Malala Turns 21

She’s a global icon and an Oxford student who still takes her washing home. In the lead-up to Malala’s first trip Down Under, Christina Lamb joins her humanitarian mission, and 21st birthday celebrations, in Brazil.

Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain is one of the most beautiful spots on earth to spend a 21st birthday. The girl in candy pink watching a ballet performance on top of the mountain with Copacabana beach spread out below claps and smiles radiantly at her father next to her.

The pint-sized dancers in tutus are from one of Rio’s most violent favelas, the ballet project a chance to dream in a place where their school is frequently closed because of shoot-outs between drug gangs and police. The birthday girl is from the other side of the world and she too knows about guns, having narrowly survived being shot on her school bus, her smile just a little lopsided as a result of damage to the nerve under her left eye.

The world’s most famous schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, is now a grown woman in lip gloss and designer heels, and these days being Malala is a full-time job requiring a posse of people. With her, apart from her doting dad, Ziauddin, is an entourage of bodyguards, a tigress like American media manager who previously worked for Brad Pitt, and a trio of social media ‘influencers’. She is so famous she is known by just one name: Malala. When she was 16, her birthday – July 12 – was officially declared Malala Day by the United Nations.

It’s a remarkable journey from October 2012 when she woke from a coma thousands of miles from home, in a UK hospital bed with a large teddy bear next to her, a tube in her neck and a bandage around her head where a Taliban bullet had narrowly missed her brain.