Stella Nyanzi Quotes

In a way, motherhood keeps me very grounded.

In my experience, there is much greater currency and power in my deployment of irreverent idioms of satire, mockery, and ridicule of oppressive power.

I wear lipstick, I speak like an academic, I take off my bra… and this is usually not what politicians look like.

I feed my children with takeout, once in a while, and sometimes we even buy street food. But ‘a good woman’ doesn’t do that, for example. These stereotypes trap us, and they make us feel like failures if we cannot meet these very high standards.

Motherhood is important for me because everything I do is about creating a better legacy for my children.

I learnt that politics is a dish I love to eat… No one is going to make the world what I want to make it to be, unless I do it myself.

Double standards demand that feminine respectability bars women from articulating, writing, or deploying words, concepts, and ideas deemed to be taboo subjects.

I use nudity because it's a weapon of the weak and the poor. The cost to pay is called shame, but I think I'm not ashamed of my body. It's a beautiful big mama body, and I am glad to deploy it for war.

When I put my nipples on the frontline, I learnt they fight harder than any bazookas. Men don't know how to deal with that.

Custody and punishment for writing freed me of the fear I previously held of being imprisoned. Physical and emotional torture during my two terms in prison radicalized me in unexpected ways.

When I die, I hope my children will be proud of me as a woman who at least tried to change things, instead of just waiting for the dictator to die.

Men with guns can't shoot at nipples.

These women are working, no matter where they are placed within politics. They entered political participation with the heart of the masses, the heart of the people, with the will to work against oppression.

In fact, as expressed in one of my poems written in prison, I wear my prison sentence for poetry as a badge of honor.

I also get a lot of motivation from my children because if I didn't have children, I would not need to change the world.