This archive report concerns the detention of Dr Stella Nyanzi in Uganda after a Facebook poem targeting President Yoweri Museveni.
Nyanzi, a queer feminist writer, activist and Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute for Social Research, was being held at Luzira Prison in Kampala after authorities accused her of “cyber harassment and offensive communication” under the Computer Misuse Act of 2011. Police arrested her after she posted a poem on September 16, the day after Museveni’s 74th birthday. The poem said Uganda would have been better off if the president had died at birth.
She denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty. The charge carried a possible sentence of one year in prison.
The detention drew on a long history of confrontation between Nyanzi and the Ugandan state. She had previously used “radical rudeness,” a political style associated with pre-independence Uganda in the late 1940s, to challenge authority. Historian Carol Summers has described that tradition as “a rude, publicly celebrated strategy of insults, scandal mongering, disruption, and disorderliness that broke conventions of colonial friendship, partnership, and mutual benefit.”
Rights campaigners moved quickly to defend her. PEN urged Ugandan authorities to release her immediately, saying freedom of expression is protected by the constitution. Danson Sylvester Kahyana, president of PEN Uganda, said: “While President Museveni has the right to take exception to Dr Nyanzi’s views, he does not have the right to gag people who find his rule oppressive.”
Academic work and queer rights advocacy ¶
Nyanzi’s public profile extends beyond the courtroom. She is a medical anthropologist who has written on HIV/AIDS, sexuality and women’s health, and she has campaigned for girls, women and LGBTQIA+ people in Uganda. She also leads Pads4GirlsUG, a campaign that provides free sanitary pads to girls. She holds a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and is known as a leading scholar in African queer studies.
Her published work includes the 2013 article “Homosexuality, Sex Work, and HIV/AIDS in Displacement and Post-Conflict Settings: The Case of Refugees in Uganda,” which appeared in International Peacekeeping, as well as “Queer Pride and Protest: A Reading of the Bodies at Uganda’s First Beach Pride.” Another 2013 paper, “Dismantling Reified African Culture through Localised Homosexualities in Uganda,” was published in Culture, Health and Sexuality and challenged Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
That bill was introduced in 2009, passed into law in February 2014, and later repealed in August 2014 after it was found to have been passed without a quorum. In her writing, Nyanzi argued that the bill rested on “myopic imaginings of a homogeneous African-ness and pedestrian oblivion to pluralities within African sexualities.” She also said her research showed that “same-sex-loving men, women and transgender people variously assert their African-ness.”
Uganda remains one of 38 countries in Africa where homosexuality is illegal.
Earlier clashes with the state ¶
Nyanzi had already been targeted in 2017, when she was charged under the same 2011 law after calling Museveni “a pair of buttocks.” In her account of that case, she described what she called her “incredible experience with the judicial system in a repressive military dictatorship.”
She said she was abducted by 10 men and two women, none of them in police uniform, then held for three days without charge. After that, she was jailed for 33 days in a maximum-security prison and became seriously ill with malaria.
The case spread widely online. Nyanzi said the hashtag #PairOfButtocks trended for weeks across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and that her arrest only amplified the insult she had used to describe the president.
She was also suspended from Makerere University after being accused of abusing Janet Museveni, the first lady and education minister. Nyanzi had referred to her as a “big-thighed cow” with an “empty brain.”
Growing repression under Museveni ¶
By 2018, the political climate in Uganda had become more hostile. Police had assaulted and detained journalists covering protests during the parliamentary elections, and the state had taken a harder line against opposition figures.
That crackdown intensified after protests in 2017 over the removal of the presidential age limit. The change opened the door for Museveni, who has ruled since 1986, to remain in power until 2021.
Despite the pressure, opposition to his government continued to grow. In a handwritten letter from detention that circulated on social media, Nyanzi said: “I am ready to face my accuser – dictator Yoweri Museveni. I am not ashamed of writing the truths about how he oppresses Ugandans. I am not ashamed of criticising his dictatorship.”
By Kylie Thomas, Associate Researcher at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, University of the Free State 1944.
