Reconstructing the meaning of Stella Nyanzi’s literary language on facebook

Abstract

This study unravels the literariness of Stella Nyanzi‘s language in her Facebook posts to debunk the view held by some critics that Nyanzi is vulgar. The study was guided by three objectives: Stella Nyanzi‘s use of sexual allegories in her Facebook posts to portray poor governance; her use of satirical elements and juxtaposition to attack poor leadership, and the use of buttocks and genitalia metaphors to expose the weaknesses of leaders. The study was library-based and employed qualitative methods of data collection and analysis such close reading and documentary review. The study draws from the formalism literary theory to analyse the language of Stella Nyanzi‘s Facebook posts, and how they effectively depict poor governance. The findings of the study show that Stella Nyanzi uses sexual allegories to expose corruption, poverty, overstay in power, police brutality, dictatorship, and unfulfilled promises that those in power make; it shows how she interweaves the satirical elements with graphic descriptions of sex activity to defamiliarise familiar vices such as corruption, hypocrisy and inequality in Uganda. The study also examines Nyanzi‘s use of Juxtaposition to show how she uses it to contrast dissimilar items to put out her message. The study concludes that Stella Nyanzi effectively uses literary language to defamiliarise what has always been familiar and ingeniously presents strong issues associated with leadership and governance such as corruption, dictatorship and brutality in a rather peculiar way. Finally, the study recommends a connotative reading of Stella Nyanzi‘s Facebook posts to fully understand her message on Uganda‘s state of leadership and governance.