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. Education had been a great gift for him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all Pakistan’s problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls. The school that my father dreamed of would have desks and a library, computers, bright posters on the walls and, most important, washrooms.
My grandfather had a different dream for his youngest son - he longed for him to be a doctor - and as one of just two sons, he expected him to contribute to the household budget. My father’s elder brother Saeed Ramzan had worked for years as a teacher at a local school. He and his family lived with my grandfather, and whenever he saved up enough of his salary, they built a small concrete hujra at the side of the house for guests. He brought logs back from the mountains for firewood, and after teaching he would work in the fields where our family had a few buffaloes. He also helped Baba with heavy tasks like clearing snow from the roof.
When my father was offered a place for his A Levels at Jehanzeb College, which is the best further education institution in Swat, my grandfather refused to pay for his living expenses. His own education in Delhi had been free - he had lived like a talib in the mosques, and local people had provided the students with food and clothes. Tuition at Jehanzeb was free but my father needed money to live on. Pakistan doesn’t have student loans and he had never even set foot in a bank. The college was in Saidu Sharif, the twin town of Mingora, and he had no family there with whom he could stay.
There was no other college in Shangla, and if he didn’t go to college, he would never be able to move out of the village and realise his dream.
My father was at his wits’ end and wept with frustration. His beloved mother had died just before he graduated from school. He knew if she had been alive, she would have been on his side. He pleaded with his father but to no avail. His only hope was his brother-in-law in Karachi. My grandfather suggested that he might take my father in so he could go to college there. The couple would soon be arriving in the village as they were coming to offer condolences after my grandmother’s death.
My father prayed they would agree, but my grandfather asked them as soon as they arrived, exhausted after the three-day bus journey, and his son-in-law refused outright. My grandfather was so furious he would not speak to them for their entire stay. My father felt he had lost his chance and would end up like his brother teaching in a local school. The school where Uncle Khan dada taught was in the mountain village of Sewoor, about an hour and a half ’s climb from their house. It didn’t even have its own building. They used the big hall in the mosque, where they taught more than a hundred children ranging from five to fifteen years old.
The people in Sewoor were Gujars, Kohistanis and Mians. We regard Mians as noble or landed people, but Gujars and Kohistanis are what we call hilly people, peasants who look after buffaloes.
Their children are usually dirty and they are looked down upon by Pashtuns, even if they are poor themselves. ‘They are dirty, black and stupid,’ people would say. ‘Let them be illiterate.’ It is often said that teachers don’t like to be posted to such remote schools and generally make a deal with their colleagues so that only one of them has to go to work each day. If the school has two teachers, each goes in for three days and signs the other in. If it has three teachers, each goes in for just two days.
Once there, all they do is keep the children quiet with a long stick as they cannot imagine education will be any use to them.
My uncle was more dutiful. He liked the hilly people and respected their tough lives. So he went to the school most days and actually tried to teach the children. After my father had graduated from school he had nothing to do so he volunteered to help his brother. There his luck changed. Another of my aunts had married a man in that village and they had a relative visiting called Nasir Pacha, who saw my father at work. Nasir Pacha had spent years in Saudi Arabia working in construction, making money to send back to his family. My father told him he had just finished school and had won a college place at Jehanzeb. He did not mention he could not afford to take it as he did not want to embarrass his father.
‘Why don’t you come and live with us?’ asked Nasir Pacha.
‘Oof, I was so happy, by God,’ says my father. Pacha and his wife Jajai became his second family.
Their home was in Spal Bandi, a beautiful mountain village on the way to the White Palace, and my father describes it as a romantic and inspirational place. He went there by bus, and it seemed so big to him compared to his home village that he thought he’d arrived in a city. As a guest, he was treated exceptionally well. Jajai replaced his late mother as the most important woman in my father’s life.
When a villager complained to her that he was flirting with a girl living across the road, she defended him. ‘Ziauddin is as clean as an egg with no hair,’ she said. ‘Look instead to your own daughter.’
It was in Spal Bandi that my father came across women who had great freedom and were not hidden away as in his own village. The women of Spal Bandi had a beautiful spot on top of the mountain where only they could congregate to chat about their everyday lives. It was unusual for women to have a special place to meet outside the home. It was also there that my father met his mentor Akbar Khan, who although he had not gone to college himself lent my father money so he could. Like my mother, Akbar Khan may not have had much of a formal education, but he had another kind of wisdom. My father often spoke of the kindness of Akbar Khan and Nasir Pacha to illustrate that if you help someone in need you might also receive unexpected aid.
