Ewuraba - Professional African Women with Class and Style

Grew Up in Nomadic Setting, Modeled for Calendar, Published Autobiographical Novel, Selected writings

Waris Dirie is an internationally renowned model, a face of Revlon skin-care products and has appeared in a James Bond movie. In 1997 she was appointed by the United Nations as a special ambassador for women's rights in Africa, in its efforts to eliminate the practice of female genital mutilation. ('I think God gave me a voice to speak for other little girls.') She is the founder of the Waris Dirie Foundation campaign against FGM, see www.waris-dirie-foundation.com for details.

Though she was among the top models in the world for some years, model Waris Dirie has disfigured feet, covered with scars she acquired during a nine-day flight across the desert after she ran away from her nomadic family in Somalia to escape a forced marriage. Those are not, however, her most serious scars. When she was five years old, Dirie underwent an extreme form of female genital mutilation. As her mother held her down on a rock, a nomad woman removed flesh from her genitals, "with an old razor blade, and then she sewed the wound coarsely"—using thorns to punch holes—"leaving only a tiny hole to urinate." The procedure left Dirie permanently changed, physically and emotionally for the rest of her life.

"I still remember every last detail," Dirie told interviewer Jenny Johnston of England's Mirror. "I still remember the pain, my God, the pain. But I didn't move an inch. I wanted Mama to be proud of me." Proud, for her parents had told her there were bad things between her legs and they had to be removed. In a way, however, Dirie was lucky; estimates suggest that one in four girls die during the procedure, which is common in parts of Africa and is practiced in 28 countries around the world. For two of Dirie's sisters and two of her cousins, the procedure was fatal, something that must have weighed on Dirie's mind as she lay recuperating for weeks, with her legs tied together. Dirie's amazing odyssey took her from the Somali desert to London, England, where she ascended through the ranks of fashion models and eventually reached a pinnacle of that world, appearing as a "Bond girl" in the 1987 film The Living Daylights. After she began to tell interviewers what she had lived through, she gave up modeling and became a campaigner against the practice of female genital mutilation.

Neither clocks nor calendars were used among the Daarood people of Somalia, the culture in which Dirie grew up. She was born, according to her best guess, in 1965. Her name means "Desert Flower," which became the title of her first book. Dirie's family were nomadic livestock herders, living in a grass hut which they would move from place to place on the back of a camel every few weeks as they sought new grazing land for their herd of animals. "All the children in my family tended the animals. We began helping as soon as we could walk," Dirie told Johnston. "By the age of six I was responsible for taking herds of about 60 sheep and goats into the desert to graze. I got my long stick and headed off alone with my herd, singing my little song to guide them." Dirie lived in harmony with lions, giraffes, zebras, and other wildlife. Though their existence was simple, Dirie's family was wealthy by Somali standards, for their herds were large.

Dirie didn't blame her mother for allowing her mutilation to occur, for the family had been told the the Koran required it. Female circumcision is practiced in both Islamic and Christian cultures, but actually neither the Koran nor the Bible mentions the operation at all. The vaginas of Somali brides are unsewn after marriage, and uncircumcised women are usually considered unmarriageable. Dirie, like many other children, actually looked forward to the procedure, but it left her in pain for many years.

When she was about 13, Dirie's father announced that he had found a husband for her—a 60-year-old man who had bought her for the price of five camels. "I pictured my life with the old man in some isolated desert place. Me doing all the work while he limped around," she told Johnston. "Me raising four or five babies after he died—because in Somalia, widows do not remarry." So Dirie, a stubborn girl from the start, took off walking into the Somali desert, with no clear idea of where she was going. Nine days later, after fending off an attempted rape by a truck driver by hitting him in the head with a rock, and after nearly being eaten by a lion, she arrived in the Somali capital of Mogadishu. She located relatives there and managed to survive.

In Mogadishu Dirie worked as a bricklayer. Then she learned that one of her uncles had been named Somalia's ambassador to Britain, and when he said that he could use her as a maid, she jumped at the chance. Arriving in London, she saw snow, flush toilets, and escalators for the first time. As her uncle prepared to return to Somalia for a periodic visit, she hid her passport in a garden and told him she had lost it. She stayed on in England as an illegal alien, and a woman at a YWCA helped her get a job scrubbing floors at a McDonald's restaurant. She enrolled in night classes and learned to understand, read, and write English. When she was 20, she underwent surgery to have the opening of her vagina restored.