Hmm, this explosion goes on? Well if this article is trustworthy with sincere motive, then in my view, the lady Stella Nyanzi is the one who is far ahead of her society in time. On that basis, it is the writer of the article and society that need healings.

WHY? She sees what the norm does not and they perceive her as a disturbance. WHY WOULD nYAZI 1986 BE THE SAME AS NYANZI 2016?!?!?

That is an insult, indulgence and violation..., pure! Let him go interview Nyanzi and make his case based on that: she has to define herself for herself, kucumac!!

Look, THEY ARE THE ONES WHO ARE BOTH DEFINING HER FOR HERSELF, ENCROACHING HER TO SUBJUGATION, VIOLATING HER and even more sickly, defining and determining for her how she perceives their encroachment?

SHE IS THE ONE WHO IS ENCROACHED, VIOLATED HENCE, SHE IS THE ONE WHO PERCEIVES THE ENCROACHMENTS. Therefore, she is the one who decides if she has been violated: NOT THE ONE WHO IS INFLICTING THE VIOLATION TO DETERMINE!!!!!

It is so stupid. It is like when some one is hurting you and when you tell him like, "hej man, you are hurting me" AND, the individual ( inflicter) turns around and tell you that he is not hurting you.

Bullcrap, it is not him / her to decide!!!

How many of her types are there? Or more to the point, how old are her liberated free minded daughters? They would make good company.

BUT LETS PUT THINGS WITHIN PERSPECTIVE FOR A WHILE: There are a whole lots of mixed-up mixed-up of issues here. I am restricting myself to the violations on account of other peoples indulgence in matters that do not concern them. That psycho-social aspect.

I choose to separate issues. Indulgence by her relatives is one issue:The MISR is another issue AND, THE CHILD ABUSE IS YET ANOTHER......TOO!

"WE FORM THE CULTURE THAT FORMS US"….noc'la gaumoy.

Den torsdag, 28 april 2016 5:59 skrev "ocennekyon@gmail.com" <ocennekyon@gmail.com>:

http://www.observer.ug/lifestyle/43933-stella-of-1986-would-possibly-not-recognise-today-s-dr-stella-nyanzi

Stella of 1986 would possibly not recognise today's Dr Stella Nyanzi

Written by Edris Kiggundu

Stella Nyanzi

"I am a man," Dr Stella Nyanzi declared before me, stretching her arms and adopting a sitting posture that made her seem more like a village chief than the academic she is.

"No one shakes me. I provide for my children in the same way a husband would. I am their protector," she said, revealing her love for her children.

The truth is Nyanzi, 41, is a woman. She prides in being referred to as Nnalongo (her three children include a set of twins). On April 18, the research fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) stripped to her knickers before TV cameras, an action that has attracted condemnation and praise in equal measure.

She was protesting a decision by the MISR executive director, Prof Mahmood Mamdani, to evict her from office ostensibly because she declined to teach on a PhD program. Nyanzi was suspended last week as the university investigates her conduct and disagreements with Mamdani.

"I don't regret what I did…" she told me, the rest of her sentence laced with profanities we could not publish here.

SHY, CONTROVERSIAL

"A day before (April 17), I had prepared my children for this. I showed them my naked body and told them what I was going to do the next day," she said, trying to answer critics who said that her action would have a psychological impact on her children. The eldest, a girl, is 11 years old, while the twins made eight years last week.

She said her children are activists in their own right.

"They fight for their rights and of other pupils at their school or anywhere," she said.

Until four years ago, Nyanzi was relatively unknown outside academic circles. All that changed when she became active on social media, thanks to her controversial posts on her Facebook page, which are often poetic, satirical and dressed in sexual innuendo.

Her friends on Facebook cut across the political spectrum and include people such as opposition behemoth Dr Kizza Besigye and government minister Asuman Kiyingi.

They comprise corporates, civil society activists, the unemployed, gays and lesbians, prostitutes and university students. Many have not met her but feel a strong sense of attachment or resentment to the issues she writes about, be it politics, homosexuality, marriage, health or education.

Yet in person, Nyanzi can even be called shy.

"I am a very shy person but people do not believe me when I tell them," she told me, revealing that she uses Facebook as a platform to confront her shyness and to sound out people on various issues she would not otherwise have said in a one-on-one conversation.

Yet her well-written, thoughtful and often provocative posts contradict the way she organizes her personal life. When I visited her office at MISR (room A7), it was scruffy and empty. It had only a desk, a couple of chairs and two filing cabinets. Papers were strewn all over the floor.

