Waris Dirie

Waris Dirie was born to a nomadic family in the Somali desert and, like her sisters, was subjected to female genital mutilation at around the age of five, a procedure performed with a razor blade and no anaesthetic that she later said nearly killed her. At thirteen her father arranged to marry her to a much older man in exchange for camels, and she ran away, walking barefoot across the desert to Mogadishu and eventually reaching London to work as a maid for relatives.

A chance encounter with a photographer led to modelling work, and by the late 1980s she was appearing in major fashion campaigns and a James Bond film, building a career while speaking almost no English when she started. In 1997 she told her story publicly for the first time in an interview with a British magazine, and that same year the United Nations Population Fund made her a special ambassador to campaign against the practice she had survived.

She founded the Desert Flower Foundation, published a bestselling memoir, Desert Flower, later made into a film, and gave evidence and testimony that helped push several countries toward legislation against female genital mutilation.

She has been criticised by some campaigners for dramatising parts of her early life, but the core of her testimony, and the scale of the practice she exposed, has been corroborated by health researchers across the region.