NUS Elects First Black Female Muslim President

The National Union of Students has elected Malia Bouattia as president after a tense contest in which she unseated incumbent Megan Dunn.

Bouattia, a leftwing former University of Birmingham student who has been the union’s black students’ officer for the past two years.

Speaking to the Guardian after her victory, Bouattia said her victory was empowering. “Running against an incumbent is always tough. I believe it has only happened before once in the NUS’s history,” she said.

It feels like a really powerful statement, especially to be the first black woman, the first woman of colour in the post.”

The new president has never been afraid of confronting some very difficult issues and has strongly argued that it is right for the student movement to confront issues beyond themselves such as ‘austerity measures that affect many’.

In her election speech, Bouattia spoke of being forced to flee the civil war in Algeria as a seven-year-old girl, after she and her classmates came under a hail of gunfire at their primary school and her father was targeted by a bomb at his lecture theatre.

It wasn’t the bombs and the bullets, it was the fear for our education that drove them to leave everything behind,”

she told the NUS conference in Brighton.

They taught me that education is key to liberation, that it would give me the power to change the world.”

Briana Bell