Single and searching: Uganda’s activist Stella Nyanzi declares

I AM SINGLE AND SEARCHING: A POEM
I can never make love again with a man who has not tasted teargas in his lungs, and shamelessly wiped the tears from his smoking eyes. My sort of man must know how to keep standing tall even when the soldiers shoot one loud canister after another loud canister after another loud canister of sharp teargas into the skies.

My thighs can never again open for a man who has not mastered the art of stoically standing upright with his handmade placard in his shaking hands, even as truckloads of armed brutes rush at him with the hot blood in their veins pounding for his emasculation.

My loins will never again embrace the firmness of a man who has never stood up against a dictator murdering every good thing in our land… the dictator raping every last bit of purity left for our children to find.

My heart will never again pound for a man who shamelessly kept quiet when the drones came for our comrades and took them to unknown chambers of torture, only to return many months later with ugly scars on their bodies and rotting wounds in their traumatised minds.

I can never again bend my ample back in doggie-style for a man who has never taken any action against the murdering octogenarian running berserk in the beautiful motherland, the bleeding, dying, sighing Pearl of Africa.

I will never again moan in exaggerated customary Kiganda kusikina love-cries for a man whose eyes never cried once at the seeming hopelessness of a failed revolution to oust this thirty-five year-old bloody reign of terror.

I am single and searching again for a man sworn to the slow winding struggle for freedom and liberation of Uganda from the bloodied tentacles of dictator Yoweri Museveni.

I am once again single and searching for the revolution!