I Am Malala

tend to remember years by events, like an earthquake. But my grandfather knew that his cousin was actually much older than him. He was so angry that he made the day-long bus journey to Mingora to see the Swat minister of education. ‘Sahib,’ he told him, ‘I have a cousin who is ten years older than me and you have certified him ten years younger.’ So the minister said, ‘OK, Maulana, what shall I write down for you? Would you like to have been born in the year of the earthquake of Quetta?’ My grandfather agreed, so his new date of birth became 1935, making him much younger than his cousin.

This family rivalry meant that my father was bullied a lot by his cousins. They knew he was insecure about his looks because at school the teachers always favoured the handsome boys for their fair skin. His cousins would stop my father on his way home from school and tease him about being short and dark-skinned. In our society you have to take revenge for such slights, but my father was much smaller than his cousins.

He also felt he could never do enough to please my grandfather. Baba had beautiful handwriting and my father would spend hours painstakingly drawing letters but Baba never once praised him.

My grandmother kept his spirits up – he was her favourite and she believed great things lay in store for him. She loved him so much that she would slip him extra meat and the cream off the milk while she went without. But it wasn’t easy to study as there was no electricity in the village in those days. He used to read by the light of the oil lamp in the hujra, and one evening he went to sleep and the oil lamp fell over. Fortunately my grandmother found him before a fire started. It was my grandmother’s faith in my father that gave him the courage to find his own proud path he could travel along. This is the path that he would later show me.

Yet she too got angry with him once. Holy men from a spiritual place called Derai Saydan used to travel the villages in those days begging for flour. One day while his parents were out some of them came to the house. My father broke the seal on the wooden storage box of maize and filled their bowls. When my grandparents came home they were furious and beat him.

Pashtuns are famously frugal (though generous with guests), and Baba was particularly careful with money. If any of his children accidentally spilt their food he would fly into a rage. He was an extremely disciplined man and could not understand why they were not the same. As a teacher he was eligible for a discount on his sons’ school fees for sports and joining the Boy Scouts. It was such a small discount that most teachers did not bother, but he forced my father to apply for the rebate. Of course my father detested doing this. As he waited outside the headmaster’s office, he broke out into a sweat, and once inside his stutter was worse than ever. ‘It felt as if my honour was at stake for five rupees,’ he told me. My grandfather never bought him new books. Instead he would tell his best students to keep their old books for my father at the end of the year and then he would be sent to their homes to get them. He felt ashamed but had no choice if he didn’t want to end up illiterate. All his books were inscribed with other boys’ names, never his own.

‘It’s not that passing books on is a bad practice,’ he says. ‘It’s just I so wanted a new book, unmarked by another student and bought with my father’s money.’

My father’s dislike of Baba’s frugality has made him a very generous man both materially and in spirit. He became determined to end the traditional rivalry between him and his cousins. When his headmaster’s wife fell ill, my father donated blood to help save her. The man was astonished and apologised for having tormented him. When my father tells me stories of his childhood, he always says that though Baba was a difficult man he gave him the most important gift – the gift of education. He sent my father to the government high school to learn English and receive a modern education rather than to a madrasa, even though as an imam people criticised him for this. Baba also gave him a deep love of learning and knowledge as well as a keen awareness of people’s rights, which my father has passed on to me. In my grandfather’s Friday addresses he would talk about the poor and the landowners and how true Islam is against feudalism. He also spoke Persian and Arabic and cared deeply for words. He read the great poems of Saadi, Allama Iqbal and Rumi to my father with such passion and fire it was as if he was teaching the whole mosque.

My father longed to be eloquent with a voice that boomed out with no stammer, and he knew my grandfather desperately wanted him to be a doctor, but though he was a very bright student and a gifted poet, he was poor at maths and science and felt he was a disappointment. That’s why he decided he would make his father proud by entering the district’s annual public speaking competition. Everyone thought he was mad. His teachers and friends tried to dissuade him and his father was reluctant to write the speech for him. But eventually Baba gave him a fine speech, which my father practised and practised. He committed every word to memory while walking in the hills, reciting it to the skies and birds as there was no privacy in their home.

There was not much to do in the area where they lived so when the day arrived there was a huge gathering. Other boys, some known as good speakers, gave their speeches. Finally my father was called forward. ‘I stood at the lectern,’ he told me, ‘hands shaking and knees knocking, so short I could barely see over the top and so terrified the faces were a blur. My palms were sweating and my mouth was as dry as paper.’ He tried desperately not to think about the treacherous consonants lying ahead of him, just waiting to trip him up and stick in his throat, but when he spoke, the words came out fluently like beautiful butterflies taking flight. His voice did not boom like his father’s, but his passion shone through and as he went on he gained confidence.

At the end of the speech there were cheers and applause. Best of all, as he went up to collect the cup for first prize, he saw his father clapping and enjoying being patted on the back by those standing around him. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘the first thing I’d done that made him smile.’

After that my father entered every competition in the district. My grandfather wrote his speeches and he almost always came first, gaining a reputation locally as an impressive speaker. My father had turned his weakness into strength. For the first time Baba started praising him in front of others. He’d boast, ‘Ziauddin is a shaheen’ – a falcon – because this is a creature that flies high above other birds. ‘Write your name as “Ziauddin Shaheen”,’ he told him. For a while my father did this but stopped when he realised that although a falcon flies high it is a cruel bird. Instead he just called himself Ziauddin Yousafzai, our clan name.

3 Growing up in a School

MY MOTHER STARTED school when she was six and stopped the same term. She was unusual in the village as she had a father and brothers who encouraged her to go to school. She was the only girl in a class of boys. She carried her bag of books proudly into school and claims she was brighter than the boys. But every day she would leave behind her girl cousins playing at home and she envied them. There seemed no point in going to school just to end up cooking, cleaning and bringing up children, so one day she sold her books for nine annas, spent the money on boiled sweets and never went back. Her father said nothing. She says he didn’t even notice, as he would set off early every morning after a breakfast of cornbread and cream, his German pistol strapped under his arm, and spend his days busy with local politics or resolving feuds. Besides he had seven other children to think about.

It was only when she met my father that she felt regret. Here was a man who had read so many books, who wrote her poems she could not read, and whose ambition was to have his own school. As his wife, she wanted to help him achieve that. For as long as my father could remember it had been his dream to open a school, but with no family contacts or money it was extremely hard for him to realise this dream. He thought there was nothing more important than knowledge. He remembered how mystified he had been by the river in his village, wondering where the water came from and went to, until he learned about the water cycle from the rain to the sea.

His own village school had been just a small building. Many of his classes were taught under a tree on the bare ground. There were no toilets and the pupils went to the fields to answer the call of nature. Yet he says he was actually lucky. His sisters – my aunts – did not go to school at all, just like millions of girls in my country.