Boniface Mwangi visits jailed firebrand Ugandan political activist Stella Nyanzi
Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi has shared details of his recent visit to jailed Ugandan scholar and political activist Stella Nyanzi at a Kampala prison, saying the University lecturer remains ‘strong’ in spite of the incarceration.
Nyanzi is serving an 18-month jail term at Luzira Prison after she was found guilty by a Kampala court of ‘harassing’ President Yoweri Museveni on social media.
She has appealed the ruling but has elected to remain behind bars other than applying for bail, stating earlier she “had wished to teach Facebook to the inmates.”
“She still has the revolutionary fire burning inside her. She chose to remain in jail and waive her right to bail because she knew they would keep on arresting her. Her idea of #FreeStellaNyanzi is the freedom to write what she wants (on social media),” said Mwangi on Facebook.
Nyanzi got into trouble with the Ugandan authorities after penning a Facebook post in which she said she wished Museveni, 74, had been burned up by the acidic pus’ in her mother’s birth canal.
Prosecutors described the post as a ‘brutish attack on the person of the president and his late mother’.
During his trip to Kampala, Mwangi also met popular Ugandan musician-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine, who, like Nyanzi, is a strong critic of President Museveni.