The first vivid memory Waris Dirie has is of her own circumcision. She remembers the sense of breathless excitement in her family's camp in the Somalian desert the night before the ritual cutting. Her mother was making a special fuss of her, giving her extra food but warning her not to drink too much water or milk.

Dirie was about five and couldn't sleep because of the butterflies in her stomach. She knew something important was about to happen, but she had no idea what it was. All she knew was this thing was going to make her pure and it meant she was going to become a woman.

Before dawn and with the sky still black, Dirie was taken from her bed by her mother and into the bush to meet ''the gypsy woman''. After locating a suitably flat rock, Dirie's mother laid her daughter down on her back and sat behind her, pulling her head against her chest and gripping her body between her legs. Dirie circled her arms around her mother's thighs.

Just as her mother was urging her to be brave for her mama, Dirie peered between her legs and saw the old woman spit on to a blood-encrusted razor blade and wipe it on her dress. At this point, Dirie's world went dark as her mother blindfolded her. The next thing she felt was the flesh of her vagina being cut away. The wound was then sewn together using thorns from an acacia tree. The opening that was left for urine, and later menstrual blood and childbirth, was a hole the diameter of a matchstick.

''I remember it like it happened yesterday, I really do,'' says Dirie, sprawled on a sofa in her red-brick home in Cardiff some 30 years later. ''Your life changes right that minute. Your pure, beautiful spirit suddenly crashes. Right from the day it happened I knew how wrong it was. I tried to rack my brain to find a reason. I was asking myself 'how could my mama put me through this?' I know God had made me perfect like all the other girls and if there had been anything very wrong with us he'd have changed it. But for our mamas to make that decision, to do such a horrific, vicious thing, is really beyond words.''

Dirie's home in Wales is a world away from that time. She moved to Cardiff from New York last month, taking her five-year-old son Aleeke with her, after splitting from her second husband. We are meeting at the terraced house to discuss Desert Dawn, her highly anticipated second book - which returns to the country that moulded her - and to talk about her campaign to rid Africa of its most barbaric ritual.

She apologises for her messy house, saying she's not had time to clean up or do the laundry or get the papers out of the way. The place is warm and homely, with its bright yellow and blue scarves draped across the windows. The focal point of the small living-room is a huge drum of clothes that has just been shipped over from America. She makes us both a cup of tea.

Like the rest of her family, Dirie doesn't know exactly what age she is. When I ask her, she smiles enigmatically, revealing two rows of perfectly square white teeth and two large dimples. ''What is it with you people and this obsession with age?'' she asks. Her resonant voice is strongly African but has a clear American accent. ''I just don't get it. It's just a meaningless, pointless

number that you guys all seem to chase after.''

When she returned to Somalia last October, though, she asked her parents, who are still

living as nomads, if they could remember when she was born. ''They just laughed. My mama said 'I have a feeling that was in the rainy

season', but that was it. Anyway, who cares? You are a person, not a number. I feel I've been alive for about 130 years so you can say I'm 130.''

Her face, which is make-up free and glistening from a light coating of baby oil, looks ageless: there are no lines and her small, sharp, evenly-spaced features are perfect. She is slim and graceful in her jeans, loose black patterned top and fawn stiletto boots. Her hair is a mop of springy curls which are as soft to the touch as mohair wool.

In 1997, Dirie was made a spokeswoman for the United Nations, working as a special ambassador against female genital mutilation (FGM). She also runs a charitable foundation, Desert Dawn, which aims to educate the women and children of Somalia, and provide them with better healthcare.

Before she was circumcised - she had the

procedure reversed in London when she became a model - she remembers a harsh but idyllic life, looking after her father's camels and goats, sleeping under the stars and moving camp every couple of weeks in search of food and water. She is one of 12 children, several of whom died in infancy, one of her sisters after being

circumcised.

At around 12, Dirie, which means desert flower, ran away after discovering her father was planning to sell her to a 60-year-old man in exchange for five camels. Trekking across the desert for six days and six nights, she encountered wild animals and two young tribesmen who tried to rape her, before she ended up in the war-ravaged capital of Mogadishu. There, she stayed with an aunt and got a job on a building site, after convincing the man in charge that she could carry sand and mix as well as the men.

A couple of months later, she met the Somalian ambassador to Britain, who was an uncle by marriage, and persuaded him to take her to

London as a maid. Her uncle was too busy to take care of her and her aunt, whom she had been hoping would nurture and care for her, never saw her as anything more than a servant.

When the family returned to Somalia, she stayed in London, taking a job in McDonald's. It was there, when she was about 19, that she was discovered by a fashion photographer, who introduced her to Terence Donovan. Her first modelling job was for the cover of the Pirelli

calendar and almost overnight she became one of the few black supermodels alongside Naomi Campbell, Iman and Tyra Banks. She also landed a role as a Bond girl in The Living

Daylights and became the first black model to be featured in advertisements for Oil of Ulay. She lived in London for 12 years before moving to New York.

I ask why she decided on Cardiff. ''Why not Cardiff?'' she shrugs. ''I just decided to live here. Things change when you have children.'' She later explains that she wanted to return to England, but didn't want to go back to London. She considered living in Scotland. ''I've been to Edinburgh and Glasgow and some beautiful place away up in the hills where there was only sheep. I thought about moving there but it's too wet. So I chose Wales instead.''

Dirie says she has always been independent and does not need to share her life with anyone except her son. She still models occasionally, but devotes most of her time to bringing up Aleeke, and to her work for charity and the UN. ''I'm on a mission,'' she says. ''And it can't be postponed. It's life or death. If somebody comes onto the road I'm on and maybe takes the ride with me, then fine, but I'm not out looking, no, no, no.''

Despite her success in the distorted world of high fashion, it is not a subject she enjoys

discussing. The minute I mention the ''supermodel'' word, she throws her head back in exasperation and pleads: ''Oh baby, no, please, no. Don't you start with me on that. Please. I don't even know the meaning of this word. Let's leave that alone because it's meaningless.

Modelling and fashion are fun but they're not doing anything good for the world. Let's talk about the real things.''

The real thing is her mission to bring to an end to female genital mutilation, which is practised in 28 African countries, on 6,000 girls every day. ''No woman in this world should rest until we put a stop to it,'' says Dirie, banging her fists on her knees. ''Some people do not want to talk about it or even think about it. But it is so brutal and wrong. And the saddest thing is everybody knows it is wrong: from the mother who is holding the child, to the father who makes the decision, to the one who is cutting the child.''

Dirie feels no anger towards her mother who believed, like all of her people, that the practice was ordered in the Koran. ''My Mama didn't think she was hurting me. She believed it would make me pure and clean. The mothers don't even question that it is the right thing to do for their daughters. My mother believed that by doing it she was ensuring my future because girls with intact genitals are considered unclean and sexually-driven sluts. No mother would consider such a girl a proper wife for her son.

''On their wedding night in my country, brides are cut open to allow their husband's entry. A woman takes a knife and slices through or the man just forces himself. Her mother-in-law inspects her the next morning to see if she is bleeding and has slept with her husband despite the pain. If the blood between her legs is fresh the women will dance through the village and announce it to everyone. That, my friend, is what we're up against.''

Before Dirie returned to Somalia last year, she was warned that she risked being detained, kidnapped or worse because she speaks out against FGM. ''Talking about it was a blessing and a curse,'' she explains. ''I was glad people wanted to do something about it, but over and over I had to relive all the pain it caused in my life. Every time I spoke out about it, I spoke against something my mother, my father and my people believe. I denounced my family and a tradition that was important to them.''

When she returned and spoke to her mother and other women in Somalia about the practice, though, she was pleasantly surprised by their reaction. ''I said to my mama that she had been great and tried to hold everything together. But I said sometimes the things that happened in our lives weren't so great. My mama had her head down and she knew the truth of what I was saying. I told her she could do something about it. I spoke to some other women about it. We were surrounded by children playing outside huts and I said 'look at all those children running around. I would hate to come back one day and hear that they went through it.' Some of the women were crying because it is so very painful yet they have never been able to talk about it.''

As well as giving Dirie her first opportunity to challenge attitudes about FGM with Somalians, her first trip home in over 20 years also provided her with the chance to meet her father, whom she hadn't seen since she ran away. When she found him, he was blind and living with one of his two new wives. She broke down when she met him and he scolded her for still being a rebel and making trouble after all these years.

The meeting made Dirie reflect on the differences between her fast-paced life and her family's subsistence lifestyle. Despite the abject poverty and its ancient, barbaric rituals, she believes that, in many ways, the people of her country are happier and more content than those living in the Western world. ''Most people in the West have so many material things and yet they want more all the time. My parents on the other hand could count everything they own, and food is difficult to get, but they are always cheerful and happy. Western people seem to be in such a hurry, always trying to fill themselves up with something that is missing. They all seem to be searching, in the stores and on TV. 'What can I get? How much can I get?' In Somalia, the most important things in life are your family, your stories and your animals. They are the source of life and the well-spring of joy.''

We are interrupted by the photographer who phones to say he is in the area but can't find her street. Dirie winks at me. ''Are you stupid or something? Just ask someone. It's easy as that, baby,'' and she slams the phone down. She throws herself back down on the settee, shaking her head. ''I found my mama in the desert. No maps, no road signs.''

Minutes later, the photographer arrives, and she smiles coquettishly at him. ''How long you been doing this job then, baby?'' she asks. He jokingly tells her it's his first assignment and says she has to do as she's told. If he tells her to pout, she pouts. She fires a string of expletives at him, warns him that ''you ain't gonna be doing any talkin''', and orders him to ''click click'' and get it over and done with in two minutes.

To say that Dirie is a strong woman is an understatement. She will fight fiercely for what she believes in and will stand her ground, come what may, but she also has a great sense of fun about her and isn't averse to compromise.

The photographer refuses to do a quick two-minute shoot in her garden. ''I'm an artist, man,'' he jokes, informing her that he's found a perfect location on a beach 20 minutes' drive away. She relents. ''Okay, but I'm starving. So you better feed me cause I can be a real bitch when I'm hungry. And you better get me back in time to pick up my baby from school.''

Before they leave she turns to me and says: ''The woman is a goddess, remember. We are stronger than men and should not be suffering to please them. There are so many myths about female genital mutilation. But it is done for one simple reason, to control and repress women by taking away their sexuality. We cannot rest,

sister, until we have put a stop to it.''

Her dedication has come too late for the 60 African girls who will have been cut in the time it has taken to read this article. But it is their younger sisters and the unborn who might just be transformed by her work. n

Desert Dawn by Waris Dirie is published by Virago on Thursday at (pounds) 10.99. For information about the Desert Dawn Foundation, write to 320 East 65th Street, Suite 116, New York, NY10021.

Silent Victims

An estimated 135 million of the world's women and children

have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), with two million added to that figure every year.

The makeshift operation is performed without anaesthetic, normally with crude, dirty instruments. International aid organisations report that the procedure has even been carried out using teeth.

Its after-effects can include severe shock, infection, septicaemia, HIV, tetanus and damage to the urethra. Complications include chronic urinary infections, the pooling of menstrual blood in the abdomen, severe menstrual pain, problems during childbirth and often death.

The World Health Organisation says there are three main types of FGM.

A clitoridectomy, involving the partial or total removal of the clitoris; excision, which refers to the removal of the clitoris and all, or part of, the outer areas of the vagina; and the removal of all external genitalia and the stitching together of most of the vaginal opening - known as infibulation.

Girls in Somalia are exposed to the most severe form of FGM. The procedure is no longer limited to

Muslim countries. As refugee communities arrive in the West, many bring their traditions with them. It is estimated that some 15,000 young women in Europe, the US and Australia have had FGM performed on them over the past few years.