NPR’s THE SUNDAY STORY:
A rare look inside locked-down Nicaragua
On this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta travels to Nicaragua. He's the first foreign journalist to make it into the country in more than a year. He traveled to his home country to get an inside look at what life is like for people living under what some call the newest dictatorship in The Americas. He found a country suffocating in fear and he found his own family history repeating.
NPR’s ROUGH TRANSLATION Season 4, Episode 4
Radical Rudeness: This episode includes vulgar and explicit language that is sexual in nature.
In Uganda, NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta introduces us to Stella Nyanzi, a feminist activist, poet and academic. Fed up with what she calls government enabled endemic corruption and conventional approaches to expressing dissent, she discovers the way to get attention and build an audience around her fight against dirty politics is to get dirty herself.
She lobs personal attacks at the president, Yoweri Museveni, with elaborate curses, mockingly erotic poetry on Facebook, public nakedness, and other displays of "radical rudeness" in an effort to get under his skin.
Surprisingly, in the conservative, largely Christian nation of Uganda, this approach has gained supporters. Stella has received international recognition. But standing up to a strongman comes at a high cost to her and her family. Can Stella—and those she loves—accept the price? How low do you have to go to change things at the top?
Additional Context:
"Queering Queer Africa," a critical essay by Stella Nyanzi, published in the 2014 anthology, "Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities," argues for a broader scope through which to understand queer Africa.
"No Roses From My Mouth" is a collection of poems that Stella published while serving an 18-month sentence for cyber harassment of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.
Professor Carol Summers coined the term "radical rudeness" in her 2006 essay, "Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s."
Follow Stella's journey through prison and protest on social media with hashtags: #StellaNyanzi, #45PoemsForFreedom, #PairOfButtocks, #RadicalRudeness, #FromPrison2Parliament.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe is a Congolese doctor who headed up the response to the recent Ebola outbreak in Congo. Back in 1976, he was the first doctor to collect a sample of the virus. But his crucial role in discovering Ebola is often overlooked. NPR's East Africa correspondent Eyder Peralta helps us correct the record.