Munich, February 2022: Despite the cold, wet winter, Stella Nyanzi wears a short Kitenge top and trousers, a traditional African wax fabric popular in Uganda, Nyanzi’s hometown. Her lipstick is a striking red. She loves lipstick. she sees it as a kind of war paint, as if she could use it to underline her words as she says them. The feminist’s words already tend to be quite loud – so much so that they have twice taken her to prison and forced her into exile.
It takes her breath away in Germany
Since the end of January, Nyanzi and her three children have been living in Germany, where she is currently the recipient of the German PEN Center’s “Writer in Exile” grant, which advocates for persecuted writers.
“What is important is that what needs to be said in dictatorships can be said and no one will kill me,” Nyanzi told DW. “My body will not be knocked down. That means freedom.”
The road to the current state of her freedom was long and dangerous. In Uganda, the 47-year-old political rights activist is considered one of the harshest critics of President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the East African nation for more than 35 years. Nyanzi used her words and actions to protest against Museveni and his government, which has arrested, tortured or even simply “wiped out” unwanted opponents.
Nyanzi has also been considered unwanted. In 2017, he spent more than a month in Luzira High Security Prison for a “banal” Facebook post in which he described Museveni as a “buttock couple” and his wife, Ugandan Education Minister Janet Museveni, as “empty-headed.”
Prior to Nyanzi’s arrest, a major controversy had erupted over Museveni’s failed 2016 campaign promise to provide free monthly sanitary napkins to all “poor girls”. In Uganda, as in many other nations of sub-Saharan Africa, menstruation is an unexpected luxury for many women and girls. This lack of material and the relative shame causes many girls to miss school regularly and this lost learning time is difficult to make up for. Some girls end up dropping out of school altogether.
Museveni’s promise could have changed the lives of many girls and increased their chances of getting a good education. Nyanzi left no criticism against him, even though his election campaign was still ongoing, and accused him of having “s ** t” in the Republic of Uganda. She also took part in demonstrations, where she was confronted by the police. However, she was not prepared for what followed her sentence.
“When we first deal with repressive militant brutal dictatorships, one can be innocent and we are allowed to be innocent and naive,” he thinks. “But the enormous involvement of barbarism by the state quickly sharpens a man.”
Pioneering research on sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa
Nyanzi’s one-month prison sentence left her so physically weak that she could barely walk. had contracted malaria while in prison and also suffered from a urinary tract infection. But, as he recalls, he felt mentally stronger than ever: “If the Museveni dictatorship hoped to imprison me and find me guilty and convict me and sentence me and put me in a high security prison, if they believed they would silence me. , I had to shock them and tell them, no … I keep talking … it will be more difficult “.
On the streets and on social media, Nyanzi has fought tirelessly for freedom of speech, as well as for the rights of women and LGBTQ people. Her motivation stems in part from her personal life. Her father married several wives to make sure he would have sons and thus fulfill the wishes of his family, she explains.
After receiving her PhD in medical anthropology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Nyanzi focused her work on sexual and reproductive health, with a particular focus on the plight of young people, women and sexual minorities in Uganda. Most recently he did research at Makerere University in Kampala. Both the scientific and activist communities consider her work to be pioneering in the way she tackles sexual orientation and queer identities – issues that are considered culturally taboo in Uganda and other sub-Saharan countries, and therefore difficult to investigate. .
Torture and injuries in prison
Over the years, Nyanzi has gained great followers on social media. Her posts are critical, crude and accusatory. In 2018, he wrote and published a poem with a strong wording that expresses the wish that Museveni had never been born: “Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday. / How disgusting a day is! [Museveni’s mother] Your cursed vaginal canal had burned your unborn fetus… »
Her poem resulted in a second stay in the maximum security prison – this time for 16 months. At the end of her sentence, she managed to smuggle out her prison uniform and her worn-out flip-flops, which had been repaired several times. he holds them as trophies of that time.
“I stole this uniform from prison and I’m celebrating it because my prison took my baby,” he says, pausing before continuing. “I was beaten by the prison guards. I was tortured. They injured me. When I showed them the blood between my legs, they told me, this is tomato sauce. [That] I’m hiding. pretend. badmouth. “My child, beaten by my womb, was put in a garbage dump with gloves and syringes and medicine and was not allowed to bury my child.”
But even this second prison could not break Nyanzi. “Today, despite the pain and torture I had to endure in prison, I am celebrating,” he said. “I celebrate being imprisoned because for the first time in the history of Uganda, a woman was able to reverse the criminalization and reverse the criminalization and use the courts and the prison system to tell the truth to the authorities and shame and I am ashamed and exposed. the government and I celebrate it “. During her numerous trials, Nyanzi began with strict monologues in bold, as well as stripping her breasts in protest.
Editing through poetry
Now in Germany, Nyanzi hopes to artistically process what she experienced over 305 days in this high-security prison in the form of 305 poems. In 2020, he published a book of poems written while in prison. She continues to be active on social media and recently took part in solidarity actions to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As an unmarried mother, Nyanzi was often concerned about the safety of her children. “My deepest regret is the effect of every night I slept away from my children,” he says. “Every time I was on the prison floor where I slept, I slept on my blanket, I thought: Did my children have food? Did my boys take a bath? Do they hate the lessons, so they have done my homework?”
The PEN grant will allow Nyanzi to stay in Germany for a maximum of three years, but he does not want to think so far. Her biggest concern right now is to find a good school for her children. Her 15-year-old sons have already declared their participation in football, her 17-year-old daughter for swimming. After painful separations, it is a step towards normalcy for Nyanzi and her family.
This article was originally written in German.
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