Dirie, Waris

Waris Dirie, (born 1965, Galcaio, Somalia), Somalian fashion model, author, and women’s rights activist known for her efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM), also called female circumcision.

Dirie was one of 12 children born into a large nomadic family living near Somalia’s border with Ethiopia. Much of Dirie’s childhood was spent tending to the family’s herd and obtaining enough food and water to survive. At about age 13 she ran away from home to avoid an arranged marriage with a much older man; she embarked on a long and treacherous journey that took her through the desert to Mogadishu and, from there, eventually to London to serve as a maid in the home of an uncle who was beginning a term as an ambassador. When his tenure ended, Dirie elected to stay in London illegally. She was illiterate, but she found work in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant and a room in a facility run by the YMCA, and she took classes to learn to read and write English.

In 1983, at age 18, a woman on the street approached Dirie about modeling and directed her to the British photographer Terence Donovan. The photos he took launched her career. In 1987 she graced the cover of the multinational holding company Pirelli & C. SpA’s exclusive Pirelli Calendar and appeared in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. She went on to appear on the runways of Paris, Milan, and New York; in advertising campaigns for top beauty brands, including Revlon and Chanel; and in leading fashion magazines such as Elle, Glamour, and Vogue. Her modeling career was chronicled in the 1995 BBC documentary A Nomad in New York.

Dirie, who had undergone FGM at about age five, overcame personal and cultural barriers to speak openly about it during a 1996 magazine interview. Her celebrity status helped to catapult the topic into the public eye, and in 1997 she was appointed as the United Nations Population Fund’s special ambassador for the elimination of FGM. In this capacity Dirie traveled and spoke extensively, vigorously pursuing her goal of preventing future generations of women from suffering as she had. In the late 1990s the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that more than 130 million girls and women had undergone some form of FGM. While it was also performed in the Middle East and Asia, FGM was most prevalent in Africa; in Dirie’s native Somalia the procedure was performed on an estimated 98 percent of women. She experienced the most extreme form, called infibulation, in which all or part of the external genitalia is cut off and the vagina stitched up, with only a small—and often insufficient—opening left for the passage of bodily fluids. Dirie’s procedure was performed under unsanitary conditions without anesthesia, and she was forced to endure excruciating pain and both short- and long-term complications. She recounted her experience with FGM, as well as her dramatic transformation from nomad to fashion model, in her autobiography Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad (1998).

At the turn of the century, Dirie retired from modeling to focus on activism. She founded the Desert Dawn Foundation (2001) to raise funds for Somalian clinics and schools as well as the Waris Dirie Foundation (2002) to advocate for the abolition of FGM. In 2010 the Waris Dirie Foundation was renamed the Desert Flower Foundation. It coordinated such projects as Save a Little Desert Flower, and in the 2010s it established medical centres for the treatment of FGM victims in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam.

Dirie authored several additional books, including Desert Dawn (2002), which recounts her return to Somalia, and Desert Children (2005), which provides information on FGM. Dirie received numerous awards for her activist efforts, including the Women’s World Award from former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev (2004) and admission to the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order, from French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007). In 2009 she cofounded the PPR Corporate Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights. Her life is also chronicled in Desert Flower, a 2009 film adaptation of her book. In 2020 a musical of the same name premiered at Theater St. Gallen, Switzerland.