Malala Yousafzai is a hero. Someone you should introduce to your children when they learn about Superman and Powerpuff Girls and the feats their animation softwares perform to glorify them.
How else would you explain the heroic bravado of a barely 15-year-old girl who was shot from point blank range, who later swung between life and death, rose back to life like the proverbial phoenix and went back to doing her thing which nearly cost her her life? This is the stuff heroes are made of. Real life heroes.
Malala was an ordinary school girl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley but life made her extraordinary.
She was named by her grandfather after an Afghan folk hero, Malalai, which means “grief-stricken”, perhaps little realising that she would grow up and have a very close brush with grief but will become the flagbearer of happiness for thousands of children.
Malalai, the Afghan folk hero this girl was named after, is known as the Afghan Joan of Arc as she helped defeat the Afghans to defeat the British forces who tried to annex Afghanistan. The choice of this name for Malala proved prophetic in 2012 when an armed Taliban assailant barged into her school bus and fired a bullet at her forehead.
With the strength of her unshakable valour and resolve, Malala managed to change the air around her tragic-sounding name to becoming the world’s youngest Nobel Laureate in 2014, just two years after she defeated death.
As is with most successful and strong people, Malala’s road to stardom was paved with struggle, strife, suffering and rebellion. When the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed control of Pakistan’s picturesque Swat Valley, they ran roughshod over education, especially for girls.
Malala was then commissioned a blog by the BBC to tell the story, in which under a pen name, Gul Makai, she told the story of how school girls and their families lived under the shadow of fear. Her blog won her readership but her bravado in defying the Taliban’s draconian edict, earned her their wrath.
She could have withdrawn after receiving threats but she rather recoiled into the shell of Gul Makai and continued to champion the cause of education through the BBC blog.
This catapulted her to such fame that when she was shot, the then UN Special Envoy for Global Education, former British prime minister Gordon Brown lent his support to Malala by visiting her in hospital in Pakistan. Inspired by a petition he handed over to then Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari in support of Malala, the world of social media was taken by storm with the hashtag #IAmMalala.
In 2011, she became the first recipient of the National Peace Award for Youth instituted by the government of Pakistan.
On 12 July 2013, Malala’s 16th birthday, soon after she had recovered, she was invited to speak at the United Nations, which was declared as Malala Day in honour of her heroic war for children’s education. In 2015, she launched her first school on the Lebanese-Syrian border for war-torn refugee families.
Malala’s war continues to this day and she continues to win it, proving the choice of her name after a war hero to be just perfect.
