An intimate look at legendary Ugandan activist Stella Nyanzi

This article An intimate look at legendary Ugandan activist Stella Nyanzi was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In 2017, Kampala was living under militarized curfews and a pervasive atmosphere of fear as a femicide rampaged across Uganda. Museveni’s dictatorship imposed a media ban on the subject.

Filmmaker Patience Nitumwesiga — whose neighborhood had been subjected to this femicide surge — convened her neighbors to unearth the blacklisted names of those women who had been killed. Inspired by the work of artist Rosa Borrás in Mexico who had similarly honored the disappeared, they stitched and embroidered a quilt identifying the femicide victims.

Nitumwesiga carried this quilt at a Women’s March for Security where she first met Dr. Stella Nyanzi, a medical anthropologist by training. She had only known the raucous activist she’d seen on the evening news as crass, calculatedly obnoxious and unrelentingly vulgar. Nyanzi embraces “radical rudeness” as a political weapon — a tradition rooted in Ugandan culture that was successfully deployed in the anti-colonial resistance against British rule. 

“I was encouraged and surprised by Nyanzi’s kind and cooperative disposition,” Nitumwesiga said. “She was nothing like the Stella that the public thinks they know. Whenever journalists asked her about the quilt, Stella eagerly directed their attention toward those of us that created it.”

It was these first interactions that bred swift trust between Nitumwesiga and Nyanzi. Nyanzi would be jailed soon thereafter for posting a vulgar poem critical of Museveni on Facebook. Nitumwesiga joined a jail solidarity team.

Throughout Nyanzi’s stint in prison, her relationship with Nitumwesiga deepened. A few days after her release, Nitumwesiga was concerned Nyanzi would die — having been tortured and poisoned. She thought it urgent to document Nyanzi’s story. The two agreed to begin doing this as quickly as possible. This agreement came at the time Nyanzi declared her bid for Parliament. Neither the film crew nor the electoral campaign had any money to speak of, but a voluntary community would see both programs forward.

Six years after embarking on production, “The Woman Who Poked The Leopard” has now finally premiered at the world’s oldest documentary festival and the world’s biggest documentary festival, Dok Leipzig and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, respectively. It has already won two festival awards and continues to receive interest from major festivals, industry partners and audiences worldwide.

The film’s release comes at an interesting time for Uganda and for the current waves of autocratic elections happening across East Africa. On Jan. 15, Ugandans will go to the polls once again, despite opposition supporters and officials reporting an acceleration of widespread detentions and heavy-handed policing. 

At this moment, activist-intellectual Nyanzi remains a powerful symbol of dissent, even though she’s currently in exile in Germany and is not directly involved in electoral politics. She has continued to use provocative poetry, satire and outspoken criticism to challenge government repression, defend free speech, and highlight issues such as gender and sexual rights — actions that have repeatedly drawn the ire of the state.

“The Woman Who Poked The Leopard” explores some of the most iconic moments of Nyanzi’s activism, including her galvanizing campaigns through Kampala’s working class neighborhoods and a scene in which she disrobes against academic Mahmood Mamdani, accusing him of being protected by the state. This intimate look at a widely misunderstood activist underscores Nyanzi as a mother straddling the balance between political struggle and personal responsibilities. 

I spoke to the film’s director Nitumwesiga about how she made this film in such a hostile environment, and how it changed her in the process.

Tell us about meeting Stella Nyanzi.

There was a time when a woman was being murdered almost on a daily basis in Uganda. Everyone was discussing the story and some of our authorities were choosing to blame the victims by calling them sex workers. So there was a march organized to create awareness and to ensure that the victims are remembered as humans — someone’s daughter, sister or wife, as opposed to being labeled as a number. It’s at the march that I got to meet her for the first time, in person. 

Stella was there to support the committee organizing the march. But because she was already popular — by then, she had already written critically about the regime, even calling the president a pair of buttocks — the media was interested in her more than the other people who had organized the whole thing. So she started redirecting the media to her fellow committee members and other small groups at the march. I had heard people saying that Stella was an attention seeker, but here I was witnessing her taking attention away from herself. Shortly after the march, Stella wrote that famous poem and she was arrested again. 

Previous Coverage

‘Vulgarity makes the point polite conversation can’t’ — a conversation with Ugandan dissident Stella Nyanzi

My husband had been in touch with her because of her activism, thus when she was arrested, he visited her in jail. When Stella was released, she had been poisoned so she often fainted. Yet even when she wasn’t well, she endeavored to visit most of the people who had visited her while in jail. So she came to our home, and I asked her if there was anyone biographing her. I was thinking Stella could die and her story would be lost and probably later retold through someone else’s point of view. This has happened to many women, even Winnie Mandela, whose story was distorted. 

