I wrote a lot about school as that was at the centre of our lives. I loved my royal-blue school
uniform but we were advised to wear plain clothes instead and hide our books under our shawls. One
extract was called
DO
NOT WEAR COLOURFUL CLOTHES
. In it I wrote, ‘I was getting ready for school
one day and was about to put on my uniform when I remembered the advice of our principal, so that
day I decided to wear my favourite pink dress.’
I also wrote about the burqa. When you’re
very young, you love the burqa because it’s great for
dressing up. But when you are made to wear it, that’s a different matter.
Also it makes walking
difficult! One of my diary entries was about an incident that happened when I was out shopping with
my mother and cousin in the Cheena Bazaar: ‘There we heard gossip that one day a woman was
wearing a shuttlecock burqa and fell over. When a man tried to help her she refused and said. “Don’t
help me, brother, as this will bring immense pleasure to Fazlullah.” When we entered the shop we
were going to, the shopkeeper laughed and told us he got scared
thinking we might be suicide
bombers as many suicide bombers wore the burqa.’
At school people started talking about the diary. One girl even printed it out and brought it in to
show my father.
‘It’s very good,’ he said with a knowing smile.
I wanted to tell people it was me, but the BBC correspondent had told me not to as it could be
dangerous. I didn’t see why as I was just a child and who would attack a child? But some of my
friends recognised incidents in it. And I almost gave the game
away in one entry when I said, ‘My
mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and joked to my father we should change my name . . . I also
like the name because my real name means “grief-stricken”.’
The diary of Gul Makai received attention further afield. Some newspapers printed extracts. The
BBC even made a recording of it using another girl’s voice, and I began to see that the pen and the
words that come from it can be much more powerful than machine guns, tanks or helicopters. We
were learning how to struggle. And we were learning how powerful we are when we speak.
Some of our teachers stopped coming to school. One said he had been ordered by Mullah Fazlullah
to help build his centre in Imam Deri. Another said he’d seen a beheaded corpse on the way in and
could no longer risk his life to teach. Many people were scared. Our neighbours said the Taliban
were instructing people to make it known to the mosque if their daughters
were unmarried so they
could be married off, probably to militants.
By the start of January 2009 there were only ten girls in my class when once there had been twenty-
seven. Many of my friends had left the valley so they could be educated in Peshawar, but my father
insisted we would not leave. ‘Swat has given us so much. In these tough days we must be strong for
our valley,’ he said.
One night we all went for dinner at the house of my father’s friend Dr Afzal, who runs a hospital.
After dinner, when the doctor was driving us home, we saw masked Taliban on both sides of the road
carrying guns. We were terrified. Dr Afzal’s hospital was in an area that had been taken over by the
Taliban. The constant gunfire and curfews had made it impossible for the hospital to function, so he
had moved it to Barikot. There had been an outcry, and the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan had
called on the doctor to reopen it. He had asked for my father’s advice.
My father told him, ‘Don’t
accept good things from bad people.’ A hospital protected by the Taliban was not a good idea so he
refused.
Dr Afzal did not live far from us, so once we were safely home, my father insisted on going back
with him in case he was targeted by the Taliban. As he and my father drove back, Dr Afzal nervously
asked him, ‘What names shall we give if they stop us?’
‘You are Dr Afzal and I am Ziauddin Yousafzai,’ replied my father. ‘These bloody people. We
haven’t done anything wrong. Why should we change our names – that’s what criminals do.’
Fortunately the Taliban had disappeared. We all breathed a big sigh of relief when my father
phoned to say they were safe.
I didn’t want to give in either. But the Taliban’s deadline was drawing closer:
girls had to stop
going to school. How could they stop more than 50,000 girls from going to school in the twenty-first
century? I kept hoping something would happen and the schools would remain open. But finally the
deadline was upon us. We were determined that the Khushal School bell would be the last to stop
ringing. Madam Maryam had even got married so she could stay in Swat. Her family had moved to
Karachi to get away from the conflict and, as a woman, she could not live alone.
Wednesday 14 January was the day my school closed, and when I woke up that morning I saw TV
cameras in my bedroom. A Pakistani journalist called Irfan Ashraf was following me around, even as
I said my prayers and brushed my teeth.
I could tell my father was in a bad mood. One of his friends had persuaded him to participate in a
documentary for the
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