Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
Toyin Falola
Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
https://africanarguments.org/2019/07/09/stella-nyanzi-rude-vagina-poem-writing-hero-uganda-needs/
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Harrow, Kenneth
in french the expression lese-majesté means offending the ruler. that obnoxious law has been used to repress people and their freedom to criticize rule.
if you do not respect bad rule, want to critique it, what should be the limits? i can understand physical acts being punishable--even if, under certain circumstances, you might wish to undertake those acts as a freedom fighter. but insulting rulers might be the only way a people can survive and remain sane. no one has said this better than mbembe citing obscene cartoons in criticism of biya.
uganda's repression of this woman is of a piece with its repression of gays, and the extremely sad state of rulership that has stayed too long.
like biya, like nkurunzima, deby, and, in his day, mobutu, khadafi, mubarak. etc.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2019 2:33:58 AM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
https://africanarguments.org/2019/07/09/stella-nyanzi-rude-vagina-poem-writing-hero-uganda-needs/
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM
Ken,
Not only the Ugandan ruler, motherhood/womanhood was also put in a pillory, maybe, inadvertently!
CAO.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
“I don’t know what party my wife belongs to but she belongs to my kitchen, my living room and the other room.”
Pres. Buhari
Stella Nyanzi's imagery places women in the pathologically contaminated and even infectious and untouchable wing of the other room. She succeeded in offending and undermining not only the ruler but women and femininity as a whole.
GE
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2019 10:16 AM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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Femi Kolapo
Nyanzi and her vagina poem belong to a traditional lineage that occurred in my northern Igbomina area back in the pre-colonial period and up until the late 1960s. Back then in my area, we had a professional class of entertainers cum mendicants cum medicine men known as asa and olongele
I remember them to be usually grotesquely or fantastically dressed in costume with pots and pans, gourds and all sorts of odds and ends hanging on their bodies, in between or sometimes under which were conspicuous strings of charms and other strange objects. They were reputed to be adept at the use of incantations and spells and knew how to manipulate powerful forest, river, or tree and other spirits. They were often approached by afflicted people for spiritual or medical help. At celebratory occasions like marriage, name giving, or during the seasonal post harvest outings of eegun (masquerades) and such like occasions, they put on a mendicant visage, begged, sang coarse funny songs, praise-sing some time, and at other times, launched attacks of abusive, deeply offensive, inciting ridicule on their victim. In 1969 or thereabout, I witnessed an attack on a fairly wealthy trader who the local community considered to be miserly and a hoarder. I was also told of shocking ridicule of an emir of by an Asa that occurred during the living memory of my grandfather that somebody he knew witnessed.
To these Olongele and Asa, nothing was sacrosanct. No part of the body or any private bodily acts relating to any part of the body was off-limits to use as a tool in their trade of abuse or shaming and correcting. The closest character to the ASA in English that I can think of is Shakespeare’s Fool in king Lear. These persons, usually men, but there were women asa too, had the liberty – socially sanctioned – to speak carelessly, crassly, grossly, and irreverently about and to anybody including royalty. The looked wretched or poor, and were despised but also feared.
As an ordinary an ASA was somebody who lacks “shame” – i.e., operating outside of society’s moral norms [in this case in terms of what they could say]. Olongele seems to be synonymous with ASA, but while I knew women who were described as ASA, all the Olongele that I knew were men. Just like Nyazi did awhile ago, they could expose themselves in the open (the men) just to horify and ridicule the high up people; to confound their hypocritical sanctimoniousness. they could say ribald jokes about the king’s genitals or king’s mother’s genitals or their own mothers’ genitals. They often were historians or at least were knowledgeable in the local histories of the members of the community and when they wanted to ridicule a person, including a king, a chief, a notable, or somebody who they reckon to have done something socially blameworthy, they could excavate some disreputable part of the person’s history and put it into some song or just say it out. They had the capacity to cut people down to size, and to tell a king that his ancestor was perhaps a slave or a lazy person or a stranger.
Because they were ASA or Olongele, they were fearless, bold; but they also made powerful enemies, amongst themselves – perhaps when they found themselves on the opposite side of an issue. They made virulent enemies among powerful people who they abused too. There were stories of many who were poisoned or who died mysteriously, supposedly, overcome by been subject to the more powerful spell of their victim enemies.
If you read Nyanzi’s poem to people of my father’s generation in my grandmothers Igbomina town of Apado or my father town of Saareh and tell them that she was an ASA, they would in no way be surprised. Though, they might warn her to watch out for her life and instruct her to search for more powerful more potent charms to fend off the expected vengeance of the king.
To us, modern, Nyanzi’s poem sounds misogynistic. But in the tradition that I discuss above, it would not have been so considered. It was a way to undercut and ridicule what society culturally considered to be the most significant source of meaning to the person being abused who must have offended society or gone against some local sensibilities that the ASA felt a need to defend – their mother’s genitals.
In a paradoxical way, it was an indication of the sacred regard that the local people gave to mother’s genitals. In my local area, the worst abuse, the deepest offense a woman or man could inflict on a person was to reference the person’s mother’s genital in formal abuse [these types of abuse have formal structures known to all.] People who were cross with each other also often referenced father’s genitals in abuse, but while it was also offensive, it was not half as offensive as when one’s mother’s genitals was referenced. The idea is that a mother’s genital is sacred. It is the source of life, it represented the origin of destiny and cradle of the human. It was the source of a person’s humanity. It has the most honor, which honor must be protected and guarded at all times. Father’s genitals seem to me to have no equivalence to mother’s in terms of sacredness. In fact, the irascible elderly, both women and men, tended to throw around much more frequently the abuse referencing father’s genitals at headstrong children or teens who offended them. But never would they use mother’s genitals. Instead, they replaced the word referencing a woman’s genitals with one referencing the anus. E ba furo iya n nla ya e. literally meaning “may it [evil] hit your mother’s mother’s anus” . When that was said, everybody knew it was the watered-down version of the other which referencing the mother’s genitals was not acceptable. But the ASA and OLONGELE, to my remembrance, could say anything. A Museveni could not hold them back if they deemed him to have offended against the social expectation of their society.
Anthropologist S. F. Nadel in the 1930s also described a rite of passage initiation ceremony among a certain group of Nupe people when the most lurid, shocking, scandalous sexual innuendos and direct references to the female genital and its secretions, and men’s genitals and to coitus, were openly allowed and participated in by both boys and girls. Some of the ones I read sound so very abusive.
______________________________________________________
Femi J. Kolapo
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2019 12:45:35 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Well this is a newly created section within the other room - created by Stella Nyanzi
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 5:11 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Stella Nyanzi: The rude vagina-poem-writing hero Uganda needs - African Arguments