When I asked her, she just laughed and asked, “what’s there to tell?”   

The title “The Woman Who Poked The Leopard” is evocative — what does it mean to you personally?

I remember when I sent her the title, she asked why I removed the “anus.” [In 2015, Museveni stated that the opposition would face severe consequences if they “touched the anus of a leopard,” a folksy metaphor he used to refer to challenging his authority.] For me when I see the title, it is what I wanted; I wanted something that most Ugandans could relate with. Most Ugandans can’t miss it, because the leopard is known — stories have been written and cartoons have been drawn. Everyone relates in some way. 

The expression was later famously co-opted by Stella after being charged with cyber harassment for insulting the president; Nyanzi defiantly promised to continue “poking the leopard’s anus” with her sharp words and criticism of his regime. The phrase became a rallying cry and symbol of her radical rudeness against the government.

How would you define the film? Is it a political film, a feminist one, a personal portrait — or all three? 

I have done many fiction short films and this is my first feature. This appeals to me simply as a story, without a specific label. I didn’t want to do an activist film where the protagonists stop being humans and become heroes. I wanted Stella to be a human, a person, a mother, and that is what people have connected with. This is a story of a woman who has lost hope in the country she loves, even when she thought she had it figured out. Her mother died while waiting for an ambulance; her father was not poor but died because he couldn’t get health care. 

This is a personal story of a woman who has realized that Uganda is not working for her. It is also a story of an activist whose work has affected her family life and children. It is not a single linear film. She wins, struggles and loses.  

How did you navigate filming in Uganda’s politically sensitive environment?

When campaigns started, Kampala streets were filled with security personnel. What helped us, however, when we were in public, was that there were many journalists. We didn’t have big gear so we just moved with journalists, even without clear identification. When I started shooting, I didn’t have enough money; I used money I had saved for my master’s. So we paid for what we really needed: cameras and lenses. We didn’t pay for things we didn’t need. It was crazy. 

There was a boy called Solomon, an activist who became sick and went to the hospital. While there, police picked him up and threw him in a cell. We were at a rally somewhere and Stella was called by people asking her to help Solomon because he could die. We went to the station and found Solomon on the cold police floor; he was really badly off. During the negotiations to have him released, we were told to stop recording and we did — but we left the sound rolling, all through the negotiations. Somewhere along the way we had started recording again and then we noticed the guy standing next to us had a gun. It hit us that we were surrounded. We learned that many people in our midst, even some who had shown up as Solomon’s friends, were actually security personnel.

We just turned off all our gear and got “busy” with other things and demonstrated that we had stopped filming. We had to sit on the side and show that we were now there as comrades and not journalists or filmmakers. We had our driver take the equipment back to the car and simply stayed standing with Stella. I think then they lost interest. 

There were incidents like that, some more scary than others. But my hope was that we’d never leave Stella alone until things were resolved — and in the same way she always stood between our camera and police. This mutual improvisational solidarity was necessary for the film to come together the way it did.

How did you balance admiration with journalistic distance?

As a filmmaker, I accompany her on a journey. Even when I believe in some of the things she believes in, it is not my story, it’s her journey. I manage to accompany her, see what she’s going through without trying to impose my own narrative. Stella trusted us so much that there wasn’t a time that she asked me to remove something.

How did this film meaningfully change how you see activism and power?

I came to make the film as a filmmaker and left as a comrade. At the time I was very disillusioned with the amount of repression in Uganda and felt like there was nothing that could be done by the people. They have the guns, they have everything and as the people we have nothing. But working on the film with Stella was very eye opening, in terms of, “how you just cannot stop.” We escaped arrest three times because Stella wouldn’t let them — because of her relentlessness, she stood her ground. She has been to jail, she has lost her baby, but she’s still willing to talk and come after the government because she knows she’s right. 

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The thing that challenges me about Stella is not the protest but the persistence and the way she applies it to normal life. There were so many times when she saw something on the news and she got her kids to write some placards or make a video and post it online. Her attitude is that you have to keep talking, you can’t keep quiet. I’m struggling with this for security reasons; I keep getting scared of speaking. So I admire people who are able to say that you can’t keep quiet, and you have to use whatever means are available to you.  

This story gave me a voice that will reverberate through all my work. I’m using it to pursue African liberation in whatever form the camera or the pen will let me.

This article An intimate look at legendary Ugandan activist Stella Nyanzi was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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