Introduction
In a poem by Jimale Ali Ahmed entitled “Portraiture” in his collection When Donkeys Give Birth to Calves (2012), a professor-persona warns his students “to beware of / Language: potent force that can manhandle us”. The Oxford English Dictionary renders the verb ‘manhandle’ thus: To attack an enemy; to handle roughly; to assault, maul, or beat up. In this essay, I reflect on how a Ugandan poet, academic and politician, Dr Stella Nyanzi, uses her writing to ‘manhandle’ Uganda’s long-ruling President, General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (in power since January 1986) by portraying him in several metaphorical albeit irreverent ways. Nyanzi’s major point is that Museveni has since ceased to be the democratic leader he claimed to be in 1986 when he captured power by force of arms; instead, he has morphed into a tyrant similar to the ones he deposed. This makes his 5-year guerrilla struggle that won him the presidency worthless since what it did was to replace one tyrant (Milton Obote) with another (Museveni himself). For this reason, his regime needs to be crushed. As a writer, the only weapon she fights with are her words, hence what I call the ‘wordfare’ she declares against Museveni.
Dr Stella Nyanzi conceives writing as warfare: with a mere pen and a paper, she sees herself as speaking truth to the people in power whom she calls “murderous gunmen”, “wolves” and “hyenas”. This enables her to score a writerly victory since she is able to disturb their peace as their response to her work (arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment) show. This locates her writing in a heroic East African tradition of writers who have used their talent to call for better governance – Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo in Kenya, Okot p’Bitek and Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu in Uganda, and Gabriel Ruhumbika and Richard Mabala in Tanzania, to mention but a few.
In fact, it is common in East Africa to conceive writing as resistance. Ngugi wa Thiong’o gives some of his books titles that point to the fact that he uses his pen as a weapon fighting for freedom, for instance Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983) and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (1998). In these two books, Ngugi theorizes writing as a form of warfare by arguing that both the writer and politician contend for the same performance space as they pitch their ideas to their audience (the citizens). Okot p’Bitek says more or less the same thing when he observes, in Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture, and Values (1986), that in every community there are two kinds of rulers – those who control through force (the army, the police, the prisons, etc.) and those who control through art (stories, songs, sculpture, etc.). Of the two rulers, he calls the latter the more effective, because they are the makers of the laws that guide society – laws that are enforced not through guns and other instruments of state coercion, but through ridicule/satire and other resources of language.
Nyanzi derives her authority to spit out fire at General Museveni from a number of sources. The first one is that she is a direct victim of Museveni’s long rule as she was fired from her job at Uganda’s premier university, Makerere, partly because she was very critical of the first family, including the First Lady (who is also the Minister of Education and Sports) whom she once called an airhead. Secondly, Nyanzi attributes the death of her parents to Museveni’s policies as a head of state – because he prioritizes purchase of military weaponry and tear gas over provision of health services. Her father died in a public hospital that did not have the medication he needed; her mother died because there was no ambulance to carry her to a health facility for emergency care. From a cultural perspective, Nyanzi’s identity as a mother of twins among the Baganda of Central Uganda gives her authority to behave in transgressive ways since by giving birth to twins, she transcends the natural world and its laws, thereby giving her the license to act the way she wishes to. Finally, the use of rudeness as a political tactic has been deployed by activists before her. In a very beautiful essay entitled “Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s’ published in Journal of Social History (volume 39), Carol Summers explains how a Ugandan nationalist called Semakula Mulumba deployed this tool to fight for independence from colonial rule. Mulumba, for instance, described Cyril Stuart, the white Anglican Bishop of colonial Uganda from 1932 to 1952, as a “ripe apple rotten at the heart” upon accusing him of cooperating with the British colonial government to rob Ugandans of their land. This was after news got out that the Native Anglican Church had quietly handed over mineral rights to the protectorate after private negotiations with Bishop Stuart who, being a missionary, was not a member of the Church he was presiding over, thereby making his deal with the British colonial administrators both fraudulent and treacherous.
