A cartoon by the satirist Gado portrays her riding a bull that has the face of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in power for 36 years: Stella Nyanzi holds a pen and uses it to pierce the bull’s testicles. The drawing expresses well how the head of state and all the Ugandan authorities see Nyanzi: a thorn in her side.
Anthropologist, writer and feminist and LGBT + activist, since November 2018 she has been in prison for sixteen months for publishing a poem in which she talked about Museveni’s mother’s vagina. “I fight for freedom”, she says of herself in a poem. In fact, her freedom of speech has no limits (“Kindness has been taken prisoner. So sometimes all you have to say is ‘fuck you'”, says Nyanzi), but her “radical rudeness”, as she defines it. , which began as a form of anti-colonial dissent and then turned against the ruling elite to demand an account of its actions, has cost her dearly.
Since the beginning of 2022 Nyanzi has lived with her three children in Munich, Germany, where she was awarded the Writers-in-exile scholarship from Pen center Germany, which supports persecuted writers.
Stella Nyanzi will be at International festival in Ferrara on 1 October together with the Zimbabwean poet Sam Ndlovu and the Senegalese-American journalist Selly Thiam, in a meeting moderated by Francesca Sibani of Internazionale.