{UAH} Who Pinched My Buttocks? The Stella Nyanzi School of Radical Rudeness .

The drama of picking up the book would have been wholly farcical were the circumstances not surreal enough already. The ridiculousness of furtive telephone calls in which names were neither asked nor given, the long, curving drive that skirted the city, suspicion as to why the boda knocked the car, and then arriving at the drop-off point only to be told the delivery man would not make it, underlined just how psychologically precarious it is to be in Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. It was bound to be that way the day Stella Nyanzi was sent to prison in 2018. The activist and scholar had opened what amounted to a second front in the fight against the Museveni dictatorship. The means the way such a war is fought is rarely visible, so that while the placid surface of a society going about its quotidian slog remains even, nerves are getting chewed thin underneath. Along with Bobi Wine, one a poet, the other a singer, both of them versifiers, Nyanzi has deployed weapons and tactics dictators are wholly unprepared for: The reaction of the state apparatus when it moves in on creatives is to always get it wrong. It may have looked like victory to the goonery when Stella Nyanzi was jailed nearly two years ago. But the result has been an Oxfam and PEN International award, and counting. This has been quickly followed by a poetry collection that will now underpin Nyanzi's repute and bring to all the sheer courage of this woman. As with censorship of books, the argument that not imprisoning writers is the best way to silence them never gets through the collective thick skull of tyranny. And yet the forceful Nyanzi had made it impossible for Mr. Museveni to not act. 

Her provocation – for it was, and Nyanzi proudly owns it – was delivered in such terms that Mr. Museveni was doomed to respond, even though he may have been aware of the folly of doing so. How this doctoral graduate with several degrees arm-twisted one of Africa's more wily presidents into a fight he is badly losing is one we do not as yet fully understand. But the history of Big Man-badly- mauled-by-activist woman is a long one. The late Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi, might have heeded wise counsel and kept clear of Wangari Maathai. But as with Nyanzi, Maathai too had set her challenge in terms that cornered the late Moi into attacking her. The day he laid hands on her was the day she won. 

The diatribe Nyanzi aimed at Mr. Museveni more than found its mark; it paralysed the warmonger who is so used to operating from the outer limits of decency (and being feted for it, by no less than the World Bank), that the bounds of propriety are lost on him, a man who set fire to four, perhaps five, countries, killing millions of Africans and comprehensively corrupting Uganda. He stepped on everyone. How this doctoral graduate with several degrees arm-twisted one of Africa's more wily presidents into a fight he is badly losing is one we do not as yet fully understand.

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The Elephant - Speaking truth to power.  

Read more at: https://www.theelephant.info/features/2020/02/27/who-pinched-my-buttocks-the-stella-nyanzi-school-of-radical-rudeness/?fbclid=IwAR2EcGIO3JaknzXXcbmfP43tTaoHMHULO2GHY6KYunE1BM5FBJD0keo-aJ0#.XlhqZ2oQLd4.facebook The Elephant - Speaking truth to power

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"When a man is stung by a bee, he doesn't set off to destroy all beehives"

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