The Writer Declares the Tyrant “a pair of buttocks”
On January 26, 2017, General Museveni declared at a public event held to celebrate his 31st year as President of Uganda, that he was not anybody’s servant. This was in Masindi Town, in western Uganda. In his words as reported by the media: “I hear some people saying that I am their servant; I am not a servant of anybody. I am a freedom fighter; that is why I do what I do. I don’t do it because I am servant; I am not your servant. I am just a freedom fighter.” This statement attracted widespread condemnation from Ugandans for a number of reasons. First, Museveni seeks the mandate of the people every five years in the form of national presidential elections. While these elections are usually contested by the opposition parties as heavily flawed, they give Museveni legitimacy as Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Forces. By saying that he is not their servant, Museveni betrays the citizens who vote him into office.
A day after Museveni made the unfortunate statement, Stella Nyanzi took to Facebook and responded to him thus:
Museveni matako nyo! Ebyo byeyayogedde e Masindi yabadde ayogera lutako [Museveni is buttocks! What he said in Masindi is pure buttocks-language]. I mean, seriously, when buttocks shake and jiggle, while the legs are walking, do you hear other body parts complaining? When buttocks produce shit, while the brain is thinking, is anyone shocked? When buttocks fart, are we surprised? That is what buttocks do. They shake, jiggle, shit and fart. Museveni is just another pair of buttocks. Rather than being shocked by what the matakosaid in Masindi, Ugandans should be shocked that we allowed these buttocks to continue leading our country. Matako butako.
This explosive post immediately went viral. By calling Museveni a pair of buttocks, Nyanzi declares the president’s speech nonsensical – mere noise we should expect from a leader who has utter contempt for the people he leads. Of course, the phrase ‘a pair of buttocks’ is meant to be a metaphor – a figure of speech in which ‘a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a comparison’ as M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpharm, observe in their book A Glossary of Literary Terms. If ‘[a]ll power belongs to the people who shall exercise their sovereignty in accordance with this Constitution’ for instance through electing leaders into office as the 1995 Uganda Constitution says in Article 1(1), then Museveni’s declaration that he is not anybody’s servant is an abrogation of the sacred law of the land, and potentially a criminal offense. So, Nyanzi decides to tear up his speech—so to speak—using metaphorical language, for by saying what he did, he evacuated himself from the world of reason and respect to that of the lowly, which the buttocks symbolize.
In a follow-up Facebook post she shared on January 15, 2018, Nyanzi doubled down on her low opinion of President Museveni by describing him thus:
He is the worst curse upon Uganda, a cancerous tumour eating up our body politic, a festering ulcer oozing with sepsis, a serial rapist of the constitution, a big fat worm feeding on our children’s inheritance, a hissing viper full of venom that poisons all our public institutions, a piece of low-lying vermin uttering promises never once fulfilled, a blood-sucking vampire feeding on the carcass of what is left of Uganda, a thieving scoundrel stealing not only from home but also abroad, a butchering murderer of those his paranoia suspects of being his enemies.
On August 3, 2019, Nyanzi was convicted under the Computer Misuse Act (2012) over the offense of cyber-harassing President Museveni and sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment. While the Facebook post that got her jailed was a different one in which she opined that President Museveni should have died at birth to save Uganda from the corruption, nepotism, plunder and tyranny he has subjected her to, there is no doubt that the prosecution had the pair-of-buttocks phrase in their mind as they worked hard to have her punished.
The Writer Declares the Tyrant “poop”
As Stella Nyanzi served her 18-month imprisonment, she took to poetry as a means of manhandling President Museveni and the people serving him. Every night, she composed verse that she later smuggled out of prison. In total, she wrote 159 poems that she published in 2020 three weeks before she was released from prison. She chose the title No Roses from My Mouth for the collection to underline her deployment of verse as warfare. The title poem reads, in part:
There will be no roses
Falling out of my mouth.
Who brings fleeting beauty to war?
Instead there are razor blades and axes,
Chainsaws, knives and machetes,
Daggers, swords and bayonets.
My words cut up our enemies.There will be no honey
Dripping out of my mouth.
Who brings sweetness to war?
Instead there are punches and slaps,
Hammers, pickaxes and chisels,
Bulldozers, tankers and under-cuts.
My words knock out our oppressors.
