, a survivor, a global icon. When just 17, she was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Her life has been turned into a parable, of good overcoming evil, of rebirth after devastation. Her real story is far more complicated and ongoing.
Ten years ago, on 9 October, she was on a bus with schoolmates going back to her family home in Mingora, a town in the beautiful Swat Valley in Pakistan. She’d just finished an exam. I imagine the scene: the stunning views, the chatter of carefree schoolgirls in uniform and then a sudden stop. A gunman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, got on, ordered the teenagers to identify Malala, then shot her and two other girls. He was a member of the Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban . They were all injured, Malala most seriously. “The bullet grazed my left eye, skull and brain, lacerating my facial nerve, shattering my eardrum and breaking my jaw joints,” she subsequently explained. At the time she registered nothing and later couldn’t recollect what had happened.
Malala owes her crusading spirit to Ziauddin Yousafzai, her remarkably liberal father, and oddly, to the BBC. Aamer Ahmed Khan, a World Service producer, came up with the idea of getting a local schoolgirl to blog anonymously about life under TT. There weren’t any takers. People were too frightened. Ziauddin and his sparky daughter decided to go for it. That’s where it all started.
Using the pseudonym Gul Makai, 11-year-old Malala began to blog vivid accounts in Urdu. An American documentary maker made a film about the talented, young blogger and she began to give media interviews. TT decided they had to silence her.