My father arrived at college at an important moment in Pakistan’s history. That summer, while he was walking in the mountains, our dictator General Zia was killed in a mysterious plane crash, which many people said was caused by a bomb hidden in a crate of mangoes. During my father’s first term at college national elections were held, which were won by Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the prime minister who had been executed when my father was a boy. Benazir was our first female prime minister and the first in the Islamic world. Suddenly there was a lot of optimism about the future.
Student organisations which had been banned under Zia became very active. My father quickly got involved in student politics and became known as a talented speaker and debater. He was made general secretary of the Pakhtoon Students Federation (PSF), which wanted equal rights for Pashtuns.
The most important jobs in the army, bureaucracy and government are all taken by Punjabis because they come from the biggest and most powerful province.
The other main student organisation was Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba, the student wing of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, which was powerful in many universities in Pakistan. They provided free textbooks and grants to students but held deeply intolerant views and their favourite pastime was to patrol universities and sabotage music concerts. The party had been close to General Zia and done badly in the elections. The president of the students’ group in Jehanzeb College was Ihsan ul-Haq Haqqani. Though he and my father were great rivals, they admired each other and later became friends. Haqqani says he is sure my father would have been president of the PSF and become a politician if he had been from a rich khan family. Student politics was all about debating and charisma, but party politics required money.
One of their most heated debates in that first year was over a novel. The book was called The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and it was a parody of the Prophet’s life set in Bombay. Muslims widely considered it blasphemous and it provoked so much outrage that it seemed people were talking of little else. The odd thing was no one had even noticed the publication of the book to start with - it wasn’t actually on sale in Pakistan - but then a series of articles appeared in Urdu newspapers by a mullah close to our intelligence service, berating the book as offensive to the Prophet and saying it was the duty of good Muslims to protest. Soon mullahs all over Pakistan were denouncing the book, calling for it to be banned, and angry demonstrations were held. The most violent took place in Islamabad on 12 February 1989, when American flags were set alight in front of the American Centre - even though Rushdie and his publishers were British. Police fired into the crowd, and five people were killed. The anger wasn’t just in Pakistan. Two days later Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination.
My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room. Many students argued that the book should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld. My father also saw the book as offensive to Islam but believes strongly in freedom of speech. ‘First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book,’ he suggested. He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, ‘Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it? Not my Islam!’
For the first few years after graduating from Jehanzeb my father worked as an English teacher in a well-known private college. But the salary was low, just 1,600 rupees a month (around £12), and my grandfather complained he was not contributing to the household. It was also not enough for him to save for the wedding he hoped for to his beloved Tor Pekai.
One of my father’s colleagues at the school was his friend Mohammad Naeem Khan. He and my father had studied for their bachelors and masters degrees in English together and were both passionate about education. They were also both frustrated as the school was very strict and unimaginative. Neither the students nor the teachers were supposed to have their own opinions, and the owners’ control was so tight they even frowned upon friendship between teachers. My father longed for the freedom that would come with running his own school. He wanted to encourage independent thought and hated the way the school he was at rewarded obedience above openmindedness and creativity. So when Naeem lost his job after a dispute with the college administration, they decided to start their own school.
Their original plan was to open a school in my father’s village of Shahpur, where there was a desperate need: ‘Like a shop in a community where there are no shops,’ he said. But when they went there to look for a building, there were banners everywhere advertising a school opening - someone had beaten them to it. So they decided to set up an English-language school in Mingora, thinking that since Swat was a tourist destination there would be a demand for learning in English.
As my father was still teaching, Naeem wandered the streets looking for somewhere to rent. One day he called my father excitedly to say he’d found the ideal place. It was the ground floor of a twostorey building in a well-off area called Landikas with a walled courtyard where students could gather. The previous tenants had also run a school - the Ramada School. The owner had called it that because he had once been to Turkey and seen a Ramada Hotel! But the school had gone bankrupt, which perhaps should have made them think twice. Also the building was on the banks of a river where people threw their rubbish and it smelt foul in hot weather.
My father went to see the building after work. It was a perfect night with stars and a full moon just above the trees, which he took to be a sign. ‘I felt so happy,’ he recalls. ‘My dream was coming true.’