One of the poems in the collection, “Enema”, says this of a tyrant who has ruled his country for decades:
The dictator is a big old poop
Enlarged in the bowels of Uganda.
In pain the masses live and stoop.
Thirty-three years of constipation!
We shall no longer use a tender scoop
For we are the enema.
There is only person who has ruled Uganda for over 33 years – General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni himself, who seized power on January 26, 1986, after waging a 5-year guerrilla struggle. He is the dictator in question whom Nyanzi metaphorically refers to as “old poop.” This use of scatological imagery serves several purposes. First, it aims to evacuate Museveni from a position of respect and honor by metaphorically equating him to something so lowly and unattractive, excrement. Second, excrement is usually linked to excessive consumption as Joshua D. Estyobserves in his essay “Excremental Postcolonialism” published in the journal, Contemporary Literature (volume 40 issue1). In Museveni’s case, the excessive consumption refers to his long reign that is characterized by a combination of coercion and corruption as Ugandan political scientist, Joshua Rubongoya, shows in his book Regime Hegemony in Museveni's Uganda: Pax Musevenica (2007). Third, the scatological image demystifies President Museveni as flesh and blood, not a god who should be feared; that is to say, it deflates his self-importance as the only person who can successfully manage Uganda as he keeps claiming. Fourth, the image calls for the removal of Museveni from power since the reasonable thing you do with shit is to dispose of it. In any case, if Museveni is shit itself, the longer he stays in power, the longer it piles up and therefore the more disgusting it becomes. Fifth, the image highlights the role that women need to play in liberating Uganda from Museveni’s stranglehold, since in many communities, enemas are administered “by solicitous mothers as a hygienic means of loosening impacted bowels, relieving flatulence, and instigating the proper flow of excrement” as Laurinda S. Dixon observes in the article “Some Penetrating Insights: The Imagery of Enemas in Art,” published in Art Journal (volume 52 issue number 3). Finally, the image highlights the limits of power, even in a dictatorship. While it might appear that President Museveni is in total control of the country as both head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he is not powerful enough to stop Nyanzi from calling him poop or to her book, No Roses from my Mouth, from circulating.
Conclusion: The Price of Manhandling the Tyrant
Nyanzi’s verbal lashing of Museveni has come at a price. The personal price is that she is considered Uganda’s rudest person to the extent that when I tell people that she is my personal friend, they look at me in shock and ask if I am equally rude. Economically, she lost her job at Makerere University, thereby condemning her to the streets. Politically, she has got into trouble with the state several times, including spending close to two years in prison. At the moment, she lives in exile in Germany. At the literary level, some readers have charged that her poetry is of poor-quality, thereby robbing her of literary recognition as a one of Uganda’s most prolific poets. She has responded to this charge by arguing that while her work might carry low literary value, it is powerful enough to irritate the big wigs she directs it to. I quote one of the poems in No Roses from My Mouth (2020) to conclude this essay:
My writing may be cheap,
But it is rather effective.
My poetry may be tasteless,
But it is shaking the nation.
My Facebook posts may be tacky,
But they grab the balls of the tyranny.
My paragraphs may be repulsive,
But they sting the Queen Bee.
My stanzas may be irreverent,
But they poked the leopard’s anus.
My language may be dirty,
But it exposed the dictatorship.
My pen never stops writing;
I will write myself to freedom!
*****
Sylvester Danson Kahyana is a visiting professor in the English Department at Boston College. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and Research, Harvard Kennedy School, having survived a brutal attack on his life on April 26, 2022. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa (where he is an Associate Researcher in the English Department) and an MA and BA in Literature from Makerere University (where he was an Associate Professor in the Literature Department before he fled Uganda). Uganda’s contributing editor to Index on Censorship and a former board member of PEN International as well as a former President of Ugandan PEN, he has defended artistic freedom and human rights for over two decades. A published poet and anthologist, he has edited five books and published more than 30 scholarly papers. Some of the awards he has received include the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network Individual Award (2023), the Fulbright Research Fellowship Award (2021), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Award (2015). Danson Kahyana held the fellowship as the Spring 2025 Cheuse Center Scholar from February 27 to March 8, 2025.
December 12, 2025