Encounter with Stella Nyanzi, East Africa's "Bad Girl"

Stella Nyanzi is a name many in Uganda’s establishment would rather not encounter. Her name evokes controversy, representing a brand of writing that flatly refuses to bow to authority.

Yet among ordinary readers across East Africa, including members of WhatsApp literary groups in Kenya and Uganda, her poetry generates intense fascination. Whenever she releases a new poem or collection, readers discuss her work with enthusiasm. This proves that her works have found a resonant audience, regardless of official disapproval.

Her poetry collections, including No Roses from My Mouth, Don’t Come in My Mouth and Exiled for My Mouth, unmistakably signal a writer with no interest in making language comfortable. Her poetry is subversive to the hilt. She does not knock politely on the door of power; she kicks it wide open.

I met this celebrated Ugandan writer for the first time not in Kampala or Makerere University, where she once worked, but in Bayreuth, Germany, a university town that has emerged as a major hub for African Studies. As a chronicler with the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, my assignment is to observe intellectual encounters and reflect on what one place reveals about another. Guided by my Narrative Transformation Model, I allow the stories and cultural memories of home to converse with the people and places I encounter abroad.

My meeting with Nyanzi could not have come at a more opportune moment. Here was an African intellectual whose relationship with state authority had been marked by confrontation, imprisonment and exile. Yet here she is in Germany, actively shaping an international conversation on African feminism. I could not help wondering what it means when an African scholar must cross continents simply to find room for conversations fundamentally about Africa.

Nyanzi is not a conventional writer. She refuses to wrap her ideas in diplomatic euphemisms to appease those in power. She writes with an unsettling directness, rejecting civility whenever civility risks becoming a disguise for injustice. Her imprisonment illustrates the consequences of this approach. In 2018, she published a poem on Facebook using graphic imagery to criticize President Yoweri Museveni. Interpreted as cyber harassment, the poem resulted in nearly sixteen months of imprisonment before her release in 2020.

You may dislike her vocabulary, but a fundamental question remains: what happens when a writer’s language becomes so disturbing to those in power that she ends up behind bars? Nyanzi’s poetry uses the body, sexuality and obscenity as deliberate literary strategies to confront political authority. She takes topics that respectable public discourse avoids and thrusts them into the centre of political debate, crafting a form of dissent that refuses to separate the personal from the political.

At the Refractions conference on African feminism in Bayreuth, discussions centred on institutional authority, access and accountability. These are not mere academic abstractions; they touch on who is allowed to produce knowledge and whose perspectives become part of institutional memory. Nyanzi’s presence brought these issues into sharp focus. Who decides what constitutes legitimate knowledge? Why is one mode of expression celebrated as scholarship while another is dismissed as vulgarity?

Describing herself as a “feminist ninja,” Nyanzi does not wait for permission to challenge established thinking. She enters contested intellectual spaces and questions the rules governing them. Her famous confrontation with Professor Mahmood Mamdani at Makerere was one episode in her wider struggle over how knowledge is produced. Beyond academia, her menstrual activism, including her criticism of Museveni over unfulfilled promises to provide sanitary towels for schoolgirls, demonstrates her determination to force ignored social realities into public consciousness.

Her interventions challenge political authority and the academy alike. She is critical of East African scholars who, she says, have failed to contribute meaningfully to liberating knowledge. To her, universities cannot claim to be centres of intellectual freedom if they remain comfortable with inherited dogmas while rejecting those who challenge them.

I was particularly struck by her critique of how we celebrate concepts such as Ubuntu. We speak eloquently about African humanism and communal responsibility. Yet Nyanzi asks us to consider who gets to speak during these discussions. Are women equal participants, or are they expected to remain silent while men explain the meaning of African identity? This question deserves serious reflection. African intellectual traditions should not be immune from criticism simply because they are African. If our universities are to produce liberating knowledge, they must make room for dissenting voices that disturb our intellectual comfort.

Nyanzi now lives in Germany as a writer in exile. The fact that her intellectual work thrives abroad highlights a bitter paradox. We speak passionately about decolonising knowledge, yet some of the most critical conversations about African societies occur in Western institutions. While collaborative initiatives like the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence offer important starting points for reconfiguring African Studies, the core contradiction remains: why must an African intellectual travel to Europe to find room for conversations that belong on our own continent?

Nyanzi may not be everyone’s idea of a “good girl.” But intellectual freedom cannot be reserved only for those who speak in ways that please the powerful. A university worthy of its name must accommodate disagreement, especially when that disagreement makes us deeply uncomfortable.