Naeem and my father invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees. They borrowed 30,000 rupees more to repaint the building, rented a shack across the road to live in and went from door to door trying to find students. Unfortunately the demand for English tuition turned out to be low, and there were unexpected drains on their income. My father’s involvement in political discussions continued after college. Every day his fellow activists came to the shack or the school for lunch. ‘We can’t afford all this entertaining!’ Naeem would complain. It was also becoming clear that while they were best friends, they found it hard to work as business partners.
On top of that, there was a stream of guests from Shangla now that my father had a place for them to stay. We Pashtuns cannot turn away relatives or friends, however inconvenient. We don’t respect privacy and there is no such thing as making an appointment to see someone. Visitors can turn up whenever they wish and can stay as long as they want. It was a nightmare for someone trying to start a business and it drove Naeem to distraction. He joked to my father that if either of them had relatives to stay, they should pay a fine. My father kept trying to persuade Naeem’s friends and family to stay so he could be fined too!
After three months Naeem had had enough. ‘We are supposed to be collecting money in enrolment fees. Instead the only people knocking on our doors are beggars! This is a Herculean task,’ he added.
‘I can’t take any more!’
By this time the two former friends were hardly speaking to each other and had to call in local elders to mediate. My father was desperate not to give up the school so agreed to pay Naeem a return on his share of the investment. He had no idea how. Fortunately another old college friend called Hidayatullah stepped in and agreed to put up the money and take Naeem’s place. The new partners again went from door to door, telling people they had started a new kind of school. My father is so charismatic that Hidayatullah says he is the kind of person who, if invited to your house, will make friends with your friends. But while people were happy to talk to him, they preferred to send their children to established schools.
They named it the Khushal School after one of my father’s great heroes, Khushal Khan Khattak, the warrior poet from Akora just south of Swat, who tried to unify all Pashtun tribes against the Moghuls in the seventeenth century. Near the entrance they painted a motto: WE ARE COMMITTED TO BUILD FOR YOU THE CALL OF THE NEW ERA. My father also designed a shield with a famous quote from Khattak in Pashto: ‘I girt my sword in the name of Afghan honour.’ My father wanted us to be inspired by our great hero, but in a manner fit for our times - with pens, not swords. Just as Khattak had wanted the Pashtuns to unite against a foreign enemy, so we needed to unite against ignorance.
Unfortunately not many people were convinced. When the school opened they had just three students. Even so my father insisted on starting the day in style by singing the national anthem. Then his nephew Aziz, who had come to help, raised the Pakistan flag.
With so few students, they had little money to equip the school and soon ran out of credit. Neither man could get any money from their families, and Hidayatullah was not pleased to discover that my father was still in debt to lots of people from college, so they were always receiving letters demanding money.
There was worse in store when my father went to register the school. After being made to wait for hours, he was finally ushered into the office of a superintendent of schools, who sat behind towering piles of files surrounded by hangers-on drinking tea. ‘What kind of school is this?’ asked the official, laughing at his application. ‘How many teachers do you have? Three! Your teachers are not trained. Everyone thinks they can open a school just like that!’
The other people in the office laughed along, ridiculing him. My father was angry. It was clear the superintendent wanted money. Pashtuns cannot stand anyone belittling them, nor was he about to pay a bribe for something he was entitled to. He and Hidayatullah hardly had money to pay for food, let alone bribes. The going rate for registration was about 13,000 rupees, more if they thought you were rich. And schools were expected to treat officials regularly to a good lunch of chicken or trout from the river. The education officer would call to arrange an inspection then give a detailed order for his lunch. My father used to grumble, ‘We’re a school not a poultry farm.’
So when the official angled for a bribe, my father turned on him with all the force of his years of debating. ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ he demanded. ‘Am I in an office or am I in a police station or a court? Am I a criminal?’ He decided to challenge the officials to protect other school owners from such bullying and corruption. He knew that to do this he needed some power of his own, so he joined an organisation called the Swat Association of Private Schools. It was small in those days, just fifteen members, and my father quickly became vice president.
The other principals took paying bribes for granted, but my father argued that if all the schools joined together they could resist. ‘Running a school is not a crime,’ he told them. ‘Why should you be paying bribes? You are not running brothels; you are educating children! Government officials are not your bosses,’ he reminded them; ‘they are your servants. They are taking salaries and have to serve you. You are the ones educating their children.’
