Stella Nyanzi Quotes

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.

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 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.

The ultimate prize in the fight for freedom for my country is death. Many have been murdered. Many have disappeared and we don't know where they are. So the ultimate prize is death.

The third layer of participation for me are women who become enablers. They are not working with, but right from the word, ‘go’, they enter politics to enable those who are oppressed, suppressed, and abused.

That is another form of women’s participation in politics: that they may come and sit at the table, using whatever means, but when they get to the table, they forget the core values of women empowerment, feminist agendas, and they participate with those who oppress us through models of patriarchy and misogyny that must be combated.

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.

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.

A lot of what I do is really related to my position in the world as a woman for whom a lot of things don't come easy. Public health services don't work, the education doesn't work for my children, we struggle a lot and that's why I do what I do.

The transgressive reversal of my role as an elite academic who chooses to write for (sexual and gender) minorities, poor people, and the political opposition party members further enhances the shock element within my audacity.

For many women, there is a great cost to pay, to challenge the status quo, because they benefit from it. Their children benefit from it. Doing the sort of activism that I do, threatens to take away from one’s status, or privilege, or wealth, or whatever it is they benefit from.

I think it is very liberating to embrace the many forms of motherhood in all its diversity. We must not be trapped by homogenous ideas of motherhood

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

Using taboo topics to poetically break silences surrounding government failures and violations of human rights is unavoidably loud. Whoever hears or reads the poems in which I deploy taboo topics stops, stands still, and thinks for a while about the issues being raised. It is effective!