Nyanzi said her disagreement with Mamdani had made her shift some of her stuff, including important documents to a safe place.

When I told her I wanted to write a profile about her, she was hesitant: "I already have a profile out there," she said.

I told her there were things her followers did not know about her enigmatic life and why she sometimes behaves the way she does.

"In journalism, we call it a news profile…" I laboured.

Interjecting, she shot back: "Edris don't pretend to lecture me about journalism. My first degree is in Mass Communication."

"What you learnt is the theoretical part. You did not practice it in any media organization," I retorted and luckily she did not push the matter any further.

Then she said she was uncomfortable talking to a newspaper (The Observer), which in 2014 broke the story of her disagreement with Mamdani. Nyanzi said the story was biased in favour of the professor.

Yet minutes earlier as the storm she had stirred raged, she had begged me (a journalist from a paper she says she hates), through a mutual friend, to talk to PhD students affected by Mamdani's leadership.

I told her that was fine as long as she promised to tell me more about herself, beyond what her social media followers know.

"Did you remember to call other journalists?" she asked me as I entered her office. It is a request she had made.

"Yes. I called a few, but you know we are competitors," I replied.

"You are not selfish like [Sulaiman] Kakaire," she said, referring to my colleague who authored the 2014 story she did not like. And that is how she opened up to me.

When you talk to Nyanzi even for a minute, you realize one of her favourite topics is sex. Sex is a subject she has deeply researched into, making her an expert. She fell in love with the subject during her doctoral studies in Medical Anthropology at the University of London.

Her research thesis focused on "youth sexualities, sexual and reproductive health in The Gambia," which like many African countries is still culturally conservative.

Sex in many African traditions is a taboo subject, often discussed in the privacy of the bedroom or in the bushes, away from the prying eyes. But Nyanzi has become a sensation because she discusses the subject publicly with a bluntness that few people, especially of her academic repute, do.

"People pretend that sex is a taboo and frown when you talk about it. But what do men discuss all the time? It is sex. What do you think women talk about when they are together? Sex," she said.

Men, she said, are obsessed with the female body.

"This body has earned many women promotions at their workplaces. It has also felled down a number of powerful men," she said.

In her case, she said, she used her body (stripped), because she thought it was the only remaining option to have her grievances heard.

"I had written several letters to the university. But when they heard that I was naked they all came running. I don't know whether they were interested in seeing my body. But they listened to me and I got back my office," she said, explaining the incident that has thrust her to the centre of public attention and scrutiny.

She said her approach was different from that of the previous generation of feminists such as Miria Matembe (who famously suggested that male rapists should be castrated), Winnie Byanyima and Cecilia Ogwal (she has condemned Nyanzi's stripping).

In as much as they would wax lyrical about women emancipation and abuse of women's rights, Nyanzi says they did not have the same drive as her. They also easily compromised with their tormentors (men) to win political favours.

"Bali baali ku bikadde. Nzize ne sitayiro empya (the others are old-fashioned, my style is different)," she said.

TRANSFORMATION

To borrow a widely-used analogy in reference to President Museveni, if the Stella Nyanzi of 1986 met the one of today, they would not recognize each other. That year, when the NRA/M took power, Nyanzi sat her Primary Leaving Examinations at Gayaza Junior School, where she emerged one of the best pupils.

Two years earlier (in P5), she had become a born-again Christian. If she was not reading a Bible, Nyanzi was revising. Those who studied with Nyanzi at Gayaza Junior School or later Gayaza High School remember her as a quiet but brilliant student. She also rarely interacted with other students.

At junior school, she was made to skip a class by the authorities because of her excellent performance.

"She was not someone you would refer to as a rebel," said Charlotte Ntulume, a Gayaza old girl and journalism lecturer at Makerere University who still interacts with Nyanzi.

When Nyanzi joined Makerere University to do Mass Communication in 1993, her character never changed much from that of her secondary school life. Those days the entire Masscom population (from first year to third) never exceeded 50, yet still Nyanzi managed to fly under the social radar.

Andrew Mwenda, the managing editor of The Independent who was classmates with Nyanzi at Makerere, remembers her as a quiet lady who was apolitical.

"She was very, very bright. She was very smart, a creative writer, very friendly. When she spoke she never used any explicit language. I cannot imagine the Stella I see today who only expresses herself in words related to sex," Mwenda said.

Mwenda said he is shocked by the Nyanzi he sees on TV and hears nowadays. Nyanzi admitted she lived a quiet life at university. She also confessed she was religious.

At university, she belonged to a fellowship that regularly came together to pray. Today, she says she is not sure whether to believe in God or belong to any of the world religions.

