Stella Nyanzi: A digital biography

This chapter contributes to the volume’s focus on exploring intellectual biographies in African studies with a biographical sketch of Ugandan intellectual and political activist Stella Nyanzi. In this chapter I propose a new biographical approach that I term “digital biography”, whereby online writings and activity make up the main biographical resource for the biographer. I illustrate this approach through my own digital biography of Stella Nyanzi that has consisted in organizing select, online texts (mainly Facebook posts and Tweets) written over ten years, into a coherent literary corpus, which I have thematically divided into three chronological periods: grief and growing activism (2014-2016); trials, arrests and prison (2017-2019) and running for office and exile (2020-2024). In this chapter I draw on this digital archive, as well as on three other research sources: an extended interview I conducted with Stella in October 2022 in Ferrara, Italy, a short film I made of Stella together with Juri Mazumdar of Juri & Aki films, which was shot in Munich in November 2023, and her published poetry book No Roses from My Mouth (2020). I draw on these sources to paint a biographical sketch of one of the most influential figures in Uganda’s contemporary political history, showing how her personal and professional experiences have informed her politics, as well as her intellectual and poetic production.