October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. According to former Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become “the most prominent citizen” of the country.

Yousafzai was born in 1997 to a Pashtun family in Pakistan, where her family came to run a chain of schools in the region. She was particularly inspired by her father, an educational activist, and his humanitarian work. In early 2009, when she was 11–12, she wrote a blog under a pseudonym for BBC Urdu detailing her life under Taliban occupation. The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region. She gave interviews in print and on television, and was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu.

In 2012, while on a bus after taking an exam, she and two other girls were shot by a Pakistani Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt in retaliation for her activism. Yousafzai was hit in the head with a bullet and remained unconscious and in critical condition in hospital, but her condition improved enough for her to be transferred to hospital in Birmingham. This attempt on her life arguably made her “the most famous teenager in the world”. Leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her, and the Pakistani Taliban were internationally denounced by governments, human rights organizations and feminist groups. Pakistani Taliban officials responded by further denouncing Yousafzai, suggesting they would try again to kill her.

Following her recovery, Yousafzai became a prominent activist for the right to education. Based in Birmingham, she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation, and in 2013 co-wrote I Am Malala, an international best seller. In 2012, she was the recipient of Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize and the 2013 Sakharov Prize. In 2014, she was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Aged 17 at the time, she was the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. 

In 2015, Yousafzai was a subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary He Named Me Malala. The 2013, 2014 and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured her as one of the most influential people globally. In 2017, she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada. She attended Edgbaston High School from 2013 to 2017, and graduated in 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from the University of Oxford.

More about Malala Yousafzai at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai