Five years ago today, a woman from Mali walked into a clinic in Casablanca, Morocco, and changed medical history. She did not walk out alone. She left with nine babies five girls and four boys in what became the first confirmed case of nonuplets surviving birth anywhere in the world. On Sunday, 4th May 2026, those nine children turned five years old. And the world, as it has done every year since, stopped to take notice.
The nine children, born to Halima Cissé and Abdelkader Arby, made global headlines when they arrived on May 4, 2021, becoming the first known set of nine babies from a single birth to survive. Their names Bah, Oumar, Elhadji, Mohammed VI, Fatouma, Adama, Hawa, Oumou, and Kadidia are now recorded in the Guinness World Records, a permanent inscription in the ledger of human possibility.
The story of their arrival was itself layered with the kind of detail that makes it feel less like a news event and more like a parable. Medical teams had initially expected seven babies following ultrasound scans conducted in Mali and later in Morocco. Two more were discovered only after Cissé was transferred abroad for specialised care. The nonuplets were delivered prematurely at 30 weeks via Caesarean section, and before returning home, they had been living with medical support in Casablanca. Combined, they weighed just 5.4 kilogrammes at birth an outcome that required months of intensive neonatal care.
That all nine survived was not a statistical probability. It was, depending on your frame of reference, either a triumph of modern medicine or something more elemental than that. Their father Abdelkader Arby, a man who has spent five years navigating the extraordinary logistics of raising nine children simultaneously, put it plainly when they returned home to Bamako: “It is a lot of work, but Allah, who gave us this blessing, will help us in their upbringing and taking care of them.”
The record the Cissé nonuplets hold was previously held by Nadya Suleman of the United States, known widely as “Octomom,” who gave birth to eight babies in 2009. The Guinness World Records notes that nonuplets are extremely rare, and until the arrival of the Cissé children, no cases had been recorded of nine babies from a single birth surviving for more than a few hours.
Five years on, the children are no longer fragile neonates in an intensive care unit. Brothers Mohammed VI, Elhadji, Oumar and Bah, and sisters Kadidia, Fatouma, Hawa, Adama and Oumou are happy, healthy and getting ready to start school. They celebrated their birthday quietly at home alongside their parents and their older sister Arby, who is seven a child who entered the world in conventional fashion and has since spent her entire conscious life as the eldest sibling of the most famous set of brothers and sisters on earth.
What makes the milestone particularly resonant is not the spectacle of nine children blowing out birthday candles together. It is the texture of ordinary life that has emerged around what began as an extraordinary medical event. Speaking about the children’s bond and individual personalities, Halima highlighted how they relate to one another: “The children get along very well with each other and with their big sister. They share a strong bond and spend most of their time playing together. Like all siblings, they sometimes have small disagreements, but they are very united and caring towards one another.”
That sentence like all siblings, they sometimes have small disagreements is perhaps the most quietly remarkable thing about the Cissé nonuplets at five. They have become, in spite of everything, normal children. Children who squabble. Children who play. Children who are about to start school and discover that the world outside their home has been watching them since before they could walk.
For Africa, the story carries a particular pride. This is not a miracle that happened somewhere else and was observed from a distance. Halima Cissé gave birth to the nine babies at the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco an African medical facility that rose to an occasion no medical facility had ever faced before and delivered nine living children into the world. The Malian government supported the family financially through the years of extended care abroad. The continent, in other words, held this family when it mattered most.
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Guinness World Records marked the birthday on social media with the warmth the occasion deserved. The certificate Halima Cissé holds in new birthday photographs the one that officially names her children as record holders is more than a piece of paper. It is documentation that the impossible happened, that it happened in Africa, and that five years later, all nine of the people it happened to are thriving.
They start school soon. The world’s most famous siblings are about to learn to read. History, one suspects, will be among their favourite subjects.
