Stella Nyanzi is a celebrated Ugandan academic, feminist and queer activist, and poet who has been detained since November 2018. She was charged with “cyber harassment and offensive communication” of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, after publishing a poem critical of his 33-year dictatorship, and was sentenced in August 2019 to 18 months in prison.

Nyanzi has been well-known in African academic and activist circles for decades, and is the leader of the #Pads4Uganda project, which sought to provide sanitary pads to all schoolgirls in Uganda free of charge. She began this project in 2017, and encountered her first legal troubles after publishing a different poem, critical of First Lady Janet Museveni, after she claimed there wasn’t enough money in the national budget to fund the project. After spending one month in prison for that offense and being freed on bail, Nyanzi successfully crowdfunded her project anyway.

Fiercely opposed to the 33-year presidency of Yoweri Museveni, who recently amended the Ugandan constitution to remove the upper age limit for the presidency, allowing himself to run again in 2021, Nyanzi has stated that she resists the dictatorship by employing a traditional Ugandan form of protest: “radical rudeness.” First devised as a form of resistance to British colonialism, radical rudeness seeks to use vulgarity and nudity to call attention activism by offending the targeted party. And in Nyanzi’s case, it seems to have worked.

On September 16, 2018, the day after Museveni’s 74th birthday, Nyanzi published a poem on Facebook that graphically described her opposition to his influence over Ugandan society. Explicitly referencing his mother’s vagina, Nyanzi wrote that she wish he had drowned during birth just as he “sank and murdered the dreams and aspirations of millions of youths who languish in the deep sea of massive unemployment…in Uganda.”

In May 2019, Nyanzi’s lawyers argued that the government had no case against her as the word “vagina” is not an expletive. Government prosecutors were unswayed, however, and Nyanzi went to trial in July 2019. Finally, in August 2019 she was convicted of offending the president and cyber harassment, at which point the magistrate decided on an 18-month prison sentence over a fine because Nyanzi was unremorseful. In fact, in response to the court’s decision, via video link from the Luzira Women’s Prison where Nyanzi has already served half of her sentence, she said she gladly accepted the punishment among a slew of other profanities. Supporters present in the courtroom cheered loudly as she spoke.

In a climate of increasingly repressed free expression, it is crucial that government critics in Uganda be free to speak out against the government and in support of political change. Nyanzi must be released from prison immediately and her conviction must be overturned. Please join The Voice Project in calling for her immediate and unconditional release.

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