How insults and a campaign over sanitary towels landed activist in jail
Stella Nyanzi, an academic and formidable campaigner, is languishing in a jail in Kampala for describing her president as "a pair of buttocks". Uganda's 72-year-old leader, first elected more than 30 years ago, has become the subject of ferocious criticism for his government's treatment of the country's poor schoolgirls.
To Nyanzi, the announcement that her country's government, under the leadership of President Yoweri Museveni, could not afford to supply sanitary towels to schoolgirls - despite three in every 10 missing school because of menstruation - was more than just another broken campaign promise. It was, to the academic, the epitome of abuse - a symbol of the humiliation that the east African country has endured at the hands of a political monarchy detached from the realities of those it leads. It was also the beginning of an activist journey that would land Nyanzi in a maximum-security prison for insulting the president the west once touted as a poster boy for African democracy.
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