as guests of Geo TV after the Sindh government announced they were renaming a girls’ secondary school on Mission Road in my honour. My brother Khushal was now at school in Abbottabad, so it was just me, my parents and Atal. We flew to Karachi, and it was the first time any of us had ever been on a plane. The journey was just two hours, which I found incredible. It would have taken us at least two days by bus. On the plane we noticed that some people could not find their seats because they could not read letters and numbers. I had a window seat and could see the deserts and mountains of our land below me. As we headed south the land became more parched. I was already missing the green of Swat. I could see why, when our people go to Karachi to work, they always want to be buried in the cool of our valley.

Driving from the airport to the hostel, I was amazed by the number of people and houses and cars. Karachi is one of the biggest cities on earth. It was strange to think it was just a port of 300,000 people when Pakistan was created. Jinnah lived there and made it our first capital, and it was soon flooded by millions of Muslim refugees from India known as
mohajirs
, which means ‘immigrants’, who spoke Urdu. Today it has around twenty million people. It’s actually the largest Pashtun city in the world, even though it’s far from our lands; between five and seven million Pashtuns have gone there to work.

Unfortunately, Karachi has also become a very violent city and there is always fighting between the
mohajirs
and Pashtuns. The
mohajir
areas we saw all seemed very organised and neat whereas the Pashtun areas were dirty and chaotic. The
mohajirs
almost all support a party called the MQM led by Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London and communicates with his people by Skype. The MQM is a very organised movement, and the
mohajir
community sticks together. By contrast we Pashtuns are very divided, some following Imran Khan because he is Pashtun, a khan and a great cricketer, some Maulana Fazlur Rehman because his party JUI is Islamic, some the secular ANP because it’s a Pashtun nationalist party and some the PPP of Benazir Bhutto or the PML(N) of Nawaz Sharif.

We went to the Sindh assembly, where I was applauded by all the members. Then we went to visit some schools including the one that was being named after me. I made a speech about the importance of education and also talked about Benazir Bhutto as this was her city. ‘We must all work together for the rights of girls,’ I said. The children sang for me and I was presented with a painting of me looking up at the sky. It was both odd and wonderful to see my name on a school just like my namesake Malalai of Maiwind, after whom so many schools in Afghanistan are named. In the next school holidays my father and I planned to go and talk to parents and children in the distant hilly areas of Swat about the importance of learning to read and write. ‘We will be like preachers of education,’ I said.