It is exactly this quality that the Obamas recognised in her. “I know the power that a young girl carries in her heart when she has a vision and a mission,” says Malala. She is already something of an elder stateswoman for the new cohort of Generation Z activists, and is friends with 18-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who visited her at Oxford, and 21-year-old gun control campaigner Emma González.
That needs to change, because Twitter is a completely different world.” “Right now,” she says wryly, “we have associated activism with tweets. “But with time, I saw that some of them do, and some of them don’t.” Yet her style is more about consensus than call-outs: she prefers to work with people, and she can get fatigued by the attention economy of social media-driven activism, fuelled by clicks rather than change, outrage rather than action. “Initially you believe what they’re saying and think they will act on it and deliver the goals they have set,” she says. Politicians promise to build schools, then spend the money on tanks and bombs. The inertia she regularly confronts when advocating for girls’ education is irritating. “The school didn’t think that!” she replies, rolling her eyes conspiratorially, humble enough to send herself up about it. “Who could be more qualified than you?” I exclaim. She is slyly funny – at one point, she confides that she lost out on the head girl position at her school. Sweet-natured, to her close friends she is Mal, a young woman who laughs at her own jokes, bites her nails, loves to watch cricket (a five-day Test match is heaven), and will always text you back in a crisis. Our conversations almost always come back to the subject of girls’ education, not in a tedious way, but because it sits forever at the forefront of her mind. Worldly yet guileless, she is the first to suggest we take selfies together, and is never less than sincere. She may be a global icon, but she’s also just a young woman who loves a Jamaican takeaway and an episode of Rick and Morty.
So alongside documentaries on serious issues, such as girls’ education and women’s rights, she wants to make comedies – Malala is a huge Ted Lasso fan, partly because the titular star of the Apple TV+ hit has a moustache a bit like her dad’s. “If I don’t laugh at them or enjoy them, I won’t put them on-screen,” she continues, firmly. “I want these shows to be entertaining and the sort of thing I would watch,” she says of overseeing the early stages of development. In March, she announced a multi-year partnership with Apple TV+ – also home to Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg – and the launch of a brand-new production company, Extracurricular. She had meetings with the major streaming platforms: of course, they were interested – but one stood out. Like the Sussexes and the Obamas, who have turned to broadcasting to connect with the public on issues that matter to them, Malala started thinking about making her own programmes, and enlisting talent from around the world to help her do it. She has always known the power of storytelling – when she was 11, Malala began blogging for the BBC under the pseudonym Gul Makai, sharing what it was like to live under Taliban rule. Inspiration came from one of her great loves: television. I was doing really well.” (Post-reveal, she has 1.8 million and counting.) “I had a secret Twitter account for a year,” she reveals, “before I joined officially, and I had, like, 4,000 followers or something. Should she look for a job? Apply for a master’s? Travel abroad? In the meantime, she slept, enjoyed her mother’s lamb curry, read – she has set herself the challenge of reading 84 books this year – and doom-scrolled. Subscribe to the British Vogue newsletter Naturally, her work with Malala Fund would continue, but at life’s great crossroads, what else was she going to do? From her childhood bedroom, she assessed her options. “I’m sitting in bed, scrolling through my private Instagram, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” Having moved home from university in March last year, to finish her degree and wait out the pandemic, she became a member of the Covid class of 2020: jobless, aimless, bored. It would be “literally 2am”, Malala remembers, her voice as warm and considered as ever, drawing you into her world. As she embarks on adult life after Oxford, the question is, what next for the world’s most famous university leaver?įirst a little existential panic. And yet, as I will discover, she is also a 23-year-old graduate with gap year travel plans thwarted by a pandemic, still living with her parents, playing a lot of the Among Us video game in her room and trying to work out what she wants.
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