The opening lines of a poem written by Dr. Stella Nyanzi and posted on Facebook in November 2018, the day after Yoweri Museveni’s alleged birthday, read: “Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday / How bitterly sad a day!” Alleged, because this date was one he estimated, due to the fact that his exact date of birth was never recorded. The poem expresses intense regret and sorrow about Museveni’s birth, stating that Uganda would have been spared the oppression, suppression, corruption, demise of public institutions, unemployment, bad governance and the erosion of morality in society, had Yoweri had not been carried to term: “I wish the infectious dirty-brown discharge flooding Esiteri’s loose pussy had drowned you to death.”

Dr. Nyanzi invokes images of the vagina in expressing her low opinion of Museveni’s rule of Uganda. The vagina, as a conduit of life, joy, disease and death is linked to childbirth, motherhood and corruption in her poetry. Esiteri, who Dr. Nyanzi names in the poem, is scorned for being mother to Yoweri, who is himself a source of bitterness to many.

This linkages between the vagina, childbirth, corruption and motherhood play out in a variety of ways. In biology as in society, there is little to zero burden of proof on mothers concerning the parentage of children as compared to that borne by fathers, and traditionally as well as biblically, the burden of scorn, bitterness, reproach often falls on the mothers of ill-mannered children. The last lines of the Facebook post are a challenge:

Ask the bodabodamen to direct you to Mama Stella’s house with a red gate. I refuse to be gagged!