When I first saw my election leaflets last week, I wept. These were tears of joy. The odds were stacked against me ever being a prospective parliamentary candidate. It’s not just that I’m only the second Somali to run for Westminster and one of only a handful of young, black, Muslim women to do so. It’s also that I’m here at all.
When I was six, bombs rained down around my family home in Hargeisa. At seven, I survived female genital mutilation, a form of violence against women and girls that liberals too often dismiss as merely a “cultural practice” but which is an organised crime against my gender. At 11, complications from my FGM nearly killed me when my kidneys failed and I was rushed into hospital. As the co-founder of Daughters of Eve, an organisation dedicated to combatting FGM, I became a target for speaking up against FGM. I was attacked on the street and a person I had considered a friend offered a reward for someone to kill me. So you can see why looking at my face on a leaflet seeking a seat in one of the world’s great parliaments made me well up.
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