Ugandan feminist, Stella Nyanzi has been jailed for writing a graphic poem where she described Ugandan President’s mother’s vagina and wished the president had suffocated there and never born alive.
Nyanzi used the poem published last September to criticize the President’s “oppression, suppression and repression” of the country, which he has ruled for over thirty years.
Stella Nyanzi posted the poem on her facebook wall on the 16th of September, 2018, and there she wrote:
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.
How bitterly sad a day!
I wish the smelly and itchy cream-coloured candida festering in Esiteri’s cunt had suffocated you to death during birth.
Suffocated you just like you are suffocating us with oppression, suppression and repression!
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.
How painfully ugly a day!
I wish the lice-filled bush of dirty pubic hair overgrown all over Esiteri’s unwashed chuchu had strangled you at birth.
Strangled you just like the long tentacles of corruption you sowed and watered into our bleeding economy.
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.
How nauseatingly disgusting a day!
I wish the acidic pus flooding Esiteri’s cursed vaginal canal had burnt up your unborn fetus.
Burnt you up as badly as you have corroded all morality and professionalism out of our public institutions in Uganda.
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.
How horrifically cancerous a day!
I wish the infectious dirty-brown discharge flooding Esiteri’s loose pussy had drowned you to death.
Drowned you as vilely as you have sank and murdered the dreams and aspirations of millions of youths who languish in the deep sea of massive unemployment, and under-emplyment in Uganda.
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.
How traumatically wasted a day!
I wish the poisoned uterus sitting just above Esiteri’s dry clitoris had prematurely miscarried a thing to be cast upon a manure pit.
Prematurely miscarried just like you prematurely aborted any semblance of democracy, good governance and rule of law.
Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday!
How morbidly grave a day!
I wish that Esiteri’s cursed genitals had pushed out a monstrously greenish-bluish still-birth.
You should have died at birth, you dirty delinquent dictator…
You should have died in birth, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
If you want to beat me for my heartfelt birthday poem, come and find me at my home. Ask the bodabodamen to direct you to Mama Stella’s house with a red gate. I refuse to be gagged!
In early June, Stella Nyanzi’s legal team put it to Buganda Road Chief Magistrate Court that she had no case to answer and pushed for her immediate release. But the judgment went against her. She remains in jail and will start presenting her defense this week. Nyanzi has asked the court to summon 20 defense witnesses, including President Yoweri Museveni himself.
Nyanzi has been known in African academic and feminist circles for decades, but it’s her provocative poetry about the 74-year-old president that has made her a household name in Uganda in recent years.
She is said to be battling three other legal cases: another “cyber harassment and offensive communication” trial for a poem calling the President a “pair of buttocks,” which she took bail for; a civil dispute with her former employer Makerere University, who dismissed her for staging a naked protest; and a case disputing her inclusion on Uganda’s “no-fly” list initiated by her critical Facebook commentary.
Stella Nyanzi says she wanted to push the government to hear her case on the vagina poem, and to rationalize exactly why they have put her in jail.“We managed to force the state to bring witnesses,” she said.According to CNN reporter, Alice McCool, When detective Bill Dickson Ndyamuhaki — a witness for the government — came to give evidence about her vagina poem in court, people in the courtroom could not contain giggles as he was asked by the judge to read out Nyanzi’s explicit work in full.
Questions in court about why the word vagina is considered “obscene” or “vulgar” are especially relevant in Uganda, which introduced a law in 2014 called the Anti-Pornography Act that resulted in the arrest of revenge porn victims and initially proposed a ban on mini-skirts.
“When you run a government that corrupt, how do you still connect to the society?” said Rosebell Kagumire, editor of digital platform African Feminism. “‘Morality laws’ are a good tool for this government to continue distracting society on what needs to be done. They tap into long-held notions about controlling women’s sexuality, and there the President and his government will find allies in all communities.”
“There are cultures of suppressing women’s expression, especially when it comes to who is accepted to be vulgarist,” Kagumire added. “Stella is very much vocal on queer rights, girls’ rights and uses the freedom of expression that is usually reserved for men — the freedom to insult.”
At Luzira Women’s Prison, prisoners wearing yellow dresses tended to an already well-manicured garden. Nyanzi sat on a mat on the floor of a room with other prisoners, as visitors — who sat in chairs — were brought in to visit their loved ones. “I’m used to life here now,” she said happily, talking about life inside.
Nyanzi was first imprisoned in 2017 for a month after posting a Facebook poem criticizing Uganda’s first lady, Janet Museveni, for failing to deliver on her promise to provide sanitary pads to schoolgirls. Museveni, who is Minister for Education and Sports, said there ultimately wasn’t enough money in the budget for the initiative. During this stint in prison, the government attempted to carry out a psychiatric assessment of Nyanzi because the prosecutor alleged she was insane.
