By Maya Palit
Who is Stella Nyanzi? You might have heard of the Ugandan academic, medical anthropologist, and feminist when she was thrown into a maximum security prison for five weeks in April after referring to President Yoweri Museveni’s antics on Facebook.
This is how the analogy, that everyone thought was so deadly, went: “I mean, seriously, when buttocks shake and jiggle, while the legs are walking, do you hear other body parts complaining? … That is what buttocks do. They shake, jiggle, shit and fart. Museveni is just another pair of buttocks.”
Museveni has been running the country for 31 years and ran for his fifth term last year. He has attracted significant criticism for an anti-homosexuality bill that increased penalties for gay sex and same-sex marriages in 2014. As you can imagine this has not been 31 years of sunshine and teddy bears. He takes a hard stand against all kinds of dissenters, ensures that broadcasts of protests are banned, and access to social media has been blocked during elections.
Nyanzi’s politics hasn’t gone down too well with Museveni. Because amazingly, Nyanzi wants her government to deliver services to her people and stop oppressing them. Besides actively supporting homosexual rights, Nyanzi is also leading a movement to bring sanitary pads to school girls in Uganda where, like in India, girls dropping out of school or staying at home during their periods is a common phenomenon. The President promised to do something about this in his campaign last year but since abandoned the plan by citing low funds, and Nyanzi was vocal about her criticism of this backtracking. She’s also held nude protests in the past.
Nyanzi was released on bail but apparently prosecutors have suggested that she be put through a psychiatric evaluations, alleging that she must be unstable for saying demeaning things about the President. Ironically, they tried to use a colonial-era law, the Mental Treatment of 1908, which was deployed by the British.
Despite the fact that people are telling her all the time to be more cautious about her “dangerous” Facebook posts, and women’s groups saying they don’t appreciate her tendencies towards profane language, Nyanzi’s outspoken and headstrong stance, which some apparently have taken to describing as ‘radical rudeness’, doesn’t look like it will be muffled anytime soon.