"I got angry with God the moment he took my parents," Nyanzi said, adding this is still an ongoing-discussion within her mind.

There is no doubt that despite her conflicting persona, Nyanzi is a brilliant and gifted academic. She has made presentations at many high-ranking universities in the world and authored papers in reputable journals. Besides sexuality and its orientation, Nyanzi has researched widely into social movements and forms of protest.

MENTAL PROBLEM?

In an interview with Daily Monitor last week, Prof Mamdani described Nyanzi as "a walking, talking and performing version of Red Pepper", a local tabloid with a penchant for explicit language.

Taken on the surface, Mamdani's figurative description of Nyanzi's character could lend credence to suggestions by some people that she has a mental problem that requires immediate attention.

Others have said she could be suffering from bipolar disorder, a condition where the sufferer experiences periods of depression and periods of elevated mood. Many of the people who have worked or related closely with Nyanzi that we talked to believe she is not in full control of her mental faculties.

"She is in need of serious help. One of these days she could do something terrible to herself or children," said one of the people who, like others, requested anonymity.

A family friend, who has known Nyanzi's family for years, suspected that her current mental state could be linked to a series of events that have built up, stretching back to her childhood.

The family friend said the first event was the decision by Nyanzi's father to take on mistresses (Stella's mother, Harriet Nyanzi, had four daughters and her father was looking for a boy).

This decision reportedly pushed a wedge between Nyanzi and her sisters on one hand and their father, Dr Joseph Nyanzi, a former director of Mengo hospital and later Masaka district health officer, on the other.

Naturally, the girls sided with their mother who they believed had been treated shabbily, although they later reconciled and Nyanzi reportedly became close to her father. This partly explains why Nyanzi decided later in life to become a voice of those she considers to be marginalized such as women, gays and prostitutes.

The second event, according to the family friend, was her separation with Ousman, the father of her children, whom she met in Gambia while doing her doctoral research.

The two parted ways eight years ago at Heathrow airport, when Nyanzi, then 33, was pregnant with the twins. She wrote on her Facebook page last week that this was a painful moment that has had a profound effect on her life.

"I was so depressed that I had three miscarriage threats in my first and second trimesters. I survived the crisis only because of the unconditional love and support of my late father, mother and three sisters," she wrote.

The third, and arguably most crucial incident that pushed her into the abyss, was the death of her parents in a space of one year (her father died in August 2014 and mother in August 2015.)

Her mother's death in particular, hit Dr Nyanzi the hardest. Nyanzi had been reading in the MISR library when she received a phone call. It was her mother telling her she had fallen down badly yet she was home alone.

Nyanzi tried to call people in her mother's neighbourhood, seeking their help. When they finally opened the door, they found her speechless. She was dead. Nyanzi grieved for long and posted pictures of her mother's body in a casket, on her Facebook page.

When she came back to MISR a few days later, she was reportedly a changed person.

"She would go days without combing her hair," a colleague said.

Another said she could look at you for minutes, her mind focused elsewhere. After some time, her posts became more vicious and pointed. She started using profanities during causal interactions with people, including colleagues at MISR.

"F**k you, Mamdani," she once reportedly shouted after she stormed into a PhD class that was being tutored by the professor. Mamdani and the students were speechless.

At this point, some people within her circles suggested she takes leave and seeks medical attention. She said she was fine. She continued working and widened her Facebook posts to the political arena, where she did not hide her support for Besigye and disdain for Museveni.

Early this month, her disagreement with Mamdani over office space bubbled to the surface. Using explicit language laced with racial slurs, she attacked Mamdani and said she would not leave her office.

Nyanzi said she would do anything to resist eviction. Then on that Monday morning before students, staff of MISR and thousands of people watching on TV, she undressed.

"I am not mad," Nyanzi told me hours after the April 18 incident. "People who say I am insane do not understand me."

Yet even if she were mad, she added, there is a cultural context to it.

"I am a Nnalongo and in Buganda, Nnalongos are sometimes visited by emmandwa (special spirits)," she said.

Last week her family including an uncle, aunt (Susan Bidandi Ssali) and paternal grandmother tried to intervene, urging her to say sorry and went on to apologise on her behalf in the media.

Her lengthy response on social media was characteristically fierce. She told her uncle to first apologise for being caught allegedly attempting to have incestuous sex; she told Mrs Ssali to apologise for her own alleged undressing in a foreign country due to schizophrenia, and blasted her grandmother for mistreating their mother for not bearing a son.

ekiggundu@observer.ug