For more than 10 years, Malala Yousufzai has been fighting for the rights of girls around the world to receive an education, even though she almost died because of her simple desire to learn. Now she is 23 years old, graduated from Oxford, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and is ready to move on with her important mission. The new protagonist of British Vogue told the magazine not only about her future ambitious plans, but also about her family and love. Cyrin Cale met with her.
Even the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner is not immune to constant self-deprecation and life upheavals. “I ask myself this question every night when I’m trying to sleep for hours,” Malala Yousufzai replies when I ask her how she sees herself in ten years.
Malala, who is only 23 years old, continues: “Where will I live next? Should I continue to live in the UK or should I move to Pakistan or another country? Who should I live with? Should I live alone or with my parents as I am now? They love me very much, and like any Asian parent, they want their children to be with them forever.”
We are sitting in a quiet corner of a hotel in central London. Malala’s hair is loose and uncovered, and she wears a scarf around her neck. “I wear it mostly on the street or in public places,” she says. Her cautious security detail is nearby. “When I’m at home or with friends, I don’t have to.” She explains that the headscarf is about more than just observing Muslim traditions. “For us Pashtuns, it is a cultural symbol that shows where I come from. Often Muslim girls wearing traditional clothing are considered oppressed, voiceless, or living in a patriarchy. I want to say to everyone that each of us can have our own voice within our own culture, and you can have equality in your own culture.”
Malala Yousufzai launched the campaign for girls’ rights to education almost thirteen years ago, when she was just 11. All these years, this has been Malala’s main message to the world. During the Taliban rule in Mingora, a town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, all girls were banned from attending school. Her desire to learn led to an attack on her life at the age of 15. Taliban militants shot at her and two other classmates while they were traveling home from school on a bus. It was in October 2012. She and her family were taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. After the move, Malala’s activism only grew stronger.
Her autobiography, I, Malala, published just a year after the assassination attempt, became an international bestseller. At the age of 15, she founded the Malala Fund, with which she organized campaigns aimed at freeing schoolgirls held captive by the Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram. She has met with presidents and prime ministers, addressed the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday, and at 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize while preparing for language exams in her new hometown of Birmingham. In 2017, she entered Oxford University to study politics, philosophy, and economics and graduated with honors. All of this shows that there are hopeful people, and then there is Malala.
Despite all these merits, I am sitting in front of a 23-year-old graduate who, like all of us, has had many trips interrupted by the pandemic, lives with her parents, often plays video games while locked in her room, and tries to work. So what does the most famous Oxford graduate want at the moment?
First, a little existential panic. “It was two o’clock in the morning,” Malala recalls, “I’m sitting in bed, looking at my personal Instagram and thinking: “What am I even doing?” After returning home from university last March to get her degree and wait out the pandemic, she became a member of the Covid class of 2020: unemployed, aimless, bored. In her childhood bedroom, she assessed her options. Naturally, her work with Malala Fund will continue, but at the same time, she is now at a major crossroads in her life.
Should she look for a job? Should she apply for a master’s degree? Travel the world? In the meantime, she slept, enjoyed her homemade lamb curry, and read (Malala has set herself the task of reading 84 books this year). “I had a secret Twitter account for about a year,” she says, “before I officially joined the network, I had about 4,000 followers.” (Yusufzai now has about 1.8 million followers and counting.)
The inspiration came unexpectedly from her favorite television. She had always known the power of storytelling – when she was 11, Malala started a BBC blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai, describing what it was like to live under Taliban rule. Like the Sussexes and Obamas, who turned to broadcasting to communicate with the public on issues that mattered to them, Malala began thinking about creating her own programs and attracting talent from around the world.