He soon became president of the organisation and expanded it until it included 400 principals.
Suddenly the school owners were in a position of power. But my father has always been a romantic rather than a businessman and in the meantime he and Hidayatullah were in such desperate straits that they ran out of credit with the local shopkeeper and could not even buy tea or sugar. To try and boost their income they ran a tuck shop at school, going off in the mornings and buying snacks to sell to the children. My father would buy maize and stay up late at night making and bagging popcorn.
‘I would get very depressed and sometimes collapse seeing the problems all around us,’ said Hidayatullah, ‘but when Ziauddin is in a crisis he becomes strong and his spirits high.’
My father insisted that they needed to think big. One day Hidayatullah came back from trying to enrol pupils to find my father sitting in the office talking about advertising with the local head of Pakistan TV. As soon as the man had gone, Hidayatullah burst into laughter. ‘Ziauddin, we don’t even have a TV,’ he pointed out. ‘If we advertise we won’t be able to watch it.’ But my father is an optimistic man and never deterred by practicalities.
One day my father told Hidayatullah he was going back to his village for a few days. He was actually getting married, but he didn’t tell any of his friends in Mingora as he could not afford to entertain them. Our weddings go on for several days of feasting. In fact, as my mother often reminds my father, he was not present for the actual ceremony. He was only there for the last day, when family members held a Quran and a shawl over their heads and held a mirror for them to look into. For many couples in arranged marriages this is the first time they see each other’s faces. A small boy was brought to sit on their laps to encourage the birth of a son.
It is our tradition for the bride to receive furniture or perhaps a fridge from her family and some gold from the groom’s family. My grandfather would not buy enough gold so my father had to borrow more money to buy bangles. After the wedding my mother moved in with my grandfather and my uncle. My father returned to the village every two or three weeks to see her. The plan was to get his school going then, once it was successful, send for his wife. But Baba kept complaining about the drain on his income and made my mother’s life miserable. She had a little money of her own so they used it to hire a van and she moved to Mingora. They had no idea how they would manage. ‘We just knew my father didn’t want us there,’ said my father. ‘At that time I was unhappy with my family, but later I was grateful as it made me more independent.’
He had however neglected to tell his partner. Hidayatullah was horrified when my father returned to Mingora with a wife. ‘We’re not in a position to support a family,’ he told my father. ‘Where will she live?’
‘It’s OK,’ replied my father. ‘She will cook and wash for us.’
My mother was excited to be in Mingora. To her it was a modern town. When she and her friends had discussed their dreams as young girls by the river, most had just said they wanted to marry and have children and cook for their husbands. When it was my mother’s turn she said, ‘I want to live in the city and be able to send out for kebabs and naan instead of cooking it myself.’ However, life wasn’t quite what she expected. The shack had just two rooms, one where Hidayatullah and my father slept and one which was a small office. There was no kitchen, no plumbing. When my mother arrived, Hidayatullah had to move into the office and sleep on a hard wooden chair.
My father consulted my mother on everything. ‘Pekai, help me resolve my confusion on this’, he would say. She even helped whitewash the school walls, holding up the lanterns so they could paint when the light went off in power cuts.
‘Ziauddin was a family man and they were unusually close,’ said Hidayatullah. ‘While most of us can’t live with our wives, he couldn’t be without his.’
Within a few months my mother was expecting. Their first child, born in 1995, was a girl and stillborn. ‘I think there was some problem with hygiene in that muddy place,’ says my father. ‘I assumed women could give birth without going to hospital, as my mother and my sisters had in the village. My mother gave birth to ten children in this way.’
The school continued to lose money. Months would pass and they could not pay the teachers’ wages or the school rent. The goldsmith kept coming and demanding his money for my mother’s wedding bangles. My father would make him good tea and offer him biscuits in the hope that would keep him satisfied. Hidayatullah laughed. ‘You think he will be happy with tea? He wants his money.’
The situation became so dire that my father was forced to sell the gold bangles. In our culture wedding jewellery is a bond between the couple. Often women sell their jewellery to help set up their husbands in business or to pay their fares to go abroad. My mother had already offered her bangles to pay for my father’s nephew to go to college, which my father had rashly promised to fund - fortunately, my father’s cousin Jehan Sher Khan had stepped in - and she did not realise the bangles were only partly paid for. She was then furious when she learned that my father did not get a good price for them.
Just when it seemed matters could not get worse, the area was hit by flash floods. There was a day when it did not stop raining and in the late afternoon there was a warning of flooding. Everyone had to leave the district. My mother was away and Hidayatullah needed my father to help him move everything up to the first floor, safe from the fast-rising waters, but he couldn’t find him anywhere. He went outside, shouting ‘Ziauddin, Ziauddin!’ The search almost cost Hidayatullah his life. The narrow street outside the school was totally flooded and he was soon up to his neck in water. There were live electric cables hanging loose and swaying in the wind. He watched paralysed with fear as they almost touched the water. Had they done so, he would have been electrocuted.
When he finally found my father, he learned that he had heard a woman crying that her husband was trapped in their house and he had rushed in to save him. Then he helped them save their fridge.
Hidayatullah was furious. ‘You saved this woman’s husband but not your own house!’ he said. ‘Was it because of the cry of a woman?’
When the waters receded, they found their home and school destroyed: their furniture, carpets, books, clothes and the audio system entirely caked in thick foul-smelling mud. They had nowhere to sleep and no clean clothes to change into. Luckily, a neighbour called Mr Aman-ud-din took them in for the night. It took them a week to clear the debris. They were both away when, ten days later, there was a second flood and the building again filled with mud. Shortly afterwards they had a visit from an official of WAPDA, the water and power company, who claimed their meter was rigged and demanded a bribe. When my father refused, a bill arrived with a large fine. There was no way they could pay this so my father asked one of his political friends to use his influence.
It started to feel as though the school was not meant to be, but my father would not give up on his dream so easily. Besides, he had a family to provide for. I was born on 12 July 1997. My mother was helped by a neighbour who had delivered babies before. My father was in the school waiting and when he heard the news he came running. My mother was worried about telling him he had a daughter not a son, but he says he looked into my eyes and was delighted.
‘Malala was a lucky girl,’ says Hidayatullah. ‘When she was born our luck changed.’ But not immediately. On Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary on 14 August 1997 there were parades and commemorations throughout the country. However, my father and his friends said there was nothing to celebrate as Swat had only suffered since it had merged with Pakistan. They wore black armbands to protest, saying the celebrations were for nothing, and were arrested. They had to pay a fine they could not afford.
A few months after I was born the three rooms above the school became vacant and we all moved in. The walls were concrete and there was running water so it was an improvement on our muddy shack, but we were still very cramped as we were sharing it with Hidayatullah and we almost always had guests. That first school was a mixed primary school and very small. By the time I was born it had five or six teachers and around a hundred pupils paying a hundred rupees a month. My father was teacher, accountant and principal. He also swept the floors, whitewashed the walls and cleaned the bathrooms. He used to climb up electricity poles to hang banners advertising the school, even though he was so afraid of heights that when he got to the top of the ladder his feet shook. If the water pump stopped working, he would go down the well to repair it himself. When I saw him disappear down there I would cry, thinking he wouldn’t come back. After paying the rent and salaries, there was little money left for food. We drank green tea as we could not afford milk for regular tea. But after a while the school started to break even and my father began to plan a second school, which he wanted to call the Malala Education Academy.
I had the run of the school as my playground. My father tells me even before I could talk I would toddle into classes and talk as if I was a teacher. Some of the female staff like Miss Ulfat would pick me up and put me on their lap as if I was their pet or even take me home with them for a while. When I was three or four I was placed in classes for much older children. I used to sit in wonder, listening to everything they were being taught. Sometimes I would mimic the teachers. You could say I grew up in a school.
As my father had found with Naeem, it is not easy to mix business and friendship. Eventually Hidayatullah left to start his own school and they divided the students, each taking two of the four years. They did not tell their pupils as they wanted people to think the school was expanding and had two buildings. Though Hidayatullah and my father were not speaking at that time, Hidayatullah missed me so much he used to visit me.
It was while he was visiting one afternoon in September 2001 that there was a great commotion and other people started arriving. They said there had been a big attack on a building in New York.
Two planes had flown into it. I was only four and too young to understand. Even for the adults it was hard to imagine - the biggest buildings in Swat are the hospital and a hotel, which are two or three storeys. It seemed very far away. I had no idea what New York and America were. The school was my world and my world was the school. We did not realise then that 9/11 would change our world too, and would bring war into our valley.
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Author: Malala